Want to Avoid AI Deskilling? Pilots May Have the Answer. - Business Insider

Business Insider has published an article headlined "Want to Avoid AI Deskilling? Pilots May Have the Answer." The piece centres on Steven Shaw, an assistant professor at King's College London and a coauthor of a widely cited study on what the article calls "cognitive surrender." Shaw draws a parallel between pilots' long reliance on autopilot systems and workers who outsource their thinking to artificial intelligence. The article presents the aviation comparison as a way of framing the deskilling question rather than as a claim about any specific employer or model.

Shaw's warning, as quoted in the piece, is that "even experts are at risk of deskilling." He pointed to a 2013 safety alert issued by the Federal Aviation Administration, which warned that continuous use of autoflight systems could lead to degradation of the pilot's ability to quickly recover the aircraft from an undesired state. The article cites that alert as the precedent behind his concern about AI, with the mechanism in both cases being sustained reliance on an automated system rather than a single acute failure.

The article does not, in the excerpt provided, quantify how many workers or which occupations are affected, nor does it specify which AI systems or employers are involved. Its argument rests on the aviation parallel and on the study on cognitive surrender that Shaw coauthored.