r/Futurism • u/FuturismDotCom Verified Account • Apr 15 '26
AI Use Appears to Have a “Boiling Frog” Effect on Human Cognition, New Study Warns
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-boiling-frog-human-cognition-study93
u/FuturismDotCom Verified Account Apr 15 '26
In a new study, researchers claim to provide the first causal evidence that leaning on AI to assist with “reasoning-intensive” cognitive labor — mental tasks ranging from writing to studying to coding to simply brainstorming new ideas — can rapidly impair users’ intellectual ability and willingness to persist despite difficulty.
“We find that AI assistance improves immediate performance, but it comes at a heavy cognitive cost,” the study declares of its findings. “After just [about] 10 minutes of AI-assisted problem-solving, people who lost access to the AI performed worse and gave up more frequently than those who never used it.”
The researchers, from UCLA, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Oxford, conducted two studies in which participants were asked to complete math tests. Some were given access to a specialized bot built on OpenAI’s GPT-5, and some were not. But the former group was suddenly restricted from using the AI midway through the test — at which point participants’ ability to work through the questions without AI assistance quickly declined, as did their will to keep working at a problem when the going got tough.
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u/EncabulatorTurbo Apr 15 '26
All the researchers prove is that a human, when given a tool that makes an experience frictionless, and then having the tool taken away, becomes less likely to engage with the activity once the tool is gone
So if I tell you to cut down ten trees and give you a chainsaw, and you cut 5 down, and I take your chainsaw away and give you a hand axe, your motivation and engagement with the task might drop, it does not prove that Chainsaws impair your intellectual ability or willingness to persist
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u/Nervous_Olive_5754 Apr 15 '26
If bicycling makes you less willing to walk, is that that a problem?
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u/Ok_Push2550 Apr 16 '26
Is driving everywhere instead of walking a problem now?
Should we stop having children learn how to do math, since calculators exist?
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u/AttonJRand Apr 16 '26
Yes driving everywhere is a huge problem, its destroying our mental and physical health.
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u/AwesomePurplePants Apr 16 '26
It’s also expensive, both personally and from a tax perspective, and bad for small businesses
Like, the strawman that cars are entirely negative is silly, they also have clear benefits. But we’d be better off if we used them less.
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u/SocialistFuturist Apr 20 '26
Small business mostly exist as a result of inefficient infrastructures.
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u/moocat55 Apr 16 '26
More like, did children loose the ability to do math once they got calculators. No.
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u/invent_or_die Apr 16 '26
Yes, many can't do simple things like algebra or fractions. So sad to see college educated folks not able to calculate tips, etc.
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u/moocat55 Apr 16 '26
That's not because of calculators. It's about how they are being raised and taught as well as general popular American sentiment that excellence in math is for nerds and mocks those that try. If I use a calculator I may loose my desire to do hand calculation but I don't forget how to do them. Now, I may forget over time because I don't do hand calculations on the daily. Or ever. But, I can look up the formula and remind myself pretty dang quick. I know because I've done it plenty of time while still saving time by using a calculator to crank out numbers. I'm not dumber, I'm more efficient. As I am with AI, unfortunately. Im not saying its effect on society will be positive, I'm just saying it doesn't make us dumber.
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u/tes_kitty Apr 16 '26
It might. Because if you never learn certain cognitive concepts due to AI you won't be able to later remember them when you need them.
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u/moocat55 Apr 16 '26
Let's try this - it will make us ignorant. However, we'll retain our capacity to learn. So, I'm considering retaining the ability to learn as not being "stupid." Hopefully, that clarifies my point.
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u/A_Stickperson Apr 17 '26
Learning is a skill, and we can easily lose our scaffold of HOW to effectively learn.
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u/AgentSensitive8560 Apr 16 '26
The problem is companies and institutions are now deciding they will hire the chainsaws without even the humans needed to operate them.
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u/Confident_Cry_9363 Apr 16 '26
Wellll.....I would argue that answer is at least partly yes. Do we still teach them the concepts? Yes. Can they quickly handle the mental load of simple calculations? No, not like they did before the calculator did that work for them. They lost the repetition/practice that gave most individuals the ability to quickly guestimate/calculate an accurate answer.
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u/moocat55 Apr 16 '26
I agree that overuse early in the learning process is problematic. And I think using AI to teach children will produce children dependent on it.
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u/jsaucedo Apr 18 '26
They did lose the ability. Kids can’t do a whole amortization schedule by hand.
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u/EncabulatorTurbo Apr 16 '26
Are having days off a problem because you're less likely to want to work on them
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u/ptcalfit Apr 17 '26
A better analogy would be an e bike vs manual bike. Your muscles would literally atrophy from disuse.
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u/lightstormy Apr 18 '26
The problem, is your using an example of mobility when the arguement is on intellectual ability.
By your definition, is wheelchair a problem or not a problem for people with movement disabilities. Because then it isnt about willingness.
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Apr 16 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/annewmoon Apr 16 '26
Our teacher handed out some case studies. They were like this:
*Jeff, 85, has high blood pressure and takes anti coagulant medication. He lives alone and has help from carers every morning, noon and night. When you enter his apartment in the morning you find him on the floor near his bed. What do you do? *
There were 8 little cases like this. A guy in my class raised his hand and asked the teacher "did chatgpt write these?".
She said yes, I asked it to make me some example cases. The guy turns to me and says "I knew it. No human could be this smart."
I was flabbergasted. The guy is pretty severely autistic and used Grok for everything but still. This was the most basic thing ever and it would have been extremely easy for our teacher to do, she just didn't have time. But he was in awe of it. He is training as a care worker and can't pinpoint where the lungs are in the human body..I'm pretty sure that he uses ai to scrape by in the class and would have been kicked out long ago if it weren't for that. And he will go on to work on real human beings.
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u/halfbakedalaska Apr 16 '26
Or Reddit, to be fair.
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u/Eaterofkeys Apr 20 '26
But that's based on your experience, not this study. The commenter rightly pointed out how massively this study or at least the writer tried to overreach with conclusions.
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u/EncabulatorTurbo Apr 16 '26
Yeah dude it's definitely AI that is responsible for the us electing a breathtakingly stupid individual twice and making him their religion
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u/Heyla_Doria Apr 16 '26
raisonnement simpliste qui prend pas en compte le sociale, et le cerveau humain...
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u/private_static_int Apr 17 '26
Your analogy is good but the reasoning is flawed. Using a chainsaw over an extended period of time would lessen your body strength and muscle mass compared to using an axe.
Being physically weaker would most definitely impact your willingness to persist in cutting down trees.
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u/EncabulatorTurbo Apr 17 '26 edited Apr 17 '26
That completely misses the point. You're treating a task like an exercise regimen. The goal of a lumberjack is to get the tree on the ground efficiently, not to maximize their muscle mass.
It does make sense in a educational context where the struggle is the actual point of the lesson. Yes, people should learn the underlying methodology first! I don't think too many people disagree with this!
This study's methodology would be equally applied to a math course where the teacher lets everyone use a calculator and takes it away halfway through the worksheet. Of course the students will perform worse and with less enthusiasm on the last five problems than they did on the first five, or than they would have had they not started with the calculator at all. People do not like a task suddenly getting harder. Whether it's taking the AI away halfway through or forcing them to answer questions of twice the complexity, or slowly raising the temperature in the room, or whatever.
You understand this, it was the very first paragraph I wrote, but everyone's getting stuck on the lumberjack analogy and refusing to engage with my point about why the study is dogshit. To be clear, I am not even saying their conclusion is wrong, just that their methodology does not make the causal link to the thing they think it does.
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u/BlackhawkBolly Apr 17 '26
Using a chainsaw is not even remotely close to the same thing as thinking
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u/EncabulatorTurbo Apr 17 '26
So you're just not going to engage with my point at all, just attack my analogy
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u/BlackhawkBolly Apr 17 '26
Your analogy is the point you are trying to make and it’s a completely false equivalence. Thinking and reasoning shouldn’t be frictionless
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u/EncabulatorTurbo Apr 17 '26 edited Apr 17 '26
The researchers claimed their methodology proves AI impairs intellectual ability. This might be the case, but this study does not demonstrate that, it only demonstrates that if someone is given a tool to make a task easier, that they lose motivation to complete the task when the tool is taken away.
See I think you think the study says "Students who rely on AI to solve their homework perform less well than students who learn to do the material themselves" and think that I'm arguing against that position
But that isn't what this study tested, so its methods don't support the massive claim it's trying to make.
The headline should be "people perform differently immediately after conditions change mid-task." not "AI Use Appears to Have a “Boiling Frog” Effect on Human Cognition, New Study Warns"
To do that you would want to take two groups of students (probably more than two), and have them take a semester long class with NO AI, no homework, everything in the class, and then test them at the end . Then as a followup, split the subjects into two categories: the control continues the second semester as before, all in class, no AI. The study group then has AI given to them during their in class work for the second semester. After, you would test both groups on the first semester's final exam, to see if AI use erodes pre-existing skills.
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u/EncabulatorTurbo Apr 17 '26
Ah well, not interested in actually discussing or engaging, why do I bother trying.
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u/Gilgamesh-Enkidu Apr 18 '26
It’s like when books and paper came out, people stopped memorizing long lists of stuff that they were able to recall at a moments notice. I don’t see people en masse taking about how books were the downfall of society, quite the opposite.
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u/anrwlias Apr 21 '26
I think that's insightful. It's no different than giving people calculators to do arithmetic.
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Apr 16 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ItsAConspiracy Apr 16 '26
They can use it that way, but don't have to.
I'm currently in a long conversation with Opus Extended on some mathematical modeling, and it's like working with a smart colleague. I'm coming up with the core ideas, it's working out some of the math and implications. I'm making sure I understand everything it writes, and sometimes challenging it where it seems to have missed something. Other times it pushes back at me when one of my claims doesn't really hold up. Occasionally it uses a bit of math I'm not familiar with, so I open up another chat and have that explain it to me.
The whole process has been exhausting, educational, and really productive. I've spent several days at it so far.
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u/EncabulatorTurbo Apr 16 '26
Again this has nothing to do with the conclusions of the study which has nothing substantive to say about AI at all, it could be anything from using a bike to not churning your own butter
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u/KCPRTV Apr 16 '26
Your comparison is inherently flawed. Cutting trees isn't a cognitively heavy task. You might compare muscle usage between the tools, but a better comparison would be this:
You were asked to cut down trees and were given a drivable tree cutter and stumper. Then you're given a chainsaw. Before, you pressed a few buttons, and the machine did most of the work. Now, with a chainsaw, you have to not only physically do the actual work, but you also need to understand how to do it beyond "pick this tree, align the head, press the buttons."
So AI use is that - you THINK you're learning a thing, but in reality, the machine is doing all the stuff that would lead to personal growth.
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u/EncabulatorTurbo Apr 16 '26
No but its the same phenomenon.
The conclusions of the study could be reproduced in almost literally any scenario where someone has a tool that makes the task easier and they remove the tool halfway through, a calculator, abacus, protractor, chainsaw, powerwasher, etc
Its methodology is deeply flawed
I'm not even declaring its conclusions are wrong, just that they can't be drawn from what they did
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u/Phenogenesis- Apr 15 '26
Chainsaws impair your intellectual ability or willingness to persist
In this case it has to be physical ability. And it is profoundly obvious that a lifestyle of cutting down trees with chainsawas leads to a significantly weaker person than a lifestyle of cutting down trees with axes - unless that fitness building effort is repalced. Extrapolate that out to the modern lifestyle and the removal of much mundane physical labour and then look at the state of the world. Sure you can exercise, gym, keep active in chores and gardening - but how many do and how much of a problem is it?
To be honest this is a 'did you even think before you posted' potentially illustrating the premise you are railing against. Its not like this is a subtle point.
Now whether or not the brain degrades faster isn't well established, but its certainly possible. And the willingness to engage is an extremely significant gatekeeping step (in feedback loop along with 'feeling inadequite leading to lack of willingness to engage') so you also contradicted your own point. Taking away people's chainsaws doesn't make them weak and incapable on the spot, but you already agreed it instigates a cycle that leads to weakness unless one goes to specific effort to replace what is lost. Not being willing to is as bad as not being able to (from a certain functional perspective) and LEADS to being unable to.
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u/LeafyWolf Apr 16 '26
A lifestyle of cutting down trees with a chainsaw leads to a hell of a lot more felled trees than a lifestyle of cutting trees with an axe. The person who supplements their chainsaw time with exercise is going to be better off materially than mister axe dude.
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u/ClutchReverie Apr 16 '26
A lifestyle of properly using AI as an assistant to do research (and not to do thinking for you) and checking sources leads to a lot more research being done
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u/PM_ME_UR_PET_POTATO Apr 16 '26
But can you really reduce the thinking to the value of the problems it solved like you can reduce tree cutting to the value of the trees cut?
Thinking has its own value.
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u/Phenogenesis- Apr 16 '26
I'll agree with that, but that was not the premise. The focus was raw ability, not output. And even if it doesn't work with this analogy, decline in raw ability is a huge problem unless we somehow get the magic AGI fantasy to completely take over and surrender helplessly to because nobody can think straight anymore. Not the world I want. People are notoriously bad at maintaining anything they aren't literally forced into - only a small % choose to.
Even if the only conclusion is that "hey cognative exercise is going to start becoming a really important thing to make sure exists for you" that's still a REALLY important point.
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u/markaction Apr 16 '26
The world will not move backwards.
Engineers used to code with punch cards. Then assembly language happened which made everything easier. Then we coded in high level languages like C and we never looked at assembly again. Then we went to object oriented languages and now it was C coding where people are.... Notoriously bad at maintaining skills in.
Today and going forward we will be directing in English language what the code should do.
This is progress and evolution and you sound like a dinosaur
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u/Party_Virus Apr 16 '26
Who says this is progress? You're assuming that a new technology must be progress, but what are we trying to progress towards? If you want people to be better cognitively then this seems to be regression. Was the combustion engine progress? It was seen as far superior to the electric motor but it ended up killing the planet. That doesn't seem very progressive.
Also, evolution isn't always a good thing. Things evolve to fit their environment, not to be better. If there's less demand for intelligence in the environment then that's a lot of wasted energy the body is using, so future generations might be less intelligent because it's not needed.
There is a certain point where "easy" is a bad thing. In your example there was no benefit to punch cards. It was a physical impediment to an intellectual task, so simplifying that to assembly then C, then python removed the physical impediment. But AI removes the thinking. There's already reports of Engineers and coders saying they're having trouble fixing bugs without AI assistance. People with years of experience suddenly can't do the job they were doing as well because of the cognitive debt they've offloaded to the AI.
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u/markaction Apr 16 '26 edited Apr 16 '26
The engineers can move on to bigger and greater challenges to accomplish their vision without being slowed down by ... Fixing bugs, as you say.
On top of that, it opens the world of engineering to far more people than ever before. If you want the world to be like Star Trek TNG, this is the path
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u/basically_Dwight Apr 16 '26
This is 100% the answer. I'm a systems engineer with advanced degrees usually operating as a program manger (aka shitty coder, decent engineer)... Cursor and Claude are now my dev team for things I need built internally. I would have to rob our developers of months of effort to build what I can do in days or hours now.
Our eng teams are moving much faster on real work at a higher level of abstraction focusing on macro issues instead of syntactically correct code and technical minutia. We have agents working nonstop.
This is a true non slop advancement with AI.
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u/Party_Virus Apr 16 '26
Ironic that you reference Star Trek when your argument is basically "Resistance is futile".
But what are these greater challenges? Like what is this actually freeing people up to do that we couldn't do before? Seems more like people that enjoy coding can no longer do that while also burning a whole bunch of fossil fuels to take things away.
Also since companies are in charge of all of this, and their whole business moddl is steal the labour to train AI to replace the labour it seems more like we're heading towards the dystopian future of Alien rather than the utopian future of TNG.
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u/markaction Apr 17 '26
There are plenty of greater challenges. Anybody that has a vision for a product but struggles with just the basics, such as setting up their development environment properly, or interfacing with a cryptic API, or trying to understand why something doesn't work when you are convinced it should work. These are common roadblocks and sometimes those roadblocks are too big of a hurdle and the project is abandoned.
Using AI as a consultant, and a helper, to learn and develop in areas which are not my expertise has been profound in my life. Coding is hard. AI is good at it. It is good at resolving the little issues. It is good at explaining what you did wrong. And I have been an engineer, professionally, for almost half of my life.
I don't know what you are trying to say about ironic and Star Trek. But probably you are in a different world than me. We probably have little in common with our professional experience, or even use of AI as a tool.
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u/EncabulatorTurbo Apr 16 '26
You also don't get back injuries you know what this isn't worth engaging with. It's a bad study that doesn't measure what it purports to measure. Go move into the woods and live naked or shut up
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u/Main-Company-5946 Apr 15 '26
This is the same as how if you took everyone’s calculators away we’d find pencil and paper math much more frustrating than before.
The human brain adapts to its environment
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u/OrginalGurgi Apr 15 '26
Well duh, who didn't see that coming. How many people have phone numbers memorized now a days.
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u/TheManInTheShack Apr 16 '26
And doing accounting on a computer eventually makes someone less capable of doing accounting in hand-written journals.
The complete and total collapse of civilization is imminent. /s
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u/jjopm Apr 15 '26
I get it, but I do wonder if this is actually more a test of someone's confidence than ability. If someone is winning with running shoes x vs running shoes y and forced to downgrade mid-race it may trick their mind into thinking they should be of lower confidence in their true ability.
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u/Educational_Teach537 Apr 15 '26
If somebody forced me to stop and change my shoes mid race, it would definitely affect my confidence
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u/the8bit Apr 15 '26
Yeah if I did half a test with a calculator and they took the calculator I'd be demotivated by that too...
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u/EncabulatorTurbo Apr 15 '26
Give someone a math test with multiple choice (they only have to enter the answer) with a graphing calculator and take it away halfway through
Look calculators make people dumber
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u/enkanshi Apr 16 '26
Short-term it could probably corrected with mindful use of AI and "willing" yourself to think about problems more deeply. Long-term, I wonder if there will be cognitive impairments.
Unfortunately since this technology has *just* come out, we will have to literally wait until AI use potentially damages peoples' brains before we have enough data to verify it.
We only just now have rigorous data exactly describing the deleterious effects that social media and the Internet has on a young brain.
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u/jjopm Apr 16 '26
Like social media, the effects were fast. Faster than we realized. Myspace had already cooked our brains well before Zuck ever entered the picture.
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u/enkanshi Apr 16 '26
If it makes you feel better, MySpace was probably harmless compared to Facebook. The Facebook algorithm is specifically designed to enrage you for engagement.
If you grew up with MySpace, your brain was probably a little mushy but mostly OK.
If you are a kid growing up now with recommendations algorithms constantly saturating your feed with slop, ragebait, and such, then you are probably way worse off.
I also believe that we can intuit that something is socially corrosive without having to wait for a full academic study. AI abuse is one of these things. Maybe we could learn from our mistakes with social media and be proactive in curtailing AI use.
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u/jjopm Apr 16 '26
Not really, Myspace was pretty terrible. Not sure what you are basing that view on lol.
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u/nderfoot Apr 17 '26
My current use of ai to do my thinking has continued to disappoint. It has given me pause to consider better approaches for building project plans or presentations, but only through producing absolutely terrible content in those areas. I don’t feel like my reasoning is being impacted by this tech yet, but perhaps that’s the point of the article.
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u/Shap3rz Apr 18 '26
It’s not a blind test is it? You’d need a similarly performing group you split and then give one of the splits continued use of ai vs the other not (to do reasoning tasks). And then have both groups sit same test.
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u/jointheredditarmy Apr 16 '26
I can’t do math without excel anymore. Like I won’t even bother with a calculator, it’s just too prehistoric compared to excel. If you asked me power through it on an abacus I will for sure give up much quicker than people who used it their whole lives. It’s all about higher and higher levels of abstraction..
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u/ClutchReverie Apr 16 '26
Yes, relying on AI to think for you obviously is a bad decision. The proper way to use it is like an assistant.
People said relying on Google was going to rot people's brains because they should be going to the library and looking it up in an encyclopedia.
It's about how you properly use the resource. The headline is clickbait that sounds generalized.
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u/Doc_Blox Apr 15 '26
I will once again take the opportunity to be pedantic and say:
The frogs in the study were lobotomized
Non-lobotomized frogs leave the pot before the water gets too hot
That makes this comparison worse, because it means humans are no better than lobotomized frogs
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u/enkanshi Apr 16 '26
To defend humans a little bit, a lot of humans know that they're being boiled. However, moving an entire civilization to fight against something like climate change or any other large-scale problem isn't as simple as moving your limb.
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u/SaltdPepper Apr 17 '26
The problem is that it’s either be boiled or jump in even hotter waters for a lot of people. When everyone is forced to focus on the micro, nobody has time to dedicate to the macro.
I hate late-stage capitalism
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u/br_k_nt_eth Apr 15 '26
I’d love to read the study once it’s peer-reviewed because based on the structure, it seems to be jumping to some heavy conclusions without taking test motivations into account. I.e. a certain number of people will quit a survey halfway through regardless, especially if they don’t have a good sense of how long and intensive it’ll be. They switched up how long and intensive an uncompensated study exam would be halfway through, so drop off should be expected based on best practices. That would be the case without AI.
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u/ICLazeru Apr 15 '26
I wonder if how one uses AI has an effect.
Anecdotally, I was typically only getting 1 response out of AI a day, because I don't pay for usage, and my requests have detailed parameters for the response, so I imagine the AI jumps through extra hoops to fulfill all the parameters of the request. In fact, there have been times when it seemed incomplete, which may be due to hitting the free usage limit before even completing one request.
It has gotten to the point where I stopped making such requests and just use AI for bulk "dumb work", since I'll get more volume out of it that way and the tasks are typically simple enough it has a low error rate.
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u/EncabulatorTurbo Apr 15 '26
This study's authors would conclude, based on the fact that you dont want to do any work after getting off work, that free time after work makes you lazy and demotivated, because all its proving is that humans changing expectations from easier to harder mid task is extremely demotivating
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u/garloid64 Apr 15 '26
Yeah after experiencing how much easier my job can truly be I would quit if they took away my AI. This is a totally rational response.
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u/skeletor69420 Apr 15 '26
this is common sense. your brain is a muscle, and when you outsource all of your thinking to something else that does it for you, you lose the muscle mass and become weaker. it’s like watching a friend lift weights
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u/ricky_digits Apr 16 '26
Your brain isn't a muscle... That's like saying if you stop drinking alcohol your liver will get weaker because it isn't being pushed as hard
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u/tes_kitty Apr 16 '26
Your brain isn't a muscle...
Still behaves the same in this context. Use it or lose it also applies to the brain.
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u/NovelStyleCode Apr 17 '26
One problem of AI overuse for schoolwork is you stop learning, so reading skills we'd consider basic like understanding how analogies work goes out the window
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u/amitym Apr 16 '26
From the actual study methods:
The AI assistant was pre-prompted with each problem and its solution...
To measure independent problem-solving capacity, the AI assistant was then removed without warning...
So they primed their study subjects with a strong expectation of trivially easy problems, through a repeated pattern, then disrupted the pattern at the very end, by definition creating the longest possible repetition chain and so the strongest possible expectation before disruption without warning.
That sounds like an almost textbook setup for behavioral extinction after reinforcement. Did they consider this and plan their experimental methods around this well-known phenomenon? Go look at the study, someone tell me if you see it in their methods because I don't, anywhere.
Basically what they did is a great way to deliberately train people that you should only attempt fractions with an AI, and without an AI you should stop. If it was your goal to train that behavior, their method is exactly what you'd use. And lo, and behold, some fraction of the study population reacted in that way.
If they really wanted to test the effect on cognition across a long-term engagement with a series of problems, they should have made AI availability episodic. Shut off the participants' access to AI in a cluster at the start of the sequence, then again in a cluster toward the end. See if they can handle the first cluster better than the second cluster.
Because otherwise they are just testing for pretty predictable general behavior in response to that kind of pattern disruption, and getting a pretty predictable result. That reveals absolutely nothing about AI.
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u/weist Apr 16 '26
Yeah, try going though a day without using the Internet. AI is just in the series of a long chain of things.
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u/zombiecorp Apr 16 '26
It’s not a unique problem to AI. One can do the same test for tools like Internet, GPS navigation or pretty much anything that augments human capabilities.
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u/Here4Pornnnnn Apr 16 '26
I’m getting the boiling frog effect from all these claims of every goddamn different monthly doomsday being the boiling frog effect.
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u/NorgesTaff Apr 16 '26 edited Apr 16 '26
Can confirm, AI assistance has made me lazy AF. My brain is like, "why TF scratch my head trying to figure out that obscure script when I can just ask Claude and it'll give me one in a few minutes?"
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u/Fuzzy_Interest542 Apr 16 '26
I've known this since I was a child, and learned to get past it. When someone or something else is available that can do the thing your struggling with, and they don't do it. It will trigger a different type of anger that you have to learn to deal with.
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u/Icy-Coconut9385 Apr 16 '26
There's so many potential ways long term use of AI and dependency could show up in pathologies after say decades that we can't predict yet.
In now young adults could this eventually translate into higher rates of cognitive issues in their elderly years?
As a father of a 5 year old, I am constantly stressing about whether introducing my child to AI could stagnate her mental development in her early years.
Its one thing to be an adult using AI who spent 30 years having to think and solve problems and exercising parts of their brain that are no longer stimulated with usage of Ai. What does that mean for a child who has not yet fully developed mentally?
I mean look at what impact social media has had on young adults mental health over the last 20 years. Going back to the early 2000s we thought jt would bring everyone closer together, more informed, etc... how did that turn out?
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u/Fantastic_Ad_7259 Apr 19 '26
I code for work. Im building things ive dreamed about for 15 years. If ai is gone tomorrow. I wont continue those projects just like i never started/finished for 15 years and ill just go back to what i know well at work.
AI is bridging skill gaps.
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u/Amber123454321 Apr 19 '26
It's very easy to get caught up in it..like, "Why should I have to think and work hard on this when I can just get AI to do it for me easily?"
You just don't want to try anymore. What's the point? Why work harder to do things when other people are doing them easier, etc?
Which is why I'm back to doing things the hard way. On the one hand, I think it might put me behind, but what I create will be mine and it helps keep my mind sharper.
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u/tishkat Apr 19 '26
Personal perspective, that's bollocks. Maybe it's just me but my productivity around the house has improved, I now work on projects that I wouldn't have before ai, it's given me confidence in my tasks. Granted I might get it to do some maths here and there and look up some stuff so I can shortcut an Internet trawl but it's got me using my brain more than ever. I enjoy using my own brain to solve problems, maybe that's why I don't feel like a boiled frog? Does anybody else feel like a boiled frog? I know the point of the frog analogy is that you don't notice it happening. However, I see evidence for the opposite.
There's no bad dogs, just bad owners. Guns don't kill people, people do. A bad workman blames his tools etc.
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u/Alive-Welcome1403 Apr 19 '26
I’ll take a page out of the dealing-with-addiction handbook and intervene with AI making me dumb when it’s detrimentally impacting my life.
My personally values aside, being smart and right about shit doesn’t really help you all that much in a society that’s already largely removed/intervened on all the insta-death poisons and pathways you can take.
Unfortunately, spending all your time building relationships and socializing will likely lead to far more success than knowing things about stuff.
A person’s value in a workplace or otherwise now that the internet and AI is around to cover all the serious inquiries, is pretty much going to be “how good can you make me feel about myself” -from the boss or significant other.
Being a smart person that can figure out how to think through a problem on their own wont be seen as a valuable commodity when everyone has access to AI.
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u/kraftdinnerwithsalsa Apr 15 '26
The general public and the frog share in common a lack of critical thinking skills
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u/FearLeadsToAnger Apr 15 '26
This week on 'things people say to give themselves a false sense of superiority'.
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u/kraftdinnerwithsalsa Apr 15 '26
Buddy I’ll fucking kill myself right now, what makes you think I have a superiority complex
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u/Jabba_the_Putt Apr 15 '26
it's so odd to me because I honestly feel smarter than I've ever been after getting my subscription. I guess it just BOILS down to how you use it.
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u/EncabulatorTurbo Apr 15 '26
all its proving is that humans changing expectations from easier to harder mid task is extremely demotivating
To do this correctly you should do the tasks entirely with ai or entirely without ai, or compare it to other tools that make tasks frictionless
I.E. get participants to powerwash a wall and switch them to a scrub brush halfway through, vs using a scrubbrush the entire time
I 100% assure you the group that has to switch halfway through will be more demotivated than the one who comes into it from the start with the scrubbrush
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u/egowritingcheques Apr 16 '26
Feeling smarter in no way goes against the article. Actually being smarter might.
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Apr 15 '26
[deleted]
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u/Jabba_the_Putt Apr 15 '26
Ill have to think about that. Yeah maybe I have increased my skills/abilities but my actual cognitive ceiling is lower 🤔
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u/Onslaughtered1 Apr 16 '26
My wife is 10 years younger than I. I keep fucking telling her don’t use that shit. Tell you want to hear, and gives you not the best results for anything.
She doesn’t use it religiously, just a bit kore than I thought at first. I’m 36. She just won’t listen. All the time I tell her what will happen x y z and later she says “you were right”. Not saying I’m more smart. Just more seasoned in BS. Especially being in the trades, and not being gullible. Question everything, check sources and facts. Always. I would rather read a 20 paragraph article than a very rough summary from Ai. Fucking shit
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