The current chatbots are kind of like a calculator for language—they’re not going to do all your work for you, but they’ll definitely speed and streamline the process.
Unless the apocalypse comes we'll be just fine, and at that point hunting will be more important than math again anyway.
You don't _need_ to be good at anything really, but we live in much better societies when people are good at things. The fact that we can live like mindless automats doesn't mean it's something we should strive for.
What makes those "basic maths" a good benchmark for whether we're fucked?
Freeing up head space for more important things is valuable. Not having to maintain 7 digit numbers in your head lets you focus on the actual problem.
Not having to worry so much about the phrasing in a document because anyone can ask a bot to rephrase it, in a way that makes the most sense to them, is better than what we have today.
They weren't saying basic maths was a good benchmark for whether we're fucked, they said that if GPT does for every other skill what calculators did for basic maths — viz. make us forget all the fundamentals and rely on computers for everything — we're fucked.
My personal opinion is that sometimes our head space is maybe a little too freed up by tool-assisted thinking, and we lose the ability to focus and concentrate.