Expertise Atrophy

Expertise atrophy is the name for what Robert Bjork’s research predicts when AI tools are used as a first resort rather than a last resort: the storage-strength account stops receiving deposits while the retrieval-strength account is maintained entirely by the tool, producing a practitioner whose output remains high and whose independent capability quietly declines. The mechanism is the same one Bjork documented for every condition that maintains high retrieval strength while eliminating effortful retrieval: the generation events that would have built durable encoding simply do not occur, and the knowledge network grows thinner with each bypassed difficulty. Expertise atrophy is not the loss of information that was once stored; it is the failure to build encoding depth that would have accumulated through years of productive struggle. It is the expertise that never forms, not the expertise that was there and disappeared. The atrophy is invisible for as long as the tool compensates in real time, and measurable only through a