This is such a lazy argument. Every tool that displaces old tools causes skills to be lost when those skills are no longer needed.

To the extent that people still need to be able to critically assess what AI delivers to achieve their goals, they will still pick up those skills or fail. They will then need to either invest the time to learn, or they'll fail to find employment, or fail in other aspects of life.

When we see people lamenting lost skills like this, it is usually a result of them overestimating the continued necessity of certain skills in the face of new technology.

You won't suddenly have a generation of software developers (for example) who don't know the necessary skills to do their work, but you may get a generation of software developers who don't have the skills you think are necessary to do their work.

Skills no longer needed… as long as you have access to an AI model provided by a handful of companies at an arbitrary rate; with training cost so high that only huge corporations have the funds to pull it off, building an ever-growing moat over time.

This sounds like a great future! Nothing worrying here at all.

I actually find your argument to be the lazy and reductive one, and im surprised how many folks just parrot it confidently.

This is clearly not like any other tool, what it can do, and more importantly the range of what it can mimic and pretend to do to a highly plausible degree is something humanity did not witness anything close to, ever.

The closest thing i can think of is high speed internet porn and its impact on generations that grew up addicted to it. I can only imagine what AI porn will do to the upcoming generations, and more generally what AI will do to their cognition

A car that can self-drive 100% of the time is a new tool that could make driving an obsolete skill. A car that can self-drive successfully 99% of the time is dangerous because it trains people to not be ready to take over for the 1% they need to.

AI is ultimately a thinking replacement tool. Losing the skill of critical thought is existential.

The actual lazy argument here is pretending that AI is like the fucking cotton gin or something. We all know and understand it's not. There's people getting whole ass degrees using AI for everything.

What is your argument actually based on? It seems you're just assuming this to be the case.

> To the extent that people still need to be able to critically assess what AI delivers to achieve their goals, they will still pick up those skills or fail.

Or, the people who evaluate them will be suffering from the exact same self-inflicted cognitive limitations, and promote them, or at least not fire them.

The quality of this firm's product suffers perhaps, but it doesn't matter. The consumer will again, in all likelihood, be limited in the same way.

Everyone's happy.

It’s essentially about if your skills are “Turing complete”. If you know only Java, you may not be able to build an app that requires assembly tier efficiency but you can do it. With vibe coding you just have to hope and pray. It’s not really a skill. Your skills are not Turing complete.