Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them. (Psychology Today, 3/22)
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-algorithmic-mind/202603/adults-lose-skills-to-ai-children-never-build-themI spent a year treating cognitive offloading as a single phenomenon. I no longer think it is one. There are two fundamentally different events hiding behind the same behavior.
An adult choosing to offload a task they understand is making a tradeoff between decreasing effort and increasing efficiency. The capacity to do that task independently exists. The choice is deliberate. The atrophy is (probably) recoverable.
A child offloading a task they've never learned to perform is not making a choice. They are skipping a developmental step that was never developed. The capacity doesn't exist yet. The foreclosure may be permanent—and because they have no independent baseline, they cannot recognize what they're losing.
The downside of adult offloading is people get less sharp. The downside of adolescents growing up delegating to AI is a generation that was never sharp to begin with. Protecting the space our children need to develop the foundational skills of thinking is now a non-negotiable.
From his earlier article on AI use harming students:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-algorithmic-mind/202512/why-kids-find-cognitive-offloading-irresistible
AI-dependent students lose the ability to explain their reasoning journey. They can produce proficient work but cannot articulate why they chose particular evidence, what confused them initially, or how they worked through competing interpretations. When questioned, they repeat conclusions but cannot reconstruct the thinking that led them there.
Encountering difficulty becomes anxiety. Students cannot spend 10 minutes wrestling with a challenging problem without external input or seeking assistance.
They lose capacity for extended reasoning chains. Multistep arguments that require Steps 1 through 4 to understand Step 5 become impossible. Complex problems requiring sustained reasoning produce the same collapse patterns that recent research identified in AI systems themselves.
And critically, students are unable to detect their own confusion or knowledge gaps. They'll submit work they cannot defend, express surprise if questioning reveals gaps in their logic, and often cannot remember what caused this confusion in the first place. Self-monitoring of the learning process begins to atrophy entirely.
-snip-
Students are becoming aware that AI use is bad for learning. Yesterday the University of Pennsylvania's student newspaper published a very blunt editorial about that, which I posted here: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100221114177 . The most striking sentence in the editiorial: "AI cannot coexist with education — it can only degrade it."
And if anyone here thinks AI use is so inevitable that everyone has to use it (which is AI industry propaganda to sell hallucinating chatbots) and so it doesn't matter if kids don't learn anything besides how to use AI because that's what they need most, I have to point out that people who lack critical thinking skills are sitting ducks for those aiming propaganda and sales pitches at them. Especially those controlling the AI, like the AI bros now pandering to Trump.
And I have to add as well that it isn't only children who learn, or who need to learn. Adults need to as well, especially to keep their brains healthy as they get older.
AI will also interfere with those adults learning new information and skills, in addition to leading to cognitive atrophy, where they lose previously acquired knowledge and skills - cognitive atrophy that might be reversible, but might not be.
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TY for sharing.
I know it's too late for the parents in their 20s and 30s, However they need to be told the truth ... they were taught to pass tests (mostly multiple choice tests) and that's how they got through school. They were cheated by a faulty system that operated on a discredited theory.
It was a horrible shortcut that never should have happened ... and it's too late to fix those mistakes. But those parents need to understand that their own children don't deserve to be short-changed. It's not too late to fix this, if we all have an honest re-evaluation of the entire educational process.
How many believe this will ever happen, show of hands ....
Silicon Valley corporate owners, venture capitalist investors, and engineers don't let their children in front of screens any earlier in life than age 17 or 18. They know these things:
Addiction and Brain Chemistry:
Tech leaders view addictive technologies as "digital heroin," designed to trigger the brain's pleasure centers similarly to drugs, making them hazardous for developing minds.
Mental Health and Anxiety:
Excessive screen use is associated with a growing mental health crisis, leading to increased anxiety, depression, and decreased self-esteem among children.
Reduced Attention Spans:
Digital devices and, in particular, short-form content are linked to shorter attention spans and weakened cognitive abilities.
Lack of Creativity and Interaction:
Many tech elite prefer Waldorf schools, which ban screens, believing they inhibit creativity, interpersonal skills, and physical activity.
Engineering Behind the Scenes:
As creators of this tech, executives know that features like infinite scroll, notification badges, and autoplay are specifically designed to maximize user engagement—essentially keeping kids hooked at the expense of their development.
Thank you, highplainsdem!
Like any new technology, we can find ourselves relying on it too easily.
For example: how many of us have found ourselves getting a little lazy to spell correctly because we rely on spell check or not remembering a phone number that we call regularly because we dial it up from a name on our phone or a single digit. Don't get me started on calculators.
How many people under 40 can use a map or know what a Thomas guide is because they're 100% reliant on a GPS. I love to look at a map when planning road trips.
My mom swore she wouldn't use a microwave or a clothes dryer until I bought them for her.
My point is, technology can be useful but like with anything we use we have to sometimes force ourselves to be a little uncomfortable. Instead of a dryer, we might hang an item to drip dry if we don't want it to fade. When reheating food that we want a crispy dry top layer on we might use an oven instead of a microwave, unless it's a convection/microwave
.
When I taught my daughter to drive, I taught her to drive in reverse before driving forward, for several hours over separate days and it bothered her but now she really appreciates that skill. Sure, it caused her discomfort, at first. Anybody can drive forward and for those that can't or shouldn't we now have self driving cars which I wouldn't be caught dead in.
Technology in moderation can be good but AI should never be relied upon 100%, again IMHO.
And so are all the AI bros. 
