Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them. (Psychology Today, 3/22)

[highplainsdem]

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-algorithmic-mind/202603/adults-lose-skills-to-ai-children-never-build-them

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I spent a year treating cognitive offloading as a single phenomenon. I no longer think it is one. There are two fundamentally different events hiding behind the same behavior.

An adult choosing to offload a task they understand is making a tradeoff between decreasing effort and increasing efficiency. The capacity to do that task independently exists. The choice is deliberate. The atrophy is (probably) recoverable.

A child offloading a task they've never learned to perform is not making a choice. They are skipping a developmental step that was never developed. The capacity doesn't exist yet. The foreclosure may be permanent—and because they have no independent baseline, they cannot recognize what they're losing.

The downside of adult offloading is people get less sharp. The downside of adolescents growing up delegating to AI is a generation that was never sharp to begin with. Protecting the space our children need to develop the foundational skills of thinking is now a non-negotiable.

From his earlier article on AI use harming students:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-algorithmic-mind/202512/why-kids-find-cognitive-offloading-irresistible

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AI-dependent students lose the ability to explain their reasoning journey. They can produce proficient work but cannot articulate why they chose particular evidence, what confused them initially, or how they worked through competing interpretations. When questioned, they repeat conclusions but cannot reconstruct the thinking that led them there.

Encountering difficulty becomes anxiety. Students cannot spend 10 minutes wrestling with a challenging problem without external input or seeking assistance.

They lose capacity for extended reasoning chains. Multistep arguments that require Steps 1 through 4 to understand Step 5 become impossible. Complex problems requiring sustained reasoning produce the same collapse patterns that recent research identified in AI systems themselves.

And critically, students are unable to detect their own confusion or knowledge gaps. They'll submit work they cannot defend, express surprise if questioning reveals gaps in their logic, and often cannot remember what caused this confusion in the first place. Self-monitoring of the learning process begins to atrophy entirely.

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Students are becoming aware that AI use is bad for learning. Yesterday the University of Pennsylvania's student newspaper published a very blunt editorial about that, which I posted here: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100221114177 . The most striking sentence in the editiorial: "AI cannot coexist with education — it can only degrade it."

And if anyone here thinks AI use is so inevitable that everyone has to use it (which is AI industry propaganda to sell hallucinating chatbots) and so it doesn't matter if kids don't learn anything besides how to use AI because that's what they need most, I have to point out that people who lack critical thinking skills are sitting ducks for those aiming propaganda and sales pitches at them. Especially those controlling the AI, like the AI bros now pandering to Trump.

And I have to add as well that it isn't only children who learn, or who need to learn. Adults need to as well, especially to keep their brains healthy as they get older.

AI will also interfere with those adults learning new information and skills, in addition to leading to cognitive atrophy, where they lose previously acquired knowledge and skills - cognitive atrophy that might be reversible, but might not be.