"A mathematician opens up ChatGPT to check a calculation she could have easily solved in her head. An executive uses AI to draft an email he's written a hundred times before. A professor asks NoteBookLM to summarize a student paper she has the expertise to read herself. Is there a difference between remembering information vs. remembering where to find it? Is there a difference in knowing how to do a task vs. knowing how to get it done for you?"
"Cognitive offloading, the act of delegating mental work to external tools, should concern anyone who values their own intelligence. When given the choice between thinking through a problem or letting technology handle it, will we choose the tool, even when we're perfectly capable of succeeding on our own? The Metacognitive Trap You can't build a skill you don't practice. Sam Gilbert noticed in his experiments something he calls "reminder bias.""
Everyday professionals frequently delegate routine mental tasks to AI and digital reminders instead of engaging their own cognition. People tend to underestimate their memory and problem-solving abilities, prompting excessive reminder-setting and AI use that removes opportunities to practice skills. Sam Gilbert identified "reminder bias," a tendency to choose external memory aids even when unaided memory would suffice, and incentives to rely on internal memory often fail. Habitual cognitive offloading can become a dispositional trait that lowers analytical thinking scores and inhibits the development of the internal mental structures required for those cognitive tasks.
Read at Psychology Today
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