Smarter and Dumber at the Same Time

A professor friend told me over coffee that her students were getting smarter and dumber at the same time. She was not wrong, and it is not only students.

An MIT Media Lab study put 54 university students on EEG while they wrote essays, some with ChatGPT, some with search, some with nothing. The ChatGPT group showed 55% less neural connectivity than those writing unassisted. And 83% of them struggled to accurately recall content from essays they had just finished.

The researchers called it cognitive debt. Every time you outsource the thinking, you borrow against your own capacity to do it, and the interest is paid in depth.

The other half is also real. People save serious time with these tools. Teachers in Singapore are saving five hours a week on routine tasks. Those hours can go to mentoring and real conversation, or they can simply disappear into more output. The question is what the time goes to.

The seat that pays first

The three seats say the shift does not price every career stage the same way. Early, the cheap years that used to train you are being automated. This study is what that looks like from the inside. The essay got written. The writer did not get the practice the essay used to provide.

In the early seat the output was never really the point. The contact was. Doing the unglamorous thing by hand is how the judgment above you was built, and holding a finished draft is not the same as having done the work that produces one.

Struggle is the training

One finding is worth keeping. AI tutors built to be deliberately unhelpful, asking "why?" instead of answering, produced nearly double the learning gains. Struggle is the gym. Remove all the weights and you do not get stronger.

That is the practical line between AI-assisted and AI-native for someone early in a career. AI-assisted is doing your existing work faster. AI-native is knowing which parts of the work are building judgment that will be yours, and refusing to hand those over just because you can. Use the tools to kill busywork, not thinking work. There is a difference, and it matters most while you are still building the thing you would be delegating.

A test you can run on yourself

The simplest check is oral. Can you explain your own argument without notes? If you cannot, it is not your argument yet. Try it on the last thing you shipped with heavy AI help: walk someone through why it is right, without the tool open.

The goal is not to use less AI. It is to get smarter through it while keeping the ability to think without it.

Adapted from We're Becoming Smarter and Dumber at the Same Time in The Forward View. Read the full issue.