>But the number will dwindle and we'll ironically be unable to build what our ancestors did, utterly dependent on the AI artifacts to do it for us.

That's only a brief moment in time. We learned it once, we can learn it again if we have to. People will tinker with those things as hobbies and they'll broadcast that out too. Worst case we hobble along until we get better at it. And if we have to hobble along and it's important, someone's going to be paying well for learning all of that stuff from zero, so the motivation will be there.

Why do people worry about a potential, temporary loss of skill?

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doctorwho42 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Because they may have studied history... There are countless examples of eras of lost technology due to a stumble in society. Where those societies were never able to recover the lost "secrets" of the past. Ultimately, yes, humans can rediscover/reinvent how to do things we know are possible. But it is a very real and understandable concern that we could build a society that slowly crumbles without the ability to relearn the way to maintain the systems it relies upon, fast enough to stop it from continued degradation.

Like, yeah, you have the resources right now to boot strap your knowledge of most coding languages. But that is predicated on so many previous skills learn through out your life, adulthood and childhood. Many of which we take for granted. And ultimately AI/LLM's aren't just affecting developers, they are infecting all strata of education. So it is quite possible that we build a society that is entirely dependent on these LLM's to function, because we have offloaded the knowledge from societies collective mind... And getting it back is not as simple as sitting down with a book.

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hnthrow0287345 4 hours ago | parent [-]

And we're still here right? We have more books and knowledge and capabilities than ever. Despite theoretically losing knowledge along the way, we're okay (mostly).

Society can replace the systems it relies on. The replacement might not be the best, but it'll probably handle things until we can reinvent a newer, better system. It probably won't be easy, but you can't convince me that humanity suddenly cannot adapt and fix problems right in front of them. How long does history have us doing that?

These are extraordinary claims that all of society will just become dumb and not be able to do any of this. History is also littered with people fretting about the next generation not being smart enough or whatever, and those fears rhyme pretty closely with what we're talking about here.

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Tomis02 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You could have lived 200 years. But instead, people decided they'd rather invest in crypto or LLMs instead.

Maybe humans will still be here in a century. But you won't be. It didn't have to be this way.

	▲	bit-anarchist 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't see how they are actually exclusive in the long-term. Crypto investment isn't that big, and LLMs, or AI in general, may provide support for better treatments, thus possibly allowing people to reliably live onto 200 years.

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Waterluvian 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I imagine it being a "does anybody know COBOL?!" but much sooner than sixty years rom now.

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RhysU 4 hours ago | parent [-]

COBOL also came to mind.

The COBOL thing seems to be working out just fine last I heard. Today a small number of people get paid well to know COBOL's depths and legacy platforms/software. The world moved on, where possible, to lower cost labor and tools.

Arguably, that outcome was the right creative destruction. Market economics doesn't long-term incentivize any other outcomes. We'll see the arc of COBOL play out again with LLM coding.

	▲	jerf 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I've been waiting for the article talking about how AI is affecting COBOL. Preferably with quotes from actual COBOL programmers since I can already theorize as well as the next guy but I'm interested in the reports from the field. While LLMs have become pretty good at generating code, I think some of their other capabilities are still undersold and poorly understood, and one of them is that they are very good at porting. AI may offer the way out for porting COBOL finally. You definitely can't just blindly point it at one code base and tell it to convert to another. The LLMs do "blur" the code, I find, just sort of deciding that maybe this little clause wasn't important and dropping it. (Though in some cases I've encountered this, I sometimes understand where it is coming from, when the old code was twisty and full of indirection I often as a human have a hard time being sure what is and is not used just by reading the code too...) But the process is still way, way faster than the old days of typing the new code in one line at a time by staring at the old code. It's definitely way cheaper to port a code base into a new language in 2026 than it was in 2020. In 2020 it was so expensive it was almost always not even an option. I think a lot of people have not caught up with the cost reductions in such porting actions now, and are not correctly calculating that into their costs. It is easier than ever to get out of a language that has some fundamental issue that is hard to overcome (performance, general lack of capability like COBOL) and into something more modern that doesn't have that flaw.
	▲	jlokier 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I know it's just anecdotal, but I looked for COBOL salaries a couple of years ago, curious about this "paid well". The salaries were ok but not good for COBOL. Here's an anecdotal Reddit thread about it. https://www.reddit.com/r/developpeurs/comments/1ixfpsx/le_sa...

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FpUser 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>"That's only a brief moment in time. We learned it once, we can learn it again if we have to. "

Yes we can but there is a big problem here. We will "learn it again" after something breaks. And the way the world currently functions there might not be a time to react. It is like growing food on industrial scale. We have slowly learned it over the time. If it breaks now with the knowledge gone and we have to learn it again it will end the civilization as we know it.

	▲	hnthrow0287345 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>It is like growing food on industrial scale. How many people do you think know how to do that today? It's in the millions (probably 10s to 100s), scattered all across the globe because we all need to eat. Not to mention all of the publications on the topic in many different languages. The only credible case for everyone forgetting how to farm is nuclear doomsday and at that point we'll all be dead anyway. >If it breaks now with the knowledge gone and we have to learn it again it will end the civilization as we know it. I don't think there is a single piece of technology that is so critical to civilization that everyone alive easily forgets how to do it and there is also zero documentation on how it works. These vague doomsday scenarios around losing knowledge and crashing civilization just have zero plausibility to me.