If your kids or graduate recruits involved in knowledge work use AI, you might want to read this. Not because AI use is bad but a passive use of AI can have detrimental effects on cognitive abilities of the young who haven’t yet had the opportunity to go through the struggles to build foundational expertise/skills and hence consequentially the neural connections in their brains. The author who is an investment manager at the iconic century old Scottish fund management firm Baillie Gifford, likens AI to a cultural evolution like literacy or the Church in terms of its effects on cognitive abilities of the individual as well as a population.
“Two hundred years ago, only 12 per cent of the world’s adults could read. Today, that figure stands at 87 per cent. What happened in between was not just an education story. It was a biological one.
As billions of humans acquired literacy, their brains literally rewired. The connection between the hemispheres thickened. A region that had evolved for recognising faces was repurposed to recognise letters. Entirely new neural pathways activated in response to spoken language. No gene had mutated. No evolutionary pressure in the traditional Darwinian sense was at work. A purely cultural practice, making marks on surfaces and training people to decode them, had reached inside the skull and reorganised the organ that makes us human.
This is not an exception but the rule. Across millennia, cultural technologies from cooking to markets to kinship structures have systematically reshaped human physiology and psychology in ways that genetics alone cannot explain. We are now deploying a cultural technology that may be more pervasive than literacy and more transformative than markets, and it is spreading at unprecedented speed. AI is not simply a productivity tool or an economic disruptor. It is the next great rewiring, and it has already begun.”
He refers to the MIT study (featured in 3L&3S a couple of months ago) which compared two groups of students – one with access to AI for writing essays and the other without to show how the former experienced weaker neural connectivity. “The effort that builds durable learning had been bypassed entirely. A complementary study in npj Artificial Intelligence offered a crucial distinction. AI gives you results, but those results only become a real understanding when you actively interpret and judge them. Participants who treated AI as a starting point for their own thinking retained and even improved their cognitive performance over time. Those who accepted AI outputs passively showed a measurable decline. The difference was not in how much AI people used, but in how they used it. Skip the effortful step of making sense of what the AI gives you, and the brain’s capacity to learn weakens. Engage actively, and it can be sustained or even enhanced.”
The problem is that all of us see the immediate benefits of AI as a productivity enhancement tool but we see the detrimental effects on our brains only after an extended use unless we learn to engage with it actively. The author explains the science behind it:
“Research on the anterior mid-cingulate cortex (aMCC) has identified a brain region strongly associated with persistence, effortful self-regulation and what might simply be called the will to live. The aMCC is smaller in people with obesity and grows when they diet. It is larger in athletes. It is especially large in people who see themselves as challenged and overcome that challenge, and in people who live exceptionally long, it maintains its size. The critical finding is that the aMCC appears to respond not to effort in general, but specifically to tasks that generate friction, frustration and the desire to quit….Every time AI eliminates the friction from an effortful task, it may be removing precisely the stimulus that builds the neural infrastructure of persistence and self-regulation. AI’s removal of cognitive struggle is not merely a learning problem. It is potentially a problem of brain development itself.”
He then cites research to show that this is not just with students or novices, even experts tend to lose their cognitive abilities without realising as much after a prolonged use of AI as a tool: “A landmark 2025 study in The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology tracked 19 experienced endoscopists across more than 1,400 colonoscopies. After a period of working with AI assistance, their detection rate for a key indicator dropped by 21 per cent, even after they stopped using the AI. The cognitive shortcuts learned during AI-assisted work had carried over and compromised their unaided performance. This is the first real-world clinical evidence that AI exposure can degrade expert judgement even after the AI is switched off.”
The author goes on to touch upon concepts such as “automation bias, the tendency to defer to a computer-generated answer over your own judgement, even when your judgement is right” or the lack of diversity required for creative output as most models tend to be trained on homogenous data sets or the effects of learning from a machine that learned from us. It is indeed worth reading the piece in its entirety. He ends by making this distinction:
“AI will not simply replace human workers. It will change what human workers are. It is already reshaping how we learn, who we learn from, how we assess our own competence and what cognitive skills we develop or allow to atrophy. The humans who emerge from this process will not be the same humans who entered it.
The partnership between humans and AI that people like to imagine, one where each complements the other’s strengths, is not a stable endpoint. It is a moving target, because one half of the partnership is being continuously reshaped by the other.
A skilled professional who learns to use AI well can be extraordinarily productive. But this is not a rising tide that lifts all boats. It is a force multiplier that amplifies existing advantages. The same dynamic that makes an AI-augmented expert vastly more valuable also makes an AI-dependent novice more disposable.”
If you want to read our other published material, please visit https://marcellus.in/blog/
Note: The above material is neither investment research, nor financial advice. Marcellus does not seek payment for or business from this publication in any shape or form. The information provided is intended for educational purposes only. Marcellus Investment Managers is regulated by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and is also an FME (Non-Retail) with the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA) as a provider of Portfolio Management Services. Additionally, Marcellus is also registered with US Securities and Exchange Commission (“US SEC”) as an Investment Advisor.
