Merryn Somerset Webb

So one of the things you look at is this MIT study that looked at brains of participants while they wrote essays.

So some of them wrote essays with absolutely no assistance at all.

Some were able to use search engines and some were able to use AI assistance.

And that was an experiment that showed us what will happen if we don't bring some focus into this conversation.

Okay, so as you would put it, you've made a trade, but you haven't recognized that you've made that trade.

You've traded efficiency, saving time, etc.

And the result has been that your brain has become weaker, actively weaker.

It's worse than it was.

And you end up without that base knowledge for yourself.

And so that brings us to the world of work, and in fact, the entire world, right?

There's been so much talk about AI removing the bottom level of jobs.

So AI can do the simple stuff.

It can do anything an intern could do.

It could do anything a junior could do.

You can argue about whether it can and can't to the extent which it makes mistakes, and we've done podcasts on that, of course.

But for the moment, let's just take it as read that it is possible for AI to remove these lower levels of jobs.

That then turns into a real problem because if the next level up, if the job market starts at the next level up, that base knowledge is never embedded and created.

You have to judge whether what your agent has told you is correct or not, but you no longer have the foundational skills to be able to do that.

So a quote from your paper, the central paradox is this, AI reliably improves immediate task performance while degrading the underlying human capabilities that produce that performance.

You get better results today but become less capable tomorrow.