AI “de-skilling”: What happens when we offload our work to AI? With Brooke Macnamara, PhD

I mentioned in the introduction that people have worried about losing skills to technology before.

Can you talk about that? I mean, how have we offloaded certain tasks to technology, and is AI in any way different from these previous technologies?

Sure.

We've been offloading to technology even things that we don't think of as technology for quite a long time.

So back in 370 BCE, Plato lamented that we would lose our memories and those skills because we suddenly had writing, and that people would then just start using writing and not work on, um, the great memorization that a lot of people had, where they would learn, uh, stories that could go on for days.

And he's not wrong, right? [chuckles] We did lose those skills, but we're okay with them because most of the time we do have access to jotting down ideas.

Um, and this, of course, has gone through the times where we have lost some of these skills.

Depending on the, the age of the listener, uh, you might remember knowing a lot of phone numbers when you were a kid.

Right.

And we don't know too many phone numbers these days, but that's something that we're just sort of willing to be okay with that, that we've lost that.

Um, you mentioned GPS.

Uh, a lot of people, at least anecdotally, don't think that they have the same spatial navigation skills or, uh, will sort of develop a good mental map as quickly as they used to without.

But again, we usually have access to it.

So these are all skills that have indeed, at least for a lot of people, maybe have, uh, reduced or, or atrophied, but generally as a society, we're okay with it.

Um, that said, whenever a new technology comes around, there is kind of this panic.

Um, so Orban defined it as the Sisyphean cycle of technology panics.

So we're in a state now, so not too long ago it was the internet and Google.

Um, there was a famous article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" And we're sort of living through the end of one cycle potentially and moving on into a new one.

And the issue is that technology moves pretty quickly, and science can move less quickly, at least psychological experiments.

So how this affects us, we can be a bit behind on knowing how much it affects us.

But if we think of skills and knowledge acquisition as use it or lose it, or of course, to learn a skill, we have to engage with it.

If we are cognitively offloading to something else, um, and we're not engaging in the same way, then there's a good chance that we're not learning the skill as deeply as we would if we didn't have that technology.

I mentioned in the introduction that people have worried about losing skills to technology before.

Can you talk about that? I mean, how have we offloaded certain tasks to technology, and is AI in any way different from these previous technologies?

Sure.

We've been offloading to technology even things that we don't think of as technology for quite a long time.

So back in 370 BCE, Plato lamented that we would lose our memories and those skills because we suddenly had writing, and that people would then just start using writing and not work on, um, the great memorization that a lot of people had, where they would learn, uh, stories that could go on for days.

And he's not wrong, right? [chuckles] We did lose those skills, but we're okay with them because most of the time we do have access to jotting down ideas.

Um, and this, of course, has gone through the times where we have lost some of these skills.

Depending on the, the age of the listener, uh, you might remember knowing a lot of phone numbers when you were a kid.

Right.

And we don't know too many phone numbers these days, but that's something that we're just sort of willing to be okay with that, that we've lost that.

Um, you mentioned GPS.

Uh, a lot of people, at least anecdotally, don't think that they have the same spatial navigation skills or, uh, will sort of develop a good mental map as quickly as they used to without.

But again, we usually have access to it.

So these are all skills that have indeed, at least for a lot of people, maybe have, uh, reduced or, or atrophied, but generally as a society, we're okay with it.

Um, that said, whenever a new technology comes around, there is kind of this panic.

Um, so Orban defined it as the Sisyphean cycle of technology panics.

So we're in a state now, so not too long ago it was the internet and Google.

Um, there was a famous article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" And we're sort of living through the end of one cycle potentially and moving on into a new one.

And the issue is that technology moves pretty quickly, and science can move less quickly, at least psychological experiments.

So how this affects us, we can be a bit behind on knowing how much it affects us.

But if we think of skills and knowledge acquisition as use it or lose it, or of course, to learn a skill, we have to engage with it.

If we are cognitively offloading to something else, um, and we're not engaging in the same way, then there's a good chance that we're not learning the skill as deeply as we would if we didn't have that technology.