Those are important studies but nothing shocking. The conclusion to draw from them is the same one we’ve drawn from all technologies that have improved our lives to some degree: Without them, we tend to either be incompetent as losing access to them isn’t worth planning for, or we are demotivated because why would we deprive ourselves from technology that makes our work so much less exhausting?

It doesn’t necessarily remove our capacity to think (and the article falsely generalises to critical thinking), it shifts what kind of thinking we do.

If AI is as good or better than I am at writing code, then I’ll switch my brain to only do the orchestrating and architecture rather than the writing code part. And yes, if you remove AI, then the switch will cause me to perform less than I used to before AI, but not permanently, only until I get used to it again.

If an AI is better than a doctor at finding cancer indicators, then the doctor will focus their mind on finding solutions only rather than splitting it on both the detection and solution.

This is not new, not bad, and I’ll even go to the extent of saying it’s a great use of AI: Humans evolved for specialization. The less varied the tasks are, the better we are at the subset we specialize in. That’s what has driven our rapid technological and societal advances in the past millenia.

But, AI has many issues and many detrimental applications as well, so don’t see this comment as a full endorsement of AI.