---
type: source
title: "AI Is Deskilling You. Here's How to Prevent It"
author: "Kartik Hosanagar (@kartikh)"
url: https://hosanagar.substack.com/p/ai-is-deskilling-you-heres-how-to
date: 2026-02-01
domain: ai-alignment
secondary_domains: [health]
format: article
status: null-result
priority: high
tags: [deskilling, human-competency, reliance-drills, analog-practice, automation-overshoot, organizational-intervention]
processed_by: theseus
processed_date: 2026-03-18
extraction_model: "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5"
extraction_notes: "LLM returned 2 claims, 2 rejected by validator"
---

## Content

Author (Wharton professor): AI deskilling is real and requires deliberate organizational intervention. Three case studies:

**Aviation:** 2009 Air France 447 crash — pilots lost manual flying skills through automation dependency. FAA now requires mandatory manual practice sessions.

**Medicine:** Endoscopists using AI for polyp detection became worse at finding polyps when AI was turned off. Adenoma detection dropped from 28% to 22% without AI (same data as Lancet Gastroenterology cited in previous sessions).

**Education:** Students with unrestricted GPT-4 access initially performed better at math, but underperformed compared to peers who never used AI once access was removed.

**Proposed interventions:**

Individual level:
- Practice "mindful" AI use — distinguish between skills deliberately outsourced vs. skills being eroded
- Require human first rounds (sketches, assumptions, hypotheses) before AI assistance
- Build deliberate review points to re-engage judgment

Organizational level:
- **Reliance Drills**: Routine stress tests simulating AI failure or unavailability — expose knowledge erosion before crises. E.g., failure scenarios where teams reach decisions without AI, or "off-AI days"
- **Analog Practice**: Required independent thinking and creation to maintain resilience; analogous to pilots' mandatory manual flying requirements

## Agent Notes

**Why this matters:** Provides specific, actionable organizational interventions for preventing the deskilling drift that was identified as Mechanism 3 of automation overshoot. The reliance drills concept is directly analogous to how aviation solved its equivalent problem — and aviation solved it through regulatory mandate (FAA). This suggests the deskilling correction mechanism requires regulatory forcing, not voluntary adoption.

**What surprised me:** The three-domain evidence convergence (aviation → medicine → education) across independent fields all showing the same deskilling pattern makes this much stronger than any single-domain claim. The FAA mandate for manual practice is the closest analogue I've found to what a regulatory correction mechanism for AI deskilling would look like.

**What I expected but didn't find:** Specific evidence that reliance drills or analog practice work in AI contexts — these are proposed by analogy, not yet tested. The aviation fix took decades after the problem was identified. The organizational interventions remain voluntary and self-selected.

**KB connections:**
- [[AI capability and reliability are independent dimensions]] — deskilling is the human-side version of this problem
- [[human-in-the-loop clinical AI degrades to worse-than-AI-alone]] — same mechanism, different direction
- [[economic forces push humans out of every cognitive loop]] — the economic force the author is trying to correct against

**Extraction hints:**
- Claim candidate: "reliance drills and analog practice are the minimum viable organizational intervention for preventing AI deskilling because they create the regular human-independent practice that historically has prevented capability erosion in other high-stakes domains"
- Could also extract: "FAA mandatory manual flying requirements are the regulatory template for AI deskilling prevention in high-stakes domains"

**Context:** Hosanagar is a credible Wharton academic with AI expertise. The Substack format means this is less formally reviewed than his academic work, but the argument is empirically grounded.

## Curator Notes

PRIMARY CONNECTION: [[economic forces push humans out of every cognitive loop where output quality is independently verifiable]] (the force these interventions push back against)

WHY ARCHIVED: First source with specific, concrete organizational interventions against deskilling drift — the third overshoot mechanism. Also provides the FAA regulatory template analogy.

EXTRACTION HINT: Extractor should focus on (a) the reliance drills concept as a claim about minimum viable organizational intervention, and (b) FAA mandatory practice as regulatory template. Do not extract the case studies — those are already in KB from other sources.


## Key Facts
- Air France Flight 447 crashed in 2009 due to pilot inability to manually fly after automation failure
- FAA instituted mandatory manual flying practice sessions for pilots following Air France 447
- Endoscopists using AI for polyp detection had adenoma detection rates drop from 28% to 22% without AI
- Students with unrestricted GPT-4 access underperformed peers who never used AI once access was removed
- Kartik Hosanagar is a Wharton professor studying AI and organizational behavior
