>"in my days, we had books and we remembered things" which of course is hilarious

it isn't hilarious, it's true. My father (now in his 60s) who came from a blue collar background with very little education taught himself programming by manually copying and editing software out of magazines, like a lot of people his age.

I teach students now who have access to all the information in the world but a lot of them are quite literally so scatterbrained and heedless anything that isn't catered to them they can't process. Not having working focus and memory is like having muscle atrophy of the mind, you just turn into a vegetable. Professors across disciplines have seen decline in student abilities, and for several decades now, not just due to LLMs.

Information 30 years ago was more difficult to obtain. It required manual labor but in todays' context there was not much information to be consumed. Today, we have the opposite - a huge vast of information that is easy to obtain but to process? Not so much. Decline is unavoidable. Human intelligence isn't increasing at the pace advancements are made.