AI today can write our college essays, plan our meals and draft our emails.<\/p>\n
But the benefits of such assistance incite wildly different opinions. Some see AI as a tool that frees up time for other activities. Others fear that offloading our thinking to a computer will dull our capacity to think for ourselves. (See recent headlines warning about AI making us lazy, stupid and prompting civilization\u2019s downfall.)<\/p>\n
The truth may lie somewhere in the middle, says Trent Cash, a behavioral scientist at University of Waterloo in Canada. A person\u2019s learned skills, such as how to work through math problems or detect polyps while performing a colonoscopy, may indeed atrophy if taken over by AI, he and his colleagues argue July 9 in Trends in Cognitive Sciences<\/em>. \u201cThe evidence is extremely clear that if we offload a specific skill to AI,\u201d he says, \u201cwe\u2019re probably not going to retain that skill particularly well.\u201d<\/p>\n