Merryn Somerset Webb

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.

And you talk about that as well in terms of productivity and that we get a productivity revolution up front while undermining the foundations of that productivity enhancement.

So it can't continue indefinitely unless it's used in a different way.

And then even worse, you get this confident trap that you talk about as well.

I was really struck for which read absolutely horrified by a study you talk about from last year in the Lancet, which tracked endoscopists.

How do you say that word?