Brooke McNamara

speaker

275 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 22 Jul

Brooke McNamara’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Speaking of Psychology · AI “de-skilling”: What happens when we offload our work to AI? With Brooke Macnamara, PhD · 22 Jul 2026 podcast

What's interesting about AI is some people would say that the argument is it's just another step in technology.

Technology and it's not really anything special, and we'll move forward in the way that we have with all of these other new technologies.

Then others would argue that there is something different about AI that, unlike other technologies, it's taking components of our cognitive processes that were just not available before, where it is making potentially decisions.

Decisions, expert level decisions that we wouldn't have offloaded before that we are now.

So there's not only the de-skilling concern or the and the skill decay concern, but there is the overconfidence concern.

There's a concern that maybe we will generally start expecting.

kind of immediate results more, not wanting to persist as much.

There's been a little bit of work already in this space.

This is from a pre-print.

So of course you have to be careful with that because it hasn't been peer reviewed yet.

But across multiple studies, they noted that when they were trying to learn a new problem solving skill and they used AI and they got the answer.

And then when it was taken away, people just gave up a lot more

Quickly.

They got used to getting this immediate result, and it just wasn't worth it anymore to put forth the effort.

And so there's concerns that this could then spread and be broader.

Now, the research is sort of all over the place in terms of whether you try to encourage people to put forth more effort in a task, whether that has far transfer, or whether people start persisting more generally.

So there's some research that suggests yes, some says no, that's not really the case.

But the idea is whenever we think that something might improve with an intervention, well, then it might be the same thing that if we have this intervention, in this case AI, uh, and we're we're not using a cognitive process, then it might get worse.

So kind of the opposite of what we usually think of.

Of in an intervention.

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