Barely Functional Just like smartphone GPS has harmed our sense of spatial cognition and memory, artificial intelligence may soon impair our ability to make decisions for ourselves — an outcome that would be, one expert warns, “catastrophic.” In an interview with PsyPost, neuropsychology expert Umberto León Domínguez of the University of Monterrey in Mexico said that his new research shows that AI chatbots may end up not just mimicking our speech patterns, but significantly harming our cognitive functioning in general. Like many other educators, Domínguez said he’s concerned about how his students are using tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Spurred by those concerns, he told PsyPost, he began to explore ways AI chatbots “could interfere with higher-order executive functions to understand how to also train these skills.” “I began to explore and generalize the impact,” the researcher said, “not only as a student but as humanity, of the catastrophic effects these technologies could have on a significant portion of the population by blocking the development of these cognitive functions.” In his paper, which was recently published in the American Psychology Association’s journal Neuropsychology, the researcher claimed that AI may act as a “cognitive prosthesis.” First theorized back in 2019 by Falk Lieder, an AI researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, these purported synthetic mental limbs that would process mental tasks and eventually assist in decision-making were initially thought of as a positive thing — but to Domínguez’s mind, they’re anything but. Think It Through Instead of being a helpful addition…AI May Be Atrophying Our Brains, Professor Warns