Theme

Capability transfers out of the person

Explore this theme’s evidence over time →

Sources

Attribution and reporting linked by this record; links do not imply independent verification.

Welcome to January 31, 2026 (theinnermostloop.substack.com)

Measured loss of human skill alongside measured gain in outcomes — library mastery down 17% for assisted programmers, aggressive cancers down 12% for assisted radiologists. The same augmentation does both.

Development timeline

Newest reporting dates first. Reporting dates may differ from event dates.

2026-08-25: A tenth of web pages show AI authorship as the web trains its successor

2026-08-21: An eight-year study finds more childhood screen time predicted better cognition

2026-08-13: Top corporate adopters burn eight times the median firm's tokens

2026-08-12: Autonomous agents complete entire online degrees on students' behalf

2026-08-04: Fifty-eight thousand applicants must resit an exam the proctor could not police

2026-08-03: A baby monitor scores sleep efficiency for a million users

2026-07-29: A hidden white-font instruction fails 32 of 35 students

2026-07-29: Trained volunteers wire a learned category straight to motor output

2026-07-26: A lab's monitors catch and suspend users probing for weapon recipes

2026-07-21: A third of scored preprints read as machine-written

2026-06-29: A take-home average of 96 craters to 48 once the exam goes in-person

2026-06-27: A survey asks whether mathematicians become priests to oracles

2026-06-21: Tools rework AI essays and add fake typos in real time

2026-06-20: A prize entry is defended by citing a model's own assessment

2026-06-20: A country moves to near-ban generative AI for children under thirteen

2026-06-17: A study of 400,000 sessions splits planning from execution

2026-06-13: A consultancy's AI adoption report is padded with fabricated case studies

2026-06-04: A third of an intro CS class fails amid a cheating wave

2026-06-02: A teachers' union moves to fence AI out of classrooms

2026-06-02: A historian warns software's oral tradition may not survive AI

2026-05-26: Fabricated references in biomedical literature grow twelvefold

2026-05-24: One in five dissertations is AI-assisted

2026-05-18: Half of surveyed CS majors say they would rather cheat than fail

2026-05-13: Princeton ends its 1893 honor code and restores proctoring

2026-05-05: A bipartisan bill would hardwire AI literacy into schools

2026-04-20: Computer science falls from fourth-largest major to sixth

2026-04-16: Apple sends 200 voice engineers to a coding bootcamp

2026-04-09: Commentators argue it is now unsafe for humans to write code

2026-04-03: Harvard replaces freshman advisers with a chatbot

2026-03-29: Grandmasters start winning by playing deliberately suboptimal moves

2026-03-09: A study names the fog specific to supervising machines

2026-02-28: An agent attends lectures and takes tests on a student's behalf

2026-02-25: Coding assistants multiply seniors and drag on juniors

2026-02-25: Over half of US teens use chatbots for schoolwork

2026-02-16: Claude is placed at the centre of CS courses for 20,000 students

2026-02-13: Spotify's best developers have not written a line since December

2026-02-07: OpenAI bans its own employees from using editors and terminals

2026-02-05: Generated code is draining open source engagement

2026-02-03: Altman says asking Codex for ideas made him feel useless

2026-01-31: Coding assistants lower library mastery by 17%

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Cite or correct this record

Citation formatCitation text

Capability transfers out of the person
Innermost Loop KB — secondary record
Reporting date: unknown
KB permalink: https://nicholsn.github.io/innermost-loop-kb/themes/deskilling
Attributed sources:
- Welcome to January 31, 2026 — https://theinnermostloop.substack.com/p/welcome-to-january-31-2026
This citation does not imply independent verification of linked-source claims.

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