Intentional Evolution: Three Ways to Evolve, and the One That's a Trap

Speaker: Anita Sarma, Professor, School of EECS, Oregon State

Date: Oct 16

Time: 2-3 p.m.

Q&A: 3-3:30 p.m.

Location: KEC 1001

Zoom

Title: Intentional Evolution: Three Ways to Evolve, and the One That's a Trap

Abstract:

It starts as the illusion of fluency. AI hands back work that reads clean and feels finished, and that polish passes for your own competence. Some delegation is healthy. The trap is handing off the part of the work that was your craft once. Do that, and the skill stops evolving, so the next task leaves you more dependent than the last. We call it the cognitive debt cycle, and it compounds: every handoff feels like progress while your ability to work without help erodes.

Open source feels this first, where a flood of machine-written contributions meets maintainers whose attention is fixed and exhaustible. This talk draws on what we have heard from thousands of developers, students, and open-source contributors. What counts as meaningful work? What happens to our professional identity and skills when the craft gets handed off? What holds a community together when we turn to bots? And what about the people just starting out?

Bio

Anita Sarma is a Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University, where she also serves as Associate School Head and directs the EPIC Lab.

Her research sits at the intersection of human-centered software engineering, AI and STEM education, with a long-running focus on cognitive diversity, developer experience, and the sustainability of open source communities. Her recent work studies what habitual AI reliance does to how people think, learn, and contribute, drawing on empirical studies of developers, students, and open source contributors across multiple institutions. She has sustained research partnerships with Google, Microsoft, GitHub, the Apache Foundation, and the Linux Foundation. She has advised numerous PhD students into faculty and research careers.