Bosses think AI will boost productivity — but it’s actually deskilling workers, a professor says

• A philosophy professor warns that reliance on AI is quietly eroding workers' core skills.
• She says junior employees risk becoming "useless" when they over-rely on AI tools.
• Data shows most ChatGPT use is personal, raising concerns about cognitive offloading.

Companies are racing to adopt AI tools they believe will supercharge productivity. But one professor warned that the technology may be quietly hollowing out the workforce instead.

Anastasia Berg, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, said that new research — and what she's hearing directly from colleagues across various industries — shows that employees who heavily rely on AI are losing core skills at a startling rate.

"We have a tremendous amount of empirical data on this question of skill attrition or skill atrophy," Berg said on "The Philosopher" podcast this week. "We talk a lot about what it takes to acquire a skill," but skills also require maintaining, she said

While Berg did not cite particular studies, there is research from Oxford University Press and journals, including Springer and MDPI, that suggests AI may boost speed and engagement in learning, but often at the cost of depth, critical thinking, creativity, and long-term skill development.

AI could be damaging the workers who need to learn the most

Berg said the workers most vulnerable to this deskilling effect are junior employees.

She said it's not just a problem with the humanities subjects; computer science professors say that students and early-career developers are relying so heavily on AI tools that they're no longer learning how to write or debug code on their own.

"It's one thing for a senior coder to use AI," she said. "But the junior people are useless because they cannot help themselves from using it."

Because they lean on AI from day one, Berg said, they never build the foundational knowledge required to understand what the AI is doing — let alone verify or correct it.

AI is becoming a crutch — even outside work

Berg said AI dependency is spreading far beyond the workplace. Adults now consult chatbots for everything from emotional support to daily decision-making — a shift she believes erodes independent judgment.

"The majority — if not something close to — of AI use among adults isn't work-related," she said, pointing to "constant advice," "a lot of weird sociability," and "emotional task management."

An analysis of 1.58 million ChatGPT conversations by researchers at OpenAI, Duke University, and Harvard University found that by June 2025, 73% of messages from adult users were non-work-related, though the study did not break down the specific non-work uses.

That kind of reliance, she said, weakens the cognitive capacities people need not only to perform specialized jobs but to function independently in everyday life.

A looming crisis of competence

Berg's point is that AI doesn't merely automate tasks — it automates the very processes through which people develop their skills.

Once workers grow dependent on AI, they lose the friction that strengthens their ability to reason, problem-solve, and make decisions.

"We have them compromising their most basic levels of their ability," she said. "The threat to the highest level of their ability is just tremendous."

If companies continue to push AI into every workflow under the banner of efficiency, she said, they may end up with a generation of employees who appear more productive on paper but lack the ability to perform without digital hand-holding.

In other words, AI might not be enhancing the workforce. It might be slowly dismantling it.