As more professionals begin to rely on artificial intelligence tools in their work, could their hard-earned skills wither away?
This possibility is increasingly worrying medical professionals, computer scientists and other workers. For example, according to a survey of U.S. healthcare workers released earlier this month, 70 percent of nurses and 77 percent of doctors are worried about losing their skills due to over-reliance on AI systems.
Your fear may be justified. There is evidence that AI-driven “deskilling” is occurring in medicine, computer science, and other fields. Researchers are now discussing how to preserve important human expertise in the age of AI.
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“Just the awareness that this phenomenon exists hopefully encourages some self-reflection about which skills people want to keep and which ones they are willing to outsource to AI tools,” says Kevin Crowston, an information scientist at Syracuse University in New York.
Spoiled by AI?
A study of doctors in Poland who specialize in endoscopy – the use of flexible probes to examine the inside of the human body – shows how quickly AI tools can undermine human capabilities. The doctors, all of whom had performed at least 2,000 colonoscopies throughout their careers, were given access to an AI system that analyzes colonoscopy images in real time and detects a type of precancerous intestinal lesion called an adenoma. The tool was available to the specialists on some days but not on others.
When doctors started using it, their performance dropped significantly when the system was unavailable. In the three-month period before the introduction of the AI tool, specialists found at least one adenoma in 28.4% of colonoscopies. Within three months of launching the tool, the adenoma detection rate in colonoscopies performed without AI assistance fell to 22.4%.
The results were published last October The Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatologysuggest that even highly skilled professionals could become worse at tasks that their jobs require as they become more dependent on AI tools, says Robert Wachter, a physician at the University of California, San Francisco and author of a book about how AI tools are transforming healthcare. The study authors say that constant exposure to such tools can cause doctors to become “less motivated, less focused, and less responsible when making cognitive decisions without AI support.”
Co-author Yuichi Mori, a doctor and researcher at the University of Oslo, says further studies are needed to confirm the phenomenon. But people who use AI tools should be aware that they risk losing some of their skills, he adds. “There is currently no established solution to deskilling. It is likely to be a very hot research topic in the next decade.”
No lesson learned
To investigate whether skills are being lost in the field of computer science, researchers at AI company Anthropic in San Francisco, California, designed a randomized controlled trial in which 52 software engineers were asked to perform a basic programming task. During the exercise, all 52 participants were able to search the Internet for instructions on how to solve the task. Half of the participants were asked to also use an AI assistant.
All software developers were then asked to take a quiz about what they learned from the task. Participants who had used an AI assistant performed significantly worse on the quiz than those who had not used an AI assistant: the average score was 50% in the AI group versus 67% in the non-AI group. The AI-assisted participants performed particularly poorly on questions that required them to diagnose errors in the code, suggesting that they had not learned the concepts behind the code they had just created. The study was published on the preprint server arXiv before peer review.
The findings are particularly concerning for students and young professionals in the field, says Crowston, who is researching how the use of generative AI tools is changing the way software developers learn and retain programming skills. “Now there is this very strange disconnect between performance and learning,” he says. “Humans can perform at fairly high levels because they basically borrow skills from AI, but don’t develop those skills themselves.”
Outsourcing knowledge
Other technologies have made certain skills obsolete in the past, notes Tapani Rinta-Kahila, an information systems researcher at the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki. For example, GPS navigation systems have affected people’s navigation skills. However, generative AI tools are “the first technology to automate various cognitive skills around thinking and interpretation, long considered uniquely human abilities.”
Rinta-Kahila’s own work reinforces these concerns. In 2018, he published a study on a group of accountants who had been continuously using an automated accounting system without AI for more than a decade. His team discovered that the accountants had forgotten to complete several routine tasks when they took away the tool. He expects AI systems to impact work in different ways as they take on basic tasks once handled by entry-level workers. “Next generations of programmers may not understand the basics of programming as well at all if they lack practical experience,” he says. “The same applies to many other knowledge-intensive professions, such as accounting and law.”
To prevent AI-related skill loss, people need to be aware of how much they are shifting to generative AI tools, he says. You also need to understand exactly how generative AI models work and what their limitations are – and should avoid trusting AI results without questioning them. “People must navigate the competing dynamics of relying on generative AI while remaining vigilant.”
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