"The story of technology is the story of continual disruption and displacement. New systems and processes send some skills into obsolescence, opening the way for new skills and workflows. Generative AI has triggered the latest "de-skilling." But chatbot technology isn't only transforming jobs and shifting our relationship with information itself. It is also inviting us to relinquish our cognitive independence and bring about a sort of dispossession that is unprecedented."
"Some argue that Big Tech's unbridled rush to implement chatbots and AI assistants into every part of our lives threatens to erode the sorts of cognitive skills that make us who we are and effectively shrink the field of human agency. The convenience and presumed " cognition" of AI assistants threaten to usurp human creativity, judgment, empathy, and meaning-making-what ethicist Kwame Anthony Appiah refers to as "constitutive de-skilling" (2025)."
Technology repeatedly disrupts work by rendering certain skills obsolete while creating new skills and workflows. Generative AI represents a recent wave of de-skilling that extends beyond job displacement to cognitive dispossession. Chatbot technology can undermine cognitive independence by encouraging people to offload discernment, judgment, imagination, and meaning-making. The convenience and presumed cognition of AI assistants threatens human creativity, judgment, empathy, and meaning-making according to ethicists. Increasing reliance on LLM-based tools risks perceptual atrophy and diminished capacity to handle uncertainty. Early research shows erosion of expertise among medical specialists increasingly dependent on AI diagnostic assistants.
Read at Psychology Today
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