It wasn't that long ago that many were demanding writing code be a required subject in elementary school.

It still should be. Any educator worth their salt should be able to connect the dots on where all of this leads.

I always joke with my wife and invoke a line from this [1] Art Bell episode "the disasters that are coming..."

People really don't seem to consider that our civilization is remarkably fragile and dependent on humans. Any given system can just fail at a moment's notice and you need people around who know how not to panic and what to do.

We seem to be adamant at disproving this reality for some weird reason (money, duh), but life isn't going to be fun when a large portion of the population needs a chat bot to do any form of work. And it's worth asking: what population will be left if we submit all of our faculties to LLMs? My guess is one that's either limited in size or practically inert.

An outright idiocracy doesn't have to happen, but we sure as hell seem to be speed-running our way there. It's actually worth watching Idiocracy and Wall-E and just contemplating "do I really want to live in this world?" Because, at least right now, we're charting course directly toward that.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkPHMEvp-Tk

The fact that a machine can do something better than humans doesn’t automatically make learning it pointless.

We still teach arithmetic and algebra despite computers being vastly better at calculation. We teach spelling, grammar and essay writing. We even teach history and geography while everyone permanently has a device in their pocket that can look up almost any fact in seconds.

How else would you be developing the mental models required to understand, question and verify anything?