I suspect that literacy will not go down, but what we become literate in will change. Just as compilers reduced literacy in assembly language, automatic code generation will reduce literacy in code syntax. But then, other forms of literacy will replace that. High level system design, etc.
Everyone working in SW before AI was also an autodidact since you always had to learn things on your own to stay employable. I don't know many now still making a living exclusively on what they learned 30+ years ago and nothing else.
There was no economically justifiable reason for me to learn about compilers, operating systems, and even CMOS VLSI. But I couldn't be satisfied writing software without knowing how those things worked. I taped out a chip in which all the polygons drawn by deterministic software I'd eithe written or understood. No place+route. It was the 2000s version of non-AI coding in the 2030s -- standard cell placement is essentially gradient descent.
Some people just have to know how it works.
The history of, 'No one will know how to do anything and the industry will collapse' is almost as old as programming itself.
1 Edsger Dijkstra, "How do we tell truths that might hurt?" (EWD 498, 1975) https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD498...
2. John Backus, "The History of FORTRAN I, II, and III" (1978) https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800025.1198345
3. Dijkstra, "On the cruelty of really teaching computing science" https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD103...
4. Alan Perlis, "Epigrams on Programming" (1982) Specifically #93 https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1982-perlis.pdf
5. Joel Spolsky, "The Perils of JavaSchools" (2005) https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-java...
But don’t you think these were just complaints about higher levels of abstractions? We still had to learn lower levels in school.
AI and tbh society in general just invalidates the economic viability of learning what’s under the foundations.
It was ever thus, learning the foundations of basically anything was never economically rational. I mean, I'd have been much better off learning product marketing rather than working my way through Volume 1 of Knuth's TAOCP.
And yet, I still did the non economically rational thing.
But our "civilization" is coming to an end. The most evident bits to me are the falling birthrates and what I would call a kind of despair among people. No one is trying anymore from what I can see. Seems like the soul-sucking was successful: the machine has our souls now.