The story of technology is the story of continual disruption and displacement. New systems and processes send some skills into obsolescence, opening the way for new skills and workflows. Generative AI has triggered the latest “de-skilling.” But chatbot technology isn’t only transforming jobs and shifting our relationship with information itself. It is also inviting us to relinquish our cognitive independence and bring about a sort of dispossession that is unprecedented. Some argue that Big Tech’s unbridled rush to implement chatbots and AI assistants into every part of our lives threatens to erode the sorts of cognitive skills that make us who we are and effectively shrink the field of human agency. The convenience and presumed “cognition” of AI assistants threaten to usurp human creativity, judgment, empathy, and meaning-making—what ethicist Kwame Anthony Appiah refers to as “constitutive de-skilling” (2025). Another technology theorist, Sylvie Delacroix, has cautioned that our increasing reliance on tools built on large language models (LLMs) is leading to our “perceptual atrophy” and an inability to deal effectively with uncertainty.

Research is beginning to document an erosion of expertise among medical specialists who are increasingly dependent on AI assistants that have proven highly effective at detecting precancerous lesions and tumors. Researchers assessed more than........

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