MIT Professor Eric So Warns of Cognitive Atrophy from Overreliance on AI

MIT Sloan professor Eric So has published "The Collision: What AI Does to Us," a synthesis of academic and industry research that examines how generative AI reshapes human cognition. So documents a pattern he observed in himself and his students: the instinct to hand off reasoning tasks to a model rather than wrestle with the problem.

Evidence from an Anthropic study cited in the book shows that roughly half of college‑student queries to a leading chatbot were low‑effort requests for direct answers, suggesting a shift away from the iterative struggle that deepens learning.

Why it matters for GPU / AI infrastructure

As demand for large‑scale model inference grows, cloud providers must balance capacity planning with responsible‑use tooling. Understanding cognitive side‑effects helps shape APIs, monitoring, and educational integrations that encourage active problem‑solving rather than passive consumption.

So recommends designing workflows that require users to articulate reasoning before invoking a model, and he urges organizations to track metrics on "thinking‑offload" frequency as a proxy for skill retention.