Why Technology Doesn’t Normally Make You Dumber, but Agentic AI Will

A perennial concern about the use of technology is that it blunts our cognitive powers. By appealing to extended cognition, it is argued that this worry is usually misplaced. For while the integration of technology into our cognitive processes might lead to a degradation of some of our unextended cognitive abilities, it normally also generates far more effective extended cognitive abilities in their place. Unfortunately, this comforting line of reasoning regarding technology integration breaks down when it comes to agentic AI. The reason for this is that the distinctive features of agentic AI mean that its integration into extended cognitive processes will have the effect of undermining our executive cognitive abilities. Our executive cognitive abilities are crucial to our cognitive lives, however, and hence their impairment cannot be offset merely by the acquisition of new non-executive extended cognitive abilities that incorporate agentic AI, however cognitively effective they might be.