Relying on tech too much can come at the cost of your critical thinking abilities.
Spell-check and autocorrect tools are practically unavoidable if you spend time on your computer or phone. They have been around for a long while, and there have been endless debates about whether the tech is making everyone dumber and worse typists.
But recently, a new breed of tools, powered by artificial intelligence, has been spreading far and wide, and that has renewed the debate about the overreliance on tech and how it affects people’s skills.
Covering a recent study by Microsoft, Forbes points out that the “dispute over whether technology is making us dumber is nothing new — it only makes sense researchers are asking the same questions about AI.”
Forbes warns that everyone should be wary of the potential downsides of relying on AI too much. Not to mention the negative impact it could leave on your critical thinking abilities.
“For years, there has been a debate whether spell-checking tools like Grammarly and autocorrect have made us worse spellers. While there’s no academic consensus, such tools have certainly made us lazier spellers. It seems AI is similarly making us lazier thinkers, which — as Microsoft’s study points out — is also making us think we’re also getting dumber.”
According to the recent report by Microsoft, the more that employees relied on artificial intelligence for help, the less actual critical thinking they did. The researchers note that these “tools appear to reduce the perceived effort required for critical thinking tasks among knowledge workers, especially when they have higher confidence in AI capabilities.”
They add: “However, workers who are confident in their own skills tend to perceive greater effort in these tasks, particularly when evaluating and applying AI responses.”
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In a nutshell, when you automate routine tasks, you deprive workers of the opportunities to “practice their judgment and strengthen their cognitive musculature, leaving them atrophied and unprepared when the exceptions do arise.”
That’s not to say that all tech is ‘bad’ or that AI ‘is the devil,’ but this underscores the importance of investing in your own skills, too. And that means doing things the hard, boring way, to grow and improve.
The Microsoft study warns that while AI helps with worker efficiency, this comes at the cost of critical engagement with work. In the long-run, this overreliance on AI can lead to “diminished skill for independent problem-solving.”
In the meantime, AI is changing how spell-check and autocorrect work, too. Purely anecdotally, some of us have noticed a massive drop in the quality of spell-check tools ever since LLMs started going public a few years ago. But that’s subjective.
Though, to be fair, the public has noticed something similar, too. The Guardian reports that last autumn, after the release of Apple’s iOS 26 operating system, users noticed the autocorrect on their iPhones going haywire.
However, why the autocorrect on iPhones temporarily went cuckoo is unclear. And it is unlikely that we’ll ever find out.
“There’s a lot of different forms of autocorrect. It’s a little hard to know what technology people are actually employing to do their prediction, because it’s all underneath the surface,” statistician Jan Pedeson, who worked on autocorrect for Microsoft, told The Guardian.
Meanwhile, computational linguist Kenneth Church, one of the godfathers of autocorrect back in the 1990s, noted: “What Apple does is always a deep, dark secret. And Apple is better at keeping secrets than most companies.”
