AI “de-skilling”: What happens when we offload our work to AI? With Brooke Macnamara, PhD
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What is cognitive offloading and how has technology historically affected our skills?
From writing emails to reading CAT scans, millions of people across a wide range of professions now use AI tools to help them do their jobs. In many cases, these tools save time and make us more productive. But as workers increasingly rely on AI tools for critical job tasks, some psychologists are asking, what will happen to our own skills as we hand over more work to artificial? Intelligence. People have worried about losing skills to technology before. We have GPS, so we rarely bother to look at maps anymore. Calculators change the way we do math. And in aviation, experts have long studied how autopilot affects pilots' skills. So is AI just the latest example of this so-called cognitive offloading?
How is it changing the way people learn, remember, and development? expertise? Are some skills more vulnerable to loss than others? Does it matter whether you're a novice or already an expert when you start to use AI? And what can workers do to make sure they're using AI in ways that help rather than hinder their learning and development? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Brooke McNamara. Dr. McNamara is an associate professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University, where she directs the Skill, Learning, and Performance Laboratory.
Her work explores how people acquire skills and expertise in professions ranging from elite sports to medicine. She looks at how practice, training, cognitive abilities, the environment, and other factors affect skill development. She's currently studying how AI may affect learning and performance, and she recently spoke with APA's magazine Monitor on Psychology for an article on the topic. Doctor McNamara, thank you for joining me today. Thank you, I'm thrilled to be here. I mentioned in the introduction that people have worried about losing skills to technology before. Can you talk about that? I mean, how have we offloaded certain tests to technology and is AI in any way different from these previous technologies?
Sure. We've been offloading to technology, even things that we don't think of as technology for quite a long time. So back in 370 BCE, Plato lamented that we would lose our memories and those skills because we suddenly had writing and that people would then just start using writing and not work on the great memorization that a lot of people had, where they would lure. Stories that could go on for days. And he's not wrong, right? We did lose those skills, but we're okay with them because most of the time we do have access to jotting down ideas. And this has, of course, have gone through the times where we have lost some of these skills. Depending on the age of the listener, you might remember knowing a lot.
Of phone numbers when you were a kid. Right. And we don't know too many phone numbers these days. But that's something that we're just sort of willing to be okay with that that we've lost that. Um, you mentioned GPS. Uh, a lot of people, at least anecdotally, don't think that they have the same spatial navigation skills or uh will sort of develop a good mental map as quickly as they used to without. But again, we usually have access to it. So these are all skills that have indeed, at least for a lot of people, maybe have uh reduced or or atrophied, but generally as a society, we're okay with it. That said, whenever a new technology comes around, there is kind of this panic. Um, so Orban defined it as the Sisyphian cycle of technology panics.
So we're in a state now. So not too long ago, it was the internet and Google. 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.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is cognitive offloading and how has technology historically affected our skills?
0:00–6:30
2
How do early studies show AI impacts skill retention in medical and emergency tasks?
6:30–13:18
3
Why might AI use lead to skill decay for experts versus novices?
13:18–20:15
4
What strategies can keep learning effective while using AI as a support tool?
20:15–26:28
5
How should workers test their abilities without AI to avoid over‑confidence?
26:28–32:17
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Speaking of Psychology
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