"For the past three years, the conversation around artificial intelligence has been dominated by a single, anxious question: What will be left for us to do? As large language models began writing code, drafting legal briefs, and composing poetry, the prevailing assumption was that human cognitive labor was being commoditized. We braced for a world where thinking was outsourced to the cloud, rendering our hard-won mental skills, writing, logic, and structural reasoning relics of a pre-automated past."
"To understand how users interact with AI, Anthropic's researchers developed a novel metric: "human education years" (HEY). This metric estimates the years of formal schooling a human would require to comprehend both the user's prompt and the AI's subsequent response. A prompt asking for a grocery list might register as 8 years (middle school), while a prompt asking to "deconstruct the causal inference in this longitudinal study" might register as 18-plus years (Ph.D. level)."
"However, a recent data release from Anthropic puts this narrative upside down. On Jan. 15, 2026, the company released its 4th Economic Index report, a deep-dive analysis of over 1 million real-world conversations with their AI, Claude. The findings suggest that we have misunderstood the nature of the partnership between our NI and AI-our natural and artificial intelligences, carbon and silicon."
Anthropic released on Jan. 15, 2026 its 4th Economic Index analyzing over one million real-world conversations with Claude. Researchers created a "human education years" (HEY) metric estimating years of formal schooling required to understand prompts and responses. Higher-complexity inputs correlate strongly with more sophisticated outputs, with a reported correlation coefficient of 0.92. The correlation indicates that Claude mirrors user ability rather than automatically elevating simplistic prompts. The findings imply that the most valuable skills for people working with AI remain domain knowledge, critical thinking, and unconventional, creative thinking.
Read at Psychology Today
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