Khaberni - As professionals increasingly rely on artificial intelligence tools in their work, might their hard-earned skills fade away?.
This possibility is a growing concern for medical specialists, computer scientists, and other workers.
For example, 70% of nurses and 77% of doctors have expressed concerns about losing their skills due to excessive reliance on artificial intelligence systems, according to a survey of healthcare workers in the United States published earlier this month.
According to a report published by Nature, their fears may be justified.
Evidence suggests that "skill fade" due to artificial intelligence is already happening in medicine, computer science, and other fields.
Researchers are now discussing how to preserve important human expertise in the era of artificial intelligence.
Kevin Croston, an information scientist at Syracuse University in New York, says: "Just recognizing the existence of this phenomenon likely stimulates deep thinking about the skills people want to preserve and those they are willing to delegate to artificial intelligence tools."
Capability Erosion
A study conducted on gastroenterologists in Poland - who use flexible probes to examine the interior of the human body - shows how rapidly artificial intelligence tools can impact human capabilities.
Doctors, each of whom had performed at least 2000 colonoscopies during their careers, were given access to an artificial intelligence system that analyzes endoscopic images in real-time and identifies a type of precancerous intestinal lesion called a benign tumor.
The tool was available to the specialists on some days but not others.
As soon as the doctors began using it, their performance noticeably declined whenever the system was unavailable.
In the three months before introducing the artificial intelligence tool, specialists detected at least one adenoma in 28.4% of colonoscopy procedures.
However, during the three months after introducing the tool, the rate of adenoma detection in colonoscopy procedures performed without artificial intelligence assistance dropped to 22.4%.
Highly-Skilled Professionals
The results, published in The Lancet's Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, suggest that even highly-skilled professionals may see their performance in job-required tasks decline as they increasingly rely on artificial intelligence tools, according to Robert Washer, a doctor at the University of California.
And study researchers say that continuous exposure to these tools may make doctors "less enthusiastic, focused, and responsible when making cognitive decisions without the help of artificial intelligence."
Yuichi Mori, a research doctor at the University of Oslo, says that more studies are needed to confirm this phenomenon.
He adds that users of artificial intelligence tools need to realize that they risk losing some of their skills. There is currently no approved solution to address skill decay.
This topic is expected to be a main focus of scientific research over the next decade.
Computer Science
To determine if skills are being lost in computer science, researchers at Anthropics AI in San Francisco designed a randomized controlled experiment asking 52 software engineers to perform a basic programming task.
During the exercise, all participants were allowed to search the internet and access instructions on how to perform the task.
Half of the participants were asked to use an artificial intelligence assistant.
Afterwards, all software engineers were asked to complete a short test on what they learned from the task.
Participants who used the artificial intelligence assistant performed significantly worse on the test compared to those who did not use it: the average scores were 50% in the artificial intelligence group versus 67% in the other group.
Participants who used the artificial intelligence assistant especially struggled with questions requiring them to diagnose errors in the code, suggesting their failure to grasp the underlying concepts of the code they wrote.
Croston, a researcher in how the use of generative artificial intelligence tools changes the way software developers learn and retain programming skills, says the results are concerning, particularly for students and young professionals in the field.
He adds: "There is now a peculiar gap between performance and learning. People can perform at a very high level because they are borrowing skills from artificial intelligence, but they are not developing those skills themselves."
External Sources for Cognition
Tapani Rinta-Kahila, a researcher in information systems at the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, notes that other technologies in the past have made certain skills obsolete.
For example, GPS navigation systems have led to a decline in people's navigation skills.
But generative artificial intelligence tools are "the first technology to automate various cognitive abilities related to thinking and interpreting, which for a long time were considered unique human skills."
Preventive Measures Necessary
To prevent skill erosion due to artificial intelligence, Rinta-Kahila says that people need to be aware of how much they delegate to generative artificial intelligence tools.
She continued: "They need to understand how generative artificial intelligence models work accurately, what their limitations are, and they should avoid trusting the outputs of artificial intelligence without questioning it," adding that people "need to manage the balance between relying on generative artificial intelligence and staying consciously vigilant."
