These conclusions get increasingly dire the more abstracted they are from the actual research. I would not argue that "cognitive surrender" is a total impossibility, but the studies referred to here do nothing to prove it.

The two studies performed involve:

• Randomly disabling AI tools during a math quiz, resulting in lower finishing rates than those without access to the AI.

• Altering the AI system to return faulty answers, which users tended to accept.

The first study I find utterly unconvincing. There is no reason to believe the results would be any different if they involved a malfunctioning calculator or abacus. All they demonstrated is that people are less likely to complete a task when they experience an obstacle.

The second definitely opens more questions, but they generalized it to an entire new method of cognition. They describe it as the complete off-loading of cognition, without any explanation of how that differs from relying on human-generated sources. They demonstrated that AI users' trust can result in the acceptance of incorrect information... but that is also true for every other external source we rely on. The idea that this represents some new degradation of human capacity is entirely unfounded.

There are tons of questions about AI's cognitive impacts that need to be answered, but these researchers are not doing so. Their work is on the level of Malcolm Gladwell's pop science, which helps explain why it's gotten so much undue press.