Carlson School (Minnesota) dean warns: AI's biggest risk isn't jobs, it's people no longer thinking

By CBS News · September 22, 2026.

The dean of the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota has issued a warning in a CBS News / CBS Minnesota (WCCO) piece: the greatest danger of artificial intelligence is not job destruction, but that people stop wanting to think for themselves. The CBS News piece provides no further details — not the dean's name, nor figures, nor the exact context of the remarks — so we stick to what can be verified and do not fill in what we do not know.

It is a brief warning, but it points to a real and growing debate: so-called 'cognitive atrophy', the risk of outsourcing to a chatbot the effort of reasoning, searching or writing until the habit of doing so is lost. On a university campus — the natural terrain of a business school dean — that risk is tangible: students using AI to skip the process of thinking, not just that of writing the paper.

Our reading: this concern does not contradict the underlying thesis about AI — that in the long run it frees up time and routine work so people can devote themselves to what really matters to them — but it does qualify the short term. That future abundance only pays off if whoever receives it retains the judgment to make use of it; a generation that outsources thinking, and not just the task, risks arriving at abundance without knowing what to do with it. Coming from someone who trains future executives, the warning deserves to be taken seriously, even if for now it lacks the data and the elaboration to back it up.