The Case That Relying on AI Atrophies Thinking
MIT professor Eric So argues in his new book, The Collision: What AI Does to Us, that heavy use of AI can lead to a kind of cognitive atrophy, in which people fail to develop and retain essential thinking skills.
Note the hedging: heavy use, can. This is a risk claim about what happens over time, not a verdict that anyone who asks a chatbot a question gets dumber. It does invite the obvious follow-up — which parts of thinking are worth refusing to hand over.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
So's own account of how learning works cuts against defaulting to the tool: he says the evidence shows our ability to learn gets dramatically better when we wrestle with material, work through initial failures and keep iterating.
Anthropic's analysis found that about half of queries from college students were low-effort requests for simple answers. That measures demand for easy answers, not what using them does to anyone's thinking.