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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

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 psychologically.

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 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.

Well, it's certainly too early to know.

We are in the stage where there's early experiments that are starting to come out.

Um, of course, we don't know what will replicate, what will change as the technology changes.

Um, but there is some information out there that is potentially concerning.

So, for example, there was a study with uh endoscopus where um

At a hospital, an AI tool was implemented where they had random access to it in terms of being able to detect um adenomas, so so polyps.

And if you look at their detection rate before the AI was implemented, and then this randomly when it was taken away, their detection rates fell.

So it suggests that they potentially

Lost some of that skill and how well they could detect without the AI available, that they'd gotten used to the AI being available.

There was another study that found that medical professional skills, like basic life support, decayed when people didn't use them.

And this was roughly decayed by about 50%, so 40 to 60% after six months of disuse.

So if we are offloading to AI and not really using these skills to the same degree, there's a good chance that those skills will decay.

Showing 21–40 of 275 · page 2 of 14