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Dana Daher: Reclaiming Human Thinking in the Age of AI Shortcuts
168 Plays16 days ago
Are we outsourcing too much of our thinking to AI?
In this thought-provoking episode, Phil Fersht sits down with HFS’s own Dana Daher, a trained anthropologist and research leader, to talk about how GenAI is subtly reshaping how we think, work, and show up.
Dana explores the idea of cognitive erosion—what happens when we rely so heavily on GenAI that we stop building our own creative, critical, and strategic muscles. She explains why this matters now, especially for the next generation of workers, and how leaders can protect what makes us uniquely human.
This isn’t about resisting technology—it’s about learning how to use it without losing ourselves.
What You’ll Hear in 30 Minutes
1. The concept of cognitive erosion—and how it’s different from burnout
2. Why younger employees may miss critical thinking milestones if they over-rely on GenAI
3. How "co-creating with machines" can end up making everything sound the same
4. The importance of cognitive resilience as a leadership capability
5. The risk of workplace homogeneity in a world of AI-written everything
6. How to balance efficiency with authenticity in the age of digital assistants
Guest Snapshots
Dana Daher is Executive Research Leader at HFS Research, where she blends her background in anthropology and IT to lead research across employee experience, agentic AI, DEI, and sustainability. Before HFS, she held leadership roles at Unisys and Info-Tech Research Group, helping public and private sector clients shape their digital transformation journeys. Dana holds both bachelor's and master's degrees in Anthropology from University College London, bringing a deeply human lens to technology’s impact on business and society.
Timestamps
00:00 – Welcome: Dana Daher and the Anthropology of Enterprise
02:54 – What Anthropology Teaches Us About Tech Culture
06:04 – What Is Cognitive Erosion and Why It Matters
07:48 – Three Waves of Cognitive Offloading: From Google to GenAI
09:16 – How AI Affects Judgment, Creativity, and Critical Thinking
12:04 – Offloading Opinions vs. Gaining Insight: The Thin Line
13:27 – AI’s Role in Creating a Sea of Generic Content
16:17 – Teaching Cognitive Resilience in the AI Era
18:07 – The Next Workforce Crisis: When Juniors Are Skipped for AI
21:03 – Is the Soul of the Workplace at Risk?
23:09 – Can AI Drive Us Back to Human Connection?
25:30 – Tech Efficiency vs. Human Cost: Finding Balance
26:52 – Closing Thoughts: Retaining Originality in a Machine World
Explore More
🌐Dana’s Research on Cognitive Erosion: https://www.hfsresearch.com/analyst/dana-daher
🌐Learn more about Agentic AI at HFS: https://www.hfsresearch.com
🔗 Follow Dana Daher: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dana-daher/
🔗 Follow Phil Fersht: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pfersht/
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Host
00:00:11
Speaker
You're listening to From the Horse's Mouth, intrepid conversations with Phil First. Ready to meet the disruptors who are guiding us to the new great utopia by reshaping our world and pushing past corporate spin for honest conversations about the future impact of current and emerging technologies?
00:00:30
Speaker
Tune in now.
00:00:35
Speaker
Welcome to the latest edition of From the Horse's Mouth.
Meet Dana Daher, an Analyst with an Anthropological Lens
00:00:39
Speaker
And with me today is actually one of our analysts at HFS, Dana Daher, who is driving a lot of big thinking around the world of a Jantec in particular, and many of you have probably read a lot of the stuff that she's been putting out.
00:00:56
Speaker
But I wanted to get Dana on the pod today because she's actually an anthropologist at heart, and she is taking her roots, educative roots, into the world of business and has a very, very strong perspective of the yeah interplay between humans and technology, which is probably the biggest topic du jour in our industry at the moment. So welcome, Dana.
00:01:21
Speaker
Can you talk a bit about what an anthropologist does and how you think Yeah, of course.
How Anthropology Shapes Tech and Workforce Understanding
00:01:28
Speaker
Thank you so much for having me on this podcast as well. I've been talking about it for a little while now as well. But yeah, I always consider myself first and foremost an anthropologist and technologist second, but for a specific reason, because I think anthropology really shapes my perspective and the way of seeing the world as well.
00:01:44
Speaker
But for those that may not understand what anthropology is, it is the study of what makes us human. It's the systems, it's the rituals, the unwritten rules that that shape behavior in our world as well.
00:01:54
Speaker
So I take this into our work as you know analysts and looking at the workforce and enterprises. And I look at the workforce as its own culture, each with its own kind of norms and behaviors and the way that we kind of do things and get work done as well.
00:02:08
Speaker
And so I also take this into the context of technology, too, and looking at how technology isn't just a tool, but it's a cultural force that can really alter our perspectives and our ways of interacting with each other.
00:02:21
Speaker
So the intersection of these two things is kind of really my passion point of ah looking at cultural, you know, implications of these tools and how it shapes ourselves and how we see our colleagues and our work around this as well.
00:02:34
Speaker
Yeah, when you go, if you went to university today to study an anthropology degree, is technology a big piece of that now? It's interesting. So I studied anthropology in the UK and my course was very distinct where we had different types of anthropology that we were looking at. So we look at social, technological, and then evolutionary as well.
00:02:55
Speaker
So my course actually looked at that perspective, but I know in a lot of North America, that isn't kind of seen as a distinction. It's typically to social anthropology. So looking at more of the culture comparative analysis across different industries. But I think there is this emergence that technology is such a pervasive impact on culture.
00:03:14
Speaker
So you're seeing it being pushed out a lot more as well. And I love that too, because when came out of university, I was lost in terms of what I was going to do. I was like, do I go into charity or humanitarian work? I didn't really understand what anthropology was was potentially capable of. And it was kind of accidental that I fell into this space as well, whether it was kind of know doing more courses and learning more about it as well.
00:03:38
Speaker
But I think anthropology is a really critical skill that's needed in the workforce today. So I'm seeing it kind of more pervasive and in the business world, and I'm so excited about it as well. Wonderful, wonderful.
00:03:50
Speaker
On that topic...
Exploring Cognitive Dissonance and Offloading in AI
00:03:52
Speaker
You recently shared some research around cognitive dissonance or cognitive erosion, you're calling it. Could you sort of expand a bit about what that study was that you shared and a little bit about your concerns and and also how optimistic you are around human use of AI right now?
00:04:13
Speaker
Yeah. um So it's been pretty interesting. And I think the origin of of my interest in this was kind of around my own uses of these tools too. I found that I was becoming more used to leveraging them for a lot of different types of work.
00:04:25
Speaker
And so in that process, I was noticing that I was becoming more reliant. And I took a step back and said, what does this actually mean for not only myself, but our workforce, our individuals is in and our society as well?
00:04:38
Speaker
And I began to understand that there's a lot more implications of overusing these tools. So cognitive offloading, which kind of is the prerequisite to erosion, refers to the offloading of cognitive skills or cognitive thinking towards tools.
00:04:53
Speaker
And cognitive offloading is something that's not new. It's not just because of Gen AI and all these tools have come into the workforce. It is a longstanding kind of impact of using any tools in any capacity, whether it's a calculator to help us do arithmetic.
00:05:09
Speaker
It is Google and allowing us to access more information. it's it's our ability to kind of talk on this call right now from a distance as well. There's always something that is positive as a result of these things, but also there is a negative impact as well.
00:05:24
Speaker
So in the research that I wrote about, i talked about three waves of cognitive offloading that have happened in the last 20 years.
The Three Waves of Cognitive Offloading
00:05:31
Speaker
So in the first wave, we had Google and the iPhone and Wikipedia coming into play. and And these tools were incredible because they allowed us to access a lot more knowledge.
00:05:42
Speaker
It gave us things at our fingertips. You can Google things instantly and understand what's happening in the world so quickly as well. But as as a result, you also had a memory offloading. So Why remember something when I can just Google it and find it right away?
00:05:57
Speaker
So that was the first phase that we saw was very notable. The second phase was social media. So technologies and like Facebook and YouTube and TikTok and all these things were coming into our society and into our our daily life.
00:06:12
Speaker
And they were curating perspectives. And it created a lot of positive impacts where, again, i had information. and I'm a pretty big TikTok user, admittedly. I always look for ways of how to build something and how to do something. And I will always look for it for the first kind of...
00:06:27
Speaker
place where I want to understand something as well. But as a result, we created these echo chambers of our own thinking. We reduced independent critical thinking as well. But yeah, these these tools were effective, but they also led to a lot of opinion offloading. So why do I have to create my own perspectives when I can just kind of look on these tools and get my perspectives you know created for me as well?
00:06:51
Speaker
So every technology advancement, as you've said, has always been aligned with access to more information, ability to do things better, faster, smarter.
00:07:03
Speaker
Why is this different? Is it because it's taking away your ability to think independently? I mean, what what is it what is your key concern? Yeah, my concern is that it's bypassing a lot of traditional approaches towards thinking and and processing information as well.
00:07:20
Speaker
And i see this concern as bigger for younger generations coming into the workforce, kind of for the most part. So for individuals like ourselves, when we're kind of thinking through how do I structure my ideas and my thoughts,
00:07:32
Speaker
It's based on experiences. It's based on ways that we've developed our own ways of doing critical thinking, of understanding context and creating kind of maps between ideas and concepts.
00:07:44
Speaker
But for younger people coming into the workforce, they haven't built that mental skill. And so they're using these tools as a form of cognitive scaffolding. So you're bypassing the traditional approaches towards learning something and you're skipping way ahead.
00:07:58
Speaker
And in the workforce, this looks great for at least initially because you're saying, oh, this junior is now being able to work at a faster speed and they're operating quickly and it's more effective. But long term, they haven't built it kind of in an an effective way that allows them to understand the context of what they're putting out anymore.
00:08:16
Speaker
And there's a lot of risks with this. You create work that is unoriginal, you lose that ability to kind of, you know, have more judgment around thinking. And so there's a lot of issues with this. And there's been a lot of studies over the last kind of two years looking at this too.
00:08:32
Speaker
And they're they're all finding similar patterns where younger kind of cohorts coming in or students or whatever that is, are leveraging these tools a little too heavily. And the process, they're losing quite a lot.
00:08:45
Speaker
And that a lot is your critical thinking. It's your judgment. It's creativity. and I'll note that these studies are fairly short-term as well, so in the last 12 months or 24 months.
00:08:55
Speaker
So there's a lot more longitudinal impacts around this that we just don't know yet. So that's where my concern comes from. I guess it's where is that line right between what is it useful for terms of getting information versus having
AI’s Role in Opinion Formation
00:09:09
Speaker
an opinion. so you know I asked Catch APT earlier about the proposed new legislation for H-1Bs and what impact that would have.
00:09:19
Speaker
and that sort of thing but then it gave me the ability to have an opinion but it did pull lots of really good and information from sources i would not normally have access to so maybe it's because i'm more experienced and i'm like this is great this is just like giving me more data that i didn't have before yeah but i don't say hey give me your opinion on it having said that the new version of chat GBT is offering me, Hey, would you like us to, to create an opinion for you? And at that point I'm like, no, you can stop.
00:09:52
Speaker
But, um, I think it's that line, isn't it, between using it to get information and then actually getting it to think for you. Right. So, Yeah, we are at such a society where we want things so quickly. It's kind of a beautiful thing about us in general that we want things at a rapid pace and allows us to grow and evolve as a society.
00:10:10
Speaker
But it's also negative too, because while you might have the inclination to say, i don't want you to think for me, some people just want that instant response because we we need something out there quickly. We need a perspective.
00:10:21
Speaker
So it's easier to kind of offload that ability to kind of critically think around it. But the line is is very thin and it's probably very dangerous as well for the most part. But for you, you understand what you're looking for. You know what good looks like. You're looking for it to amplify insights, to synthesize it.
00:10:41
Speaker
But it's so easy to fall into the trap of, I just need a perspective now.
Authenticity in an AI-Driven Content World
00:10:45
Speaker
So let's just get something out quickly and accepting it as it is. and And you see the patterns of people overusing it kind of everywhere and in the workforce and in society as well right now. Like you go on LinkedIn and everyone's posts look the exact same.
00:10:59
Speaker
You can see the way that sentences are structured. Everyone's writing the same titles and the same way of doing things as well. And we've just lost so much originality and in this entire process as well.
00:11:10
Speaker
And it is a little bit tiring. Yeah. It scares the hell out of me. I was testing out GPT-5 about a week ago. i' just got this feeling of trepidation of, oh my God, this is too good.
00:11:20
Speaker
Yeah. Now, and forget AGI. That's already here. It's ASI, which is the, big piece that we need to really think about now. And as an analyst company, I've literally just hired somebody to help us maintain our authentic voice in the market because I see so much dry, as you said, generic stuff flying around.
00:11:42
Speaker
Some media firm approached me the other day to partner with them and I looked at their content and it's some of it was so obviously generated by AI. It was, I don't want to read this. yeah and This doesn't feel authentic and real.
00:11:55
Speaker
It's almost like it's who's saying it rather than what's being said at this point. It's like, do I trust Dana and what she writes? I do, because I know it's coming from her, but this other person, they just seem to use you know generic stuff and I don't kind of trust where they're coming from You're just not going to read it.
00:12:12
Speaker
And I think that's been my big... bugbear right now is how do you maintain your authenticity and voice in an increasingly generic world where, you know, everything is becoming rather mere and boring. And it's like the same advice I give to service providers in our industry and consulting firms is don't just dumb it all down to selling AI applications ah because yeah everyone's going to be selling the same stuff. You need to have that cultural identity um within your firm to be to be different.
00:12:46
Speaker
Yeah, I see the same thing too. Whenever I'm scrolling through LinkedIn or reading articles, if there's any signs of the use of these tools in any capacity, i just don't want to read it anymore because I know that the person hasn't put effort into the you know thinking through the idea itself.
00:13:01
Speaker
But yeah, it's so easy just to kind of sometimes take take your own writing and put it through ChattopG saying, clean it up. And then all of a sudden the structure looks the same again. And the original reality is lost as well. And it's so critical to make sure that we bring our own perspectives and our own experiences into our writing because these tools will never have the tribal knowledge and the discussions so and the unspoken things that are said as well in its own systems. It'll only ever be trained on what's actually accessible to the tools itself.
00:13:29
Speaker
So if your university called and said, Dana, we want to bring you back and run a class to educate our students on how they can use AI to support and enhance human cognition, how would you structure that class and what advice would you give them?
Teaching Cognitive Resilience for Effective AI Use
00:13:47
Speaker
That's a good question. Um, I think, well, first off, i my push is towards something called cognitive resilience, which is something that i think we need to focus on and enhance in the workplace and in the education system as well, which is focusing on the skills that make us so uniquely human. So ability to kind of judge, to build context, to critically evaluate ideas and bring our own differing experiences and perspectives into things. So I think that is the kind of the big thing I'd be focusing on.
00:14:17
Speaker
But then when it comes to actually writing content and building perspectives, I think it's really critical to understand whether people are using these tools to amplify insights or just avoiding kind of any effort at all Do they know what the outcome looks like before they're leveraging it?
00:14:35
Speaker
Understanding what the consequences of what goes wrong if we're using these tools and how do you begin to defend these perspectives as well? And that all comes down to just having critical thinking around leveraging these tools. So I think that's a very critical aspect of it. and So when you look at the younger generation today, you know i see a world that's pretty tough for these kids. like They can't just go out, take mortgages and buy apartments and hey, there's not a lot lot jobs out there right now for ah graduates in particular.
00:15:06
Speaker
The cost of living is through the roof. Inflation has just been going up consistently since the pandemic. Half your salary goes on rent, right? So what sort of society are we ah we creating for younger workers and how is AI impacting that in your opinion?
00:15:25
Speaker
Yeah, I feel bad for the younger workforce coming into it right now as well. And I'm sure that older generations are probably the same thing as well for for my generation. That's kind of probably fairly normal as well.
00:15:35
Speaker
But this generation is really impacted by so many things right now. And AI is definitely amplifying the negative aspects of entering this workforce. It's impacting it in that cognitive offloading kind of perspective i was talking about as well, which is people are relying more heavily on these tools. Expectations is that they are now operating at a higher level without building those critical thinking skills.
00:15:58
Speaker
And then at the same time, so you have this individual work level, then you have a more organizational level where organizations are now saying that AI can do the work of a junior employee.
00:16:10
Speaker
um And so they're saying, we don't need to hire any more younger workforce coming in. We can reduce down our entire kind of company. And you're seeing that all across tech. You're seeing that and lot of industries were a lot of lot of workforce cuts are being justified by AI.
00:16:26
Speaker
And that's dangerous for a number of reasons. One is that AI is not there. To be honest, it's not that the capability to actually replace the roles of individuals. And then secondly, it creates this comparison that you have to now operate it at the level of and um to be effective in the workforce as well.
00:16:44
Speaker
So yeah, there's there's a lot of issues for these younger people coming in. and individual organization level as mentioned, but it's it's really ah difficult challenge for organizations themselves who may kind of believe in this these sentiments.
00:16:57
Speaker
And as a result, they're kind of eroding their future workforce in in developing as well. So you worry that companies are just wanting to retain more experienced people and they're using AI as an excuse not to build the next generation up
AI and the Impact on Hiring Young Talent
00:17:15
Speaker
and train them up? Do you think they're using AI as an excuse rather than the actual true reason of what they why they're behaving this way?
00:17:22
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I don't think that AI is at the level to replace entire individuals or workflows. or Right now, it's it's basically specific tasks, but there's so much more that's part of a role of a young person coming into the workforce that's really critical. So being able to do those kind of smaller tasks and learning their capabilities is critical for the next kind of level of the workforce. So how do you even build the next level up when people retire without actually having these younger cohorts coming in?
00:17:51
Speaker
But they're certainly using it as an excuse right now, justifying loads of cuts, saying that the AI is ready and, you know, it probably helps their bottom line and justify kind of economic turbulence that are happening right now in the environment too.
00:18:05
Speaker
So do you think the humanity of companies is now under the spotlight?
Maintaining Human Connection in an AI-Dominated Workplace
00:18:11
Speaker
So in terms of who do you want to work with? ah Because end of the day, right, I've never seen people wanting to go events like they are right now because people want to see other people. like We're mammals. We still need people around us.
00:18:24
Speaker
And do you see like a whole sort of backlash to AI happening where we do as humans say, Hey, we want to work with other people. We like to engage more with other people.
00:18:35
Speaker
the sheer impact of AI is taking the soul out of the workplace and we got to bring that soul back in. Right. So. think good leaders are recognizing that, but maybe not everyone is at the same time too.
00:18:47
Speaker
There's definitely been a pendulum swing that's been happening over the last few years with caring about employees and this idea of humanity and culture in the workforce as well. We cared about it during COVID so much because we were doing a lot of these workforce cuts. We had to all kind of go into virtual environments And so there was a really big heightened importance on how do you foster culture in in difficult times.
00:19:11
Speaker
And then once we got out of that, in my world, it seemed like nobody really cared about people anymore. And so you saw a big shift towards focusing purely on technology. And that pendulum is actually swinging back again. And I've noticed that probably in the last like six or so months where people were saying, okay, so we've invested in all this technology, we've hired back people, we've been building all these things.
00:19:32
Speaker
But people are unhappy again. There's a lot of, you know, changes that are happening for individuals and their culture and the workforce that is dangerous long term again. there's definitely a pendulum swing caring about individuals again, but it takes good leaders to recognize that you need to actively foster this humanity and shared experiences and build a culture that leverages AI effectively versus diminishes people further as well.
00:20:01
Speaker
I couldn't agree more. And I feel I've changed as a company leader in the last just year terms of the whole coming out of the pandemic. you I was really keen to get people back to the office a for little while. And I just realized after a while, people don't want to do that anymore. Their lifestyles have changed and things are different. So we need to find other ways to be human with each other.
00:20:23
Speaker
And if anything now, AI, I think is driving that desire to have that human touch come back and I'm positive about the future because we have to, every time we've gone through a technological transformation, we come out the other side a little bit smarter for it.
00:20:40
Speaker
And I'm hoping that this is the case with AI and these incredible tools. I mean, let's be honest, these are tools that we couldn't have dreamt of using even two or three years ago.
00:20:51
Speaker
And suddenly they're right there at your fingertips. And I'm like, I feel I could do my job more effectively than I've ever been able to do it. because I have so much to do in my life. I have so much going on.
00:21:02
Speaker
This is actually helping me get through the day, getting things done. I know when to take a shortcut now, and I know when to take the long yeah take the long route. Like I know that I sometimes sound quite negative when I'm talking about, you know, the loss of cognitive thinking, all this stuff, it sounds negative. And I think it's more that I'm just cautious of potential negative aspects of this because you are seeing a lot of studies kind of conveying it too, but there is absolutely so much positive things as well.
00:21:27
Speaker
I was doing some interviews for a study the other day as well. And I, I can take my transcripts and I can put them in a chat GPT and I can summarize it for me as well. But I remember a couple of years ago, more than that, but I was doing market research and I would have to do the interview.
00:21:42
Speaker
i would then have to transcribe the interview myself. And then I'd have to go in line by line and highlight the key phrases and then analyze it. And that just for one interview would probably take me a week. And now I can do it in you know a couple of minutes.
00:21:55
Speaker
And so there's definitely these aspects that are phenomenal for changing the way that I'm able to work at a rapid speed. um But my only point is that with any use of a tool, there is something that you lose in the process. So just being more cognizant and aware of what you're losing and making sure that you're still retaining the things that are so human to us as well.
00:22:18
Speaker
So my kind of biggest point is just finding ways to amplify being human in the workforce is really critical alongside these tools. That's absolute gold. And, you know, it's just got me thinking a bit more about ultimately we are the masters or mistresses of our own destiny.
00:22:39
Speaker
And how you use these tools, ultimately, it's up to us to decide. So if you're teaching yourself, you know you're doing it, right? If you're generally thinking, how do I use these tools so I can be better at my job and really differentiate myself, I'm going be more successful.
00:22:54
Speaker
So there are going to be people who maybe lose themselves to AI a bit and they suffer. And I think that's that's the tough side of what's happening. And and there's other people who are... going to embrace this and be better what they do. I mean, it's like, look, people who are slaves to their mobile phones. I know people who are on their phones all the time. It drives me nuts. And I'm like, that is probably impacting their humanity more than the fact that they're using AI. So that was just a comparison.
00:23:23
Speaker
Well, Dana, this has been awesome. And it's great to have one of our analysts. get out of their comfort zone a bit and share what they're seeing and experiencing in the market. So I really appreciate the time. It's pleasure to join you as well. I was really really excited to stand have this discussion.
00:23:37
Speaker
right.
00:23:41
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in to From the Horse's Mouth, intrepid conversations with Phil First. Remember to follow Phil on LinkedIn and subscribe and like on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite platform for no-nonsense takes on the intricate dance between technology, business, and ideological systems.
00:24:00
Speaker
Got something to add to the discussion? Let's have it. Drop us a line at fromthehorsesmouth at hfsresearch.com or connect with Phil on LinkedIn.