WIBCI we thought about deskilling?
This is a new-to-me term that I’ve come across.
Wikipedia defines it as: a byproduct of technological advancements, generally driven by production innovation, can first be examined during the Industrial Revolution in late 18th century England. On the other hand, skilling is also seen as a direct consequence of technological advancement, whereby workers have the opportunity to adopt new operational knowledge through upskilling.
Although this page was recently updated, this type of ‘deskilling’ is not the one that we, apparently, should be discussing. The deskilling that would be good for us to consider aren’t the skills lost to technological advancement, they are the skills lost through lack of practice. Your brain truly is a muscle, if you don’t use it, it will atrophy. You can see it from acronyms and spell-check to the worst thing ever to happen to human brains….AI. The following article explains this in more depth with some pretty alarming articles in case you need to be scared straight:
The fretting has swelled from a murmur to a clamor, all variations on the same foreboding theme: “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” “AI Is Making You Dumber.” “AI Is Killing Critical Thinking.” Once, the fear was of a runaway intelligence that would wipe us out, maybe while turning the planet into a paper-clip factory. Now that chatbots are going the way of Google—moving from the miraculous to the taken-for-granted—the anxiety has shifted, too, from apocalypse to atrophy. Teachers, especially, say they’re beginning to see the rot. The term for it is unlovely but not inapt: de-skilling.
The worry is far from fanciful. Kids who turn to Gemini to summarize Twelfth Night may never learn to wrestle with Shakespeare on their own. Aspiring lawyers who use Harvey AI for legal analysis may fail to develop the interpretive muscle their predecessors took for granted. In a recent study, several hundred U.K. participants were given a standard critical-thinking test and were interviewed about their AI use for finding information or making decisions. Younger users leaned more on the technology, and scored lower on the test. Use it or lose it was the basic takeaway. Another study looked at physicians performing colonoscopies: After three months of using an AI system to help flag polyps, they became less adept at spotting them unaided.
But the real puzzle isn’t whether de-skilling exists—it plainly does—but rather what kind of thing it is. Are all forms of de-skilling corrosive? Or are there kinds that we can live with, that might even be welcome? De-skilling is a catchall term for losses of very different kinds: some costly, some trivial, some oddly generative. To grasp what’s at stake, we have to look closely at the ways that skill frays, fades, or mutates when new technologies arrive.
-The Atlantic: The Age of De-Skilling: Will AI stretch our minds—or stunt them?/By Kwame Anthony Appiah/October 26, 2025
What skills do YOU think you are worse at because of the convenience of tech…. writing, reading, communicating, being present, being happy?
Last Updated on 12/15/2025 by Death of Hypatia Inc.
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