The fretting has swelled from a murmur to a clamor, all variations on the same foreboding theme: “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” “AI Is Making You Dumber.” “AI Is Killing Critical Thinking.” Once, the fear was of a runaway intelligence that would wipe us out, maybe while turning the planet into a paper-clip factory. Now that chatbots are going the way of Google—moving from the miraculous to the taken-for-granted—the anxiety has shifted, too, from apocalypse to atrophy. Teachers, especially, say they’re beginning to see the rot. The term for it is unlovely but not inapt: de-skilling.

The worry is far from fanciful. Kids who turn to Gemini to summarize Twelfth Night may never learn to wrestle with Shakespeare on their own. Aspiring lawyers who use Harvey AI for legal analysis may fail to develop the interpretive muscle their predecessors took for granted. In a recent study, several hundred U.K. participants were given a standard critical-thinking test and were interviewed about their AI use for finding information or making decisions. Younger users leaned more on the technology, and scored lower on the test. Use it or lose it was the basic takeaway. Another study looked at physicians performing colonoscopies: After three months of using an AI system to help flag polyps, they became less adept at spotting them unaided.

But the real puzzle isn’t whether de-skilling exists—it plainly does—but rather what kind of thing it is. Are all forms of de-skilling corrosive? Or are there kinds that we can live with, that might even be welcome? De-skilling is a catchall term for losses of very different kinds: some costly, some trivial, some oddly generative. To grasp what’s at stake, we have to look closely at the ways that skill frays, fades, or mutates when new technologies arrive.

Our chatbots are new: The “transformer” architecture they rely on was invented in 2017, and ChatGPT made its public debut just five years later. But the fear that a new technology might blunt the mind is ancient. In the Phaedrus, which dates to the fourth century B.C.E., Socrates recounts a myth in which the Egyptian god Thoth offers King Thamus the gift of writing—“a recipe for memory and for wisdom.” Thamus is unmoved. Writing, he warns, will do the opposite: It will breed forgetfulness, letting people trade the labor of recollection for marks on papyrus, mistaking the appearance of understanding for the thing itself. Socrates sides with Thamus. Written words, he complains, never answer your particular questions; reply to everyone the same way, sage and fool alike; and are helpless when they’re misunderstood.

Of course, the reason we know all this—the reason the episode keeps turning up in Whiggish histories of technology—is that Plato wrote it down. Yet the critics of writing weren’t entirely wrong. In oral cultures, bards carried epics in their heads; griots could reel off centuries of genealogy on demand. Writing made such prowess unnecessary. You could now take in ideas without wrestling with them. Dialogue demands replies: clarification, objection, revision. (Sometimes “Very true, Socrates” did the trick, but still.) Reading, by contrast, lets you bask in another’s brilliance, nodding along without ever testing yourself against it.

Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares: AI is grown, not built

What looks like a loss from one angle, though, can look like a gain from another. Writing opened new mental territories: commentary, jurisprudence, reliable history, science. Walter J. Ong, the scholar of orality and literacy, put it crisply: “Writing is a technology that restructures thought.” The pattern is familiar. When sailors began using sextants, they left behind the seafarer’s skycraft, the detailed reading of stars that once steered them safely home. Later, satellite navigation brought an end to sextant skills. Owning a Model T once meant moonlighting as a mechanic—knowing how to patch tubes, set ignition timing by ear, coax the car’s engine back to life after a stall. Today’s highly reliable engines seal off their secrets. Slide rules yielded to calculators, calculators to computers. Each time, individual virtuosity waned, but overall performance advanced.

It’s a reassuring pattern—something let go, something else acquired. But some gains come with deeper costs.