Generative AI is achieving incredible outcomes but possibly at the cost of a deterioration of our expertise.

I cataloged some of these degradations in 2003 with regard to the use of information technology.

Current AI may make us worse at recognizing patterns, searching for data, and improving our mental models.

The challenge is to understand the basis of expertise in order to safeguard and enhance it.

Current versions of artificial intelligence have created so much well-deserved excitement. However, along with all that progress has come a wave of apprehension about the destructive potential of using AI. Fears that AI could be harming us. Fears that it might be making us stupid.

I wrote about this possibility in 2019, in a post I titled "The Second Singularity," and I am not happy to see my predictions coming true.

However, this post asks a different question. Now I am looking back to 2003 and the original publication of my book The Power of Intuition. This was before large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Claude and the generative AI technologies. My book examined different facets of intuition/expertise. Chapter 16 was titled “Smart Technology Can Make Us Stupid.” The smart technology I was writing about was simply the 2003-style information technology, not current LLMs, but the mechanisms I identified seem quite relevant today.

In that chapter, I wrote, “Information technologies are intended to make us more productive, but their use carries a penalty. The computer programs, the decision support systems, the search engines, databases, and shareware we use can diminish our intuition and expertise. They can make us stupid.” I worried that the 2003-era........

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