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AI skill atrophy: Are we forgetting how to think?
The hidden cost of outsourcing our thinking and judgment to AI.
TL;DR: AI is not making us less intelligent. It is reducing the amount of intelligence we practise. The real problem is that we can slowly forget how to do things we no longer have to do. AI skill atrophy and cognitive offloading go hand in hand, and in this article we look at what happens when we outsource the thinking, judgement, and struggle that made those skills ours in the first place.
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AI does NOT make you dumber
Try this: Say a phone number you know by heart. Almost everyone can produce one.
Now notice which one it is. For most people over thirty it is a landline from a house they no longer live in, learned before they owned a smartphone. Nothing since has stuck, because nothing since has needed to.
Nobody decided to stop memorising phone numbers. There was no moment of choice, no trade-off weighed, no skill consciously retired.
The capacity to memorize phone numbers just quietly stopped being used, and then it quietly stopped being there.
