Sign up to see the future, today<\/p>\n
Can\u2019t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech<\/p>\n
The headlines warning about AI melting our brains usually point to students or workers, which \u2014 fair enough. But there\u2019s a much more ironic victim hiding in the corner office: the very business executives who unleashed AI on us in the first place.<\/p>\n
A recent study<\/a> conducted by market research agency 3Gem and flagged by The Register<\/a> found that business leaders in the United Kingdom seem to be outsourcing a huge amount of their cognitive and emotional labor to their AI chatbots.<\/p>\n The study, which surveyed 200 various owners, founders, CEOs, and other titans of industry, found that 62 percent of the respondents are using AI to make \u201cmost decisions.\u201d A whopping 140 of the moguls reported second-guessing their own ideas when they conflicted with AI\u2019s recommendations, while 46 percent said they now rely on advice from AI more than that of their own business colleagues.<\/p>\n This follows a similar report from last year that found 64 percent of business leaders were consulting AI for advice<\/a> on terminations (although only 27 percent of the respondents to the 3Gem survey said they used AI for those decisions in 2025.)<\/p>\n In other words, the people most loudly investing in AI, with no concern for its impact on everybody else\u2019s cognitive abilities<\/a>, are quietly outsourcing their own.<\/p>\n Last year, another joint study conducted by Carnegie Mellon and Microsoft found that knowledge workers who trusted the accuracy of generative AI systems had a lower propensity<\/a> for critical thought. It\u2019s not hard to see why: when humans are confident that a task has been competently automated, we tend to take a backseat and let the system do its thing \u2014 sometimes literally, as in the case of self-driving<\/a> cars<\/a>.<\/p>\n That finding was underscored earlier in February, when S\u00f8ren Dinesen \u00d8stergaard, the Danish psychiatrist who predicted the affliction now commonly known as \u201cAI psychosis,\u201d warned that academic scholars risk accruing a \u201ccognitive debt\u201d when they outsource their work<\/a> to AI chatbots.<\/p>\n All that is to say, there\u2019s a strong consensus that outsourcing your thinking to AI atrophies your brain. The executives who evangelized the lobotomy machine, it seems, are no exception to the rule.<\/p>\n