Hope to see you there!

I think one difference between beneficial uses of ai and a cognitively detrimental ones is often who the expert is in the interaction. If he human is the expert, then the ai can be a helpful tool for ideation assistance, sanity checks, etc. If the ai is the expert, you have to be much more careful.

I don’t know, I doubt it’s that simple. People definitely offload cognitive tasks to ai, and by itself, that’s often bad for skill development and learning. It’s also been super helpful to me as a way to sanity check my understanding of new technical concepts.

On the other hand, when I hear people worrying about the way ais are gobbling up tasks that humans previously did, and asking something along the lines of “what will we be left to do?”, I can’t help but optimistically hope the answer is that we’ll learn to do more interesting and complicated things.

I think the trouble is that depending on your level of familiarity with a task, a language, and your working/learning styles, ai can either be a convenient helper that automates some of the more tedious stuff, or a way to avoid learning altogether.