Lisanne Bainbridge Called This in 1983 - we have the rules already

After endoscopists started using AI detection tools routinely, their own unassisted
detection rate fell from 28.4% to 22.4%. Most professions have no number like that —
which doesn't mean it isn't happening to them.

Dale Leszczynski and Nick McIntosh work through a claim: nearly every AI problem
organisations think they're discovering right now was described decades ago and then
ignored. Lisanne Bainbridge wrote five pages on automation and skill decay in 1983.
Shadow IT research called end-user workarounds twenty years back. Learning science has
a century on desirable difficulties and why struggle is the mechanism, not the obstacle.
The episode names where each of those bodies of work still holds, and — more usefully —
the three places they genuinely break: a collapsed audit surface, non-deterministic
output with no ground truth to check against, and an artefact that mutates faster than
any procurement cycle can finish.

Chapters
00:00 Bainbridge, 1983, and the problem everyone thinks is new
02:39 Two claims about AI, both wrong
04:03 Sui generis: treating AI as of its own kind
05:38 Automation complacency and skill atrophy
06:28 The colonoscopy deskilling study
07:36 Fabricated citations and automation bias
08:17 Where Bainbridge breaks: no dial, no correct state
09:24 Terence Tao's helicopter
10:03 Shadow AI, and a confession
11:36 A workaround is a signal
13:43 The EDUCAUSE numbers
14:34 Learning science, the field ignored hardest
15:15 Jason Lodge and Leslie Loble
16:52 Bjork's desirable difficulties
17:55 Judging quality by surface fluency
18:26 370,000 essays and idea homogenisation
19:51 The steelman: is AI different in kind?
21:23 AI as a stress test on science we never applied
23:26 The three genuine fracture points
25:43 The work has been done. Nobody's reading it.

Referenced in this episode
[LINKS TBC — Dale to supply: Bainbridge 1983; Lancet Gastro colonoscopy study;
EDUCAUSE/AIR report; Lodge & Loble ANQDE report; Charlotin hallucination database;
Tao on Dwarkesh Podcast]

Subscribe for new episodes of Adjunct Intelligence.

🎙️ Adjunct Intelligence is the weekly briefing for higher-ed professionals who want AI as a cheat code—not a headache.

Every episode:
• Real tests of AI tools in education and professional workflows
• Fast, Monday-morning actions you can actually try
• Clear signal through the noise (no hype, no jargon)

👉 Subscribe on [YouTube] | [Apple Podcasts] | [Spotify]
👉 Share this with a colleague who still says “I’ll figure AI out later”
👉 Join the conversation on LinkedIn with #AdjunctIntelligence

Stay curious. Stay intelligent. Stay the human in the loop.