# Cognitive Offloading
Source: https://humanspark.ai/frameworks/cognitive-offloading/

*Hand a skill to the machine often enough and you stop practising it - the individual cost of heavy AI use.*

**When to use:** When you or your team lean on AI daily, to decide which skills to keep sharp.

> **What it is:** Cognitive offloading is shifting mental work onto a tool - calculators, GPS, now AI. The cost: skills you stop practising fade.

> **Not brain rot:** You may have heard this called brain rot - [Oxford's 2024 Word of the Year](https://corp.oup.com/news/brain-rot-named-oxford-word-of-the-year-2024/). The term overreaches for AI: 'rot' implies damage done to you, but the evidence shows skill fade from lost practice.

> **The fix:** Not abstinence but deliberate practice: keep some hard thinking unassisted, treat AI as a sparring partner, and decide which skills you will not let fade.

> **The individual twin of [the Pipeline Problem](https://humanspark.ai/frameworks/pipeline-problem/):** One erodes a person's capability, the other a firm's supply of senior people. They look alike and need different responses.