My knowledge and engineering has only gone up over time. I read significantly more and higher quality technical information and need to debug problems significantly harder.
I think AI will in general make everyone a lot smarter. Maybe the people who use AI as a companion will melt? I'm sure there's some kind of repetitive addiction loop that could melt your brain just like anythibg else though.
And it's like that for many things. Complicated Git commands that I rarely need. I used to remember them at least 50% of the time, and if not, I looked them up. Now I just describe what I need to Copilot. But also APIs that I don't need daily. All that stuff that I used to know is gone, because I don't need to look it up anymore, I just tell Copilot or Claude what to do.
Humanity has adopted and then discarded skills many times in its history. There were once many master archers, nobody outside of one crazy Danish guy has mastered archery for hundreds of years. That isn't bad, nobody cares, nothing of value was lost.
Writing for example is proven to be better done by hand with a pen and paper, people who take typed notes don’t retain as much.
AI has accelerated the most simple and obvious answers to easy questions.
For more difficult things deep thinking and writing, partly with pen and paper notes and diagrams are still the most effective tools.
Like I am starting to use etherpad a lot recently and although I have proton docs and similar, I just love etherpad for creating quick pads for information
Or to be honest, I search it on the internet and ddg's AI feature does give me a short answer (mostly to the point) but I think that there are definitely ways to get our own knowledge base if any outage happens basically.
I wasted so much time on dumbass pandas documentation search when I should have been building. AI is literally the internet all you are doing is querying the internet 2.0.
I often kept vast ugly text documents filled with random commands because I always forgot them.
Socrates said the same thing about writing.
The only thing that matters is if YOU care. Do you like software? Do you want to learn and make something that was unatainable to you a year ago?
There's also a major difference between college and work so you shouldn't sweat it so much.
The human has to have enough understanding of the problem to know which math to apply and calculate in the first place. That requires understanding and discernment. This works the brain. This mental work strengthens our problem solving ability.
Whereas with AI, you just tell it the problem and it gives an easy answer. Thus involving no further work from the human brain which causes it to atrophy just like any other underused muscle.
You give a calculator a problem and it gives an easy answer thus involving no further work from the human brain which causes it to atrophy just like any other underused muscle.
Just like a calculator can easily solve some problems so can AI. Sure the set of problems it can solve is bigger than a calculator. AI just enables you to work on bigger problems because you’re not spending so much time “calculating by hand”.
If you delegate all your thinking to AI or you use AI when the point of the activity is to do the activity (ie homework at school) then I think you’ll see problems. Just like using a calculator when you’re supposed to be learning how to add will stunt your growth.
The way you describe AI - tell it the problem and get an easy answer sounds identical to anecdotal complaints I've heard like Google search providing an answer to everything means no one has to learn anything, or everyone copying code from stack overflow articles. At the end of the day it's still another tool with pros and cons, tradeoffs, etc., and will be used and misused and abused by different people in different ways.
The chasm between proactive vs lazy people is growing exponentially. I predict it will bring a lot of drama.
Just people like you.
There are other types.