Offload at your peril

Artificial intelligence allows us to outsource thinking, in order to focus on the important stuff. But what impact might that have on health and safety?

Ben Hargreaves, head of content

Offload at your peril

AI allows us to stop thinking to focus on the important stuff. But what impact might that have on health and safety?

Ben Hargreaves, head of content

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It would be a major irony if the race to exploit artificial intelligence ended up making us less good at doing things we already know how to do.

Some engineers, however, are warning that use of AI could risk degrading hard-won skills and know-how. If that deterioration takes place in an area where it’s vital not to cut corners – such as health and safety – it might not just be skills that are at risk. People could be too.

That’s the view of Richard Waine. Waine is a chartered engineer researching AI safety and risk management in infrastructure, and the founder of consultancy Emlyn Square. Emlyn Square has been assessing the risks and opportunities of the ‘cognitive offloading’ enabled by AI when it comes to health and safety.

Cognitive offloading is not unique to AI usage, explains Waine. If you’ve ever used a calculator or entered a location into sat nav, you’ve offloaded the mental effort of doing arithmetic or learning a route to technology. The difference is that AI is being used to do increasingly sophisticated tasks and help make complicated decisions. The ease with which it delivers answers to problems can be seductive. When it comes to maintaining an effective health and safety regime, this convenience has the potential to cause harm.

Waine explains that we are “all doing cognitive work in the knowledge economy in moving information around. We are using information to think about problems, making connections, judgements and decisions, and acting on them. When we offload that work, we transfer it to other tools and systems. Using GPS is a really good example.”

But cognitive offloading to AI is slightly different. “We are offloading deeper cognitive work and skills – things like analysis, synthesis, reasoning, and critical thinking, and we can ask AI for advice. In automated, or agentic systems, we can ask AI to make decisions on our behalf.”

The potential negative effects include not only a reduction in critical thinking [see box overleaf], but also over-reliance on AI systems, or even ‘cognitive surrender’, in which critical thinking and decision-making is completely deferred to AI without oversight. Memory could also easily be compromised. (The International AI Safety Report 2026 says AI safety risks include deskilling and poorer decision-making.)

Of course, AI is designed to lighten the load. That’s attractive when there’s too much going on. It will even flatter you as it helps out. ChatGPT congratulates you for asking a great question and suggests a range of options. “AI can be overly helpful sometimes,” says Waine. “You'll ask it to do one thing, and it will look two or three steps ahead of that task for you.

“So, it's designed to take more off you if you let it. Some of the AI tools are designed to make you feel good about your interaction with the technology and what you've done or what you've suggested.”

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Why think about it?

Emlyn Square has been working with the Health and Safety Executive Science Division on a project looking at cognitive offloading in the context of physical infrastructure, where accidents have the potential for serious consequences. As we all know, operators of infrastructure have responsibility for controlling risks using management systems in which people are responsible for reducing risks to health and safety as far as is reasonably practicable.

Historically this work has been done by people. But it could now potentially be offloaded to AI by individuals or organisations. This creates a potential link between process safety and AI safety risks such as deskilling.

As an example, people could suffer mental blank spots in the event of an emergency because they are so used to deferring decisions to artificial intelligence. Or as Waine puts it, using AI means “you are losing the opportunity to practice. If you use Google Maps for navigation, your map reading and navigation skills decline. You have weaker mental models.” With less practice, “we lose our familiarity with how things work. And that becomes important when we're under pressure, or there's uncertainty, because we will typically fall back on those mental models to make decisions.”

Waine adds: “When things don't go as we expect them to – an emergency or incident is a good example – we've potentially lost those mental models and our judgment has degraded. If you take away the AI from that situation – let's say you must respond in analogue only – can you still do it?”

These concerns have surfaced just as usage of AI is rising in health and safety for tasks such as writing risk assessments or analysing risk using video technology, says Waine. “AI is already influencing health and safety decision-making.”

Such usage may not be officially sanctioned by the organisation. Emlyn Square’s research highlights ‘shadow’ or ‘grey’ AI where the technology is used outside the structures of organisational IT provision. This use of AI on the margins may not be visible or controlled (a good example is employing a consumer tool such as ChatGPT to carry out work tasks) but still make a big contribution to health and safety-related decision-making.

All of this means a collaborative effort by the energy and water sectors to develop further understanding and frameworks for the use of AI in health and safety is now needed, says Waine.

“We need to be pragmatic about this with the pace of AI development. One of the contributing factors to the use of shadow AI is that the frontier models are so much better in comparison to those models that are just six months old. So, when we're thinking about governance frameworks and standards, they must remain relevant and practical to control risks as they emerge.”

It’s not all bad. Waine stresses the positive impact of cognitive offloading in improving productivity and efficiency. He says well-informed AI users will learn how much and where to cognitively offload and how to scrutinise the technology. “The challenge is how do we create the conditions for appropriate cognitive offloading,” Waine says.

Get that right, and AI will help make utilities safer. For tasks that are repetitive or monotonous, automation has the potential to free up engineers to analyse more complex risks.

But it’s vital engineers maintain responsibility for what AI is doing. In August, Ofgem released high-level findings from its AI Reg Lab, which included a statement that in all cases, people should remain accountable for outcomes.

Until this changes, people will remain a critical part of decision-making. “They will need the skills and decision-making competence to operate in an AI-augmented environment,” says Waine.