The move-fast ethos that works for software deployment is potentially catastrophic when applied to human cognitive development. You can’t A/B test your way out of atrophy. You can’t pivot when you realise you’ve lost a generation of expertise.

But cognitive atrophy - that can happen instantly. Someone can start reflexively outsourcing their thinking today, and the degradation begins immediately. No approval process required. No implementation timeline. No procurement cycle. Just a quiet erosion of capability, person by person, decision by decision. And it compounds. Every month of... See more

So what do we actually do about this? Because I’m not saying don’t use AI. That would be stupid. The genie is out of the bottle and there are genuinely transformative applications of this technology. I’m saying we need to be incredibly deliberate about how we integrate it. We need to slow down and think about what we’re optimising for.

Right now, it’s really easy for us to just constantly say AI will make you better. AI will give you superpowers. AI will do the grunt work in your day-to-day job to free you up for higher-order thinking. We’ve become evangelical about it. In our rush to augment everybody, we’re pushing out Copilot licenses like they’re going out of fashion. We’re... See more

If you’re twenty-three and entering creative work right now, you could theoretically go your entire early career without ever building the foundational cognitive muscles that create senior creative excellence. Pattern recognition. Conceptual synthesis. The ability to tolerate ambiguity and sit with discomfort. The instinct for when something is... See more

But what we’re not talking about, what we’re not worrying about nearly enough, is the other side of the coin. If we’re running at speed at this, if we’re pushing everyone to use AI because we think it’s some sort of panacea to every business challenge we have, what about atrophy? What about the erosion of expertise, of knowledge, of critical... See more

What’s most insidious about this is that early-stage atrophy feels like productivity. The person thinks they’re getting so much done. Look at all this output. Look how fast I can turn things around. Meanwhile, they’re actually hollowing out the very capabilities that made them valuable in the first place. The output looks good. The velocity is... See more