Use it or lose it: AI may cause you to forget some skills
- Reference: 1757393890
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/09/09/gartner_ai_skill_loss_prediction/
- Source link:
“Is there anyone here who's OK with the idea that they may wake up one day and find they have no one left in the organization who knows how to code?” asked Gartner distinguished VP analyst Daryl Plummer during the keynote speech of the firm’s Symposium conference in Australia yesterday.
Plummer floated that scenario because he feels use of AI coding tools mean developers may eventually spend their days generating code, not writing it. “If you don't use your coding skills every day, you are losing coding skills every day,” he added, then concluded “AI is stealing your skills.”
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Manjunath Bhat, another of Gartner’s distinguished VP analysts, used the term “skills erosion” during another session at the conference.
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Bhat said that adoption of AI coding assistants can cause “experience compression” whe employers expect the tools will help young developers to acquire skills and improve performance in months instead of years. That thinking creates “experience starvation” – missing out on learning from being hands-on and tackling many different tasks – and leads to “erosion of critical and foundational skills.”
He wants employers to ensure their developers acquire and exercise core critical thinking skills, and foundational technical skills, to ensure they can fulfill the role of developers in the AI age: Exercising creativity that machines cannot.
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Plummer also recommended taking steps to maintain critical thinking skills, and advised employers to “institute periodic reviews or testing to make sure critical skills are not being eroded by AI.”
[5]All IT work to involve AI by 2030, says Gartner, but jobs are safe
[6]OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart
[7]AWS goes full speed ahead on the AI agent train
[8]C-suite sours on AI despite rising investment, survey finds
He also suggested that skills erosion is one of the emerging – and largely unidentified – byproducts of using AI.
“Remember when you got your first social media account?” he asked. “You might not have asked what are the behavioral byproducts of having the world's most addictive algorithm on your phone.”
Those byproducts are now horribly obvious: “We know it's a pit of doom scrolling and three second attention spans,” Plummer said.
The after-effects of AI are harder to predict, he said, and 91 percent of CIOs surveyed by Gartner are dedicating “little or no time” to looking for them. ®
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Re: Keynote speech at the conference "Sky is blue"
This kind of problem where if you don't practice a skill you lose it never happens to the C-Suite... I wonder why.
"Using AI may cause some of your skills to atrophy"...
And that's also one of the reasons why I don't use this so-called 'A.I.'...
Use it or lose it
That is obvious to anyone who has been involved in didactics and pedagogy.
Please ask your friendly youngster to handwrite a letter that must be both readable and free of spelling errors...
Re: Use it or lose it
Happens all the time, if I don’t do a particular task for a few months then I need to go back and refer to the documentation that I wrote to tell me how to do it properly, I mean if you look at my cv I am certified in all sorts of technologies but if I don’t use them on a regular basis the knowledge gets fuzzy and starts fading. Could I write a program in Cobol, no but 20 years ago I held several certificates and had a reasonable understanding of it, along with lisp, c and a few other programming languages.
The only thing that AI will change is that the duration of retention will become lower, which will bite you when the internet is down and you need to fix it but can’t remember how…
Re: Use it or lose it
It is actually much worse when you use so-called AI.
Learning is a process of trial and error until you start to understand the subject matter (get a "feel" for it).
Learning can be described as the repeating process of "your brain(+body) fails and you recover by fixing it using your brain(+body) ". That second part, "using your brain(+body)" is short-circuited when you use so-called AI. Therefore, no (deep) learning happens and no understanding of the subject matter is created. And don't underestimate the importance of the body in "brain(+body)" in the process.
Ok [that] they have no one left in the organization who knows how to code?
The uncharitable might postulate that this has long been the case at Microsoft.
FTFY
"Gartner’s distinguished extinguished VP analysts"
Keynote speech at the conference "Sky is blue"
Was met by a sea of amazed looks on the faces of the gathered C-suite audience members, who were later seen puzzled by the live demonstration of making a tower from wooden cubes.
What a world to live in: not only is Gartner talking sense for once, which is newsworthy in itself, but it is only by repeating what every school child has been told since the invention of the pointy throwy stick.
But will anyone think of the cheaper alternative to taking tests? Just switch the damn AI off for a fortnight and work on the code (or whatever) "by hand"? Roll up the sleeves and dive in.
So many of us had to read E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" at school, now we know why; it wasn't just for the use of language...