This is such a lazy argument. Every tool that displaces old tools causes skills to be lost when those skills are no longer needed.
To the extent that people still need to be able to critically assess what AI delivers to achieve their goals, they will still pick up those skills or fail. They will then need to either invest the time to learn, or they'll fail to find employment, or fail in other aspects of life.
When we see people lamenting lost skills like this, it is usually a result of them overestimating the continued necessity of certain skills in the face of new technology.
You won't suddenly have a generation of software developers (for example) who don't know the necessary skills to do their work, but you may get a generation of software developers who don't have the skills you think are necessary to do their work.
It’s essentially about if your skills are “Turing complete”. If you know only Java, you may not be able to build an app that requires assembly tier efficiency but you can do it. With vibe coding you just have to hope and pray. It’s not really a skill. Your skills are not Turing complete.
It aligns with my experience and what I have seen. Looking at this through the lenses of writing software; much of "learning" to write software comes down to experience.
When you see an error like, "error: expected ‘,’ or ‘;’ before ‘include’" you know what happened and where to look because you've seen it a hundred times before.
AI takes that away. It's not inherently bad, it's great that it can solve those sort of things for you. However, the second order effects are terrible. You end up never developing that experience. Is this simply evolution of the craft? Is that experience no longer necessary?
I could be wrong, but I believe that experience is necessary and losing it will be a net negative. Furthermore, the reduction of experience will increase dependency on these tools and the companies that provide them.
AI is a tool to help you see the forest from the trees.
You reading articles the old fashion way can be akin to seeing the trees but not seeing the actual forest.
Young minds tend to learn. How they do it, the old fashion way, the new AI way, they will learn.
Many blank out in school on different subjects and the cognitive overload byproduct follows them all their life making them wary of new things.
And finally, maybe you, personally, are reaching a limit in your comprehension of the modern world, and you show it by fighting the wrong battle with the wrong arguments.
You mean the state of affairs humans have enjoyed for the last four millennia? The status quo that led to all of the technology you seem to think we now can't live without?
> Many blank out in school on different subjects and the cognitive overload byproduct follows them all their life making them wary of new things.
They should try putting their phones down before we double down on solving tech problems with more tech.
You are assuming slop is only an AI feature. You know the anecdotal aunt in the old days, confidently hallucinating answers? One had to carry half-truths all the time, and things are still the same now. Only now, the mitigation can come sooner than later. From an AI model near you.
i feel like people should be focusing on the damaging things that aren't just "ai" (like what he hell does that even mean, it's too broad?).
dark app patterns, gambling, etc. like seriously, i know we all want to hate on llms or whatever stealing our jobs or making us stupider but has this been any different from the past in that regard?
whether it be radio, tv, computer, internet, video games, etc. all of these claimed to be doing something "to the children" but i agree with another comment said kids will figure out a way to learn and utilize the tools given to them.
did me "offloading" my thinking to google or some computer instead of cracking open some library book or doing calculations by hand damage my thinking at the time? no... because a sufficiently motivated person will learn regardless, figure out why things work the way they do, and rather it's better access to said information that helps.
we should be fixing the motivation problem rather than the tools which we've been trying to do for decades. teach people the framework for solving problems and critical thinking. kids nowadays have way more things demanding their attention and it's been on a decline far before this AI wave (cough social media). we literally sound like old farts lol.
My skills was forged in the other type of school, I know how to operate a lathe and milling machine but I don't think it's a good thing now and very dangerous too. The time dictates the skills. But understanding of the basic life/ physical principles was fired in me by my father, so I don't rely to school on that, it's the parent who is responsible.
Perhaps if you're the highly motivated type who would excel even without ai. But it's far too easy to become like maths students who learn only how to use a calculator instead of how to actually add fractions.
Learning and suffering seem to be linked to some degree. It takes a lot of up front pain to get to a point where you can become an effective autodidact. You have to develop an appreciation for the game. AI can accelerate aspects of this, but it often alleviates too much suffering for a novice to develop the fundamentals.
If you go into AI as a way to get your school work done more quickly, you won't experience the friction you need to. AI should be used to make the work longer and deeper. More engaging and adapted to the individual. Not quicker and easier.
The problem is that AI is the most effective dual use technology we have ever created with regard to education and cheating at education. The monkey brain doesn't like to suffer, so on average I think we find most people tend toward the shittier use case.
One could have said the same things when calculators were invented. Is routine suffering by adding numbers by hand required? Or is it more important to delegate simpler things and focus on complex problems.
The point is not to make the suffering permanent. It is a temporary phase. A lesson. Once you complete it you can go on to do the automated thing without as much concern.
Certainly practising mental arithmetic helps in capability of doing mental arithmetic. Doing adding by hand probably also improves mental arithmetic.
The again we are not that far off from time when your AI glasses will read the price label. And then automatically add up total for you. Hopefully you then each time ask what does that total mean in context of your finances...
Do you think that's how most students are using it? Teachers would quickly disabuse you of that notion [0]:
> In study hall, I watched a kid use Snapchat to take pictures of his computer screen. He was working on IXL skills. His Snap A.I. friend sent an immediate reply. He then clicked the answer on his screen. The next question popped up, he took a picture and got an answer. He swiftly went through the whole session this way. His right hand held the phone, he tapped the camera button, glanced at the reply, and his left hand entered the answers on his laptop. He didn’t know I was watching, but I saw the gold medal of 100 percent mastery bloom on his screen. I told the teacher who assigned the IXL. She didn’t realize Snapchat had an A.I. that would do her homework. It can answer all the questions.
... Now, can you use AI to learn things? Sure. But what the article is talking about it is critical thinking:
> Adults using AI mostly just sound generic. But for a child who never formed independent reasoning, "generic" is a major identity problem. The model’s reasoning doesn’t compete with the child’s reasoning but becomes the child’s reasoning. For children still building out the cognitive skills for evaluating the world, the effect will not be temporary but have a foundation impact on their thinking.
American's performance with critical thinking is already mixed at best. A new generation with even lower independent thinking ability combined with AI painstakingly engineered to suffer from severe bias is a powerful recipe for (even more) horrors beyond human comprehension. Paid for by our tax dollars.
I’m not a hater. LLMs on search is the best research tool I’ve ever used because it’s read everything and can find minutia buried in places it would take me a long time to find.
But there’s a huge difference between using it to assist focus, or as a study aide, and offloading the whole act of thinking itself.
I swear to god, people heard the story about how Socrates was against books and reurgitate this as argument against any critical view on AI usage. If this is the level of reasoning people have, nothing will be lost when cognitive skills decline through AI usage anyway.
To the extent that people still need to be able to critically assess what AI delivers to achieve their goals, they will still pick up those skills or fail. They will then need to either invest the time to learn, or they'll fail to find employment, or fail in other aspects of life.
When we see people lamenting lost skills like this, it is usually a result of them overestimating the continued necessity of certain skills in the face of new technology.
You won't suddenly have a generation of software developers (for example) who don't know the necessary skills to do their work, but you may get a generation of software developers who don't have the skills you think are necessary to do their work.
When you see an error like, "error: expected ‘,’ or ‘;’ before ‘include’" you know what happened and where to look because you've seen it a hundred times before.
AI takes that away. It's not inherently bad, it's great that it can solve those sort of things for you. However, the second order effects are terrible. You end up never developing that experience. Is this simply evolution of the craft? Is that experience no longer necessary?
I could be wrong, but I believe that experience is necessary and losing it will be a net negative. Furthermore, the reduction of experience will increase dependency on these tools and the companies that provide them.
AI is a tool to help you see the forest from the trees.
You reading articles the old fashion way can be akin to seeing the trees but not seeing the actual forest.
Young minds tend to learn. How they do it, the old fashion way, the new AI way, they will learn.
Many blank out in school on different subjects and the cognitive overload byproduct follows them all their life making them wary of new things.
And finally, maybe you, personally, are reaching a limit in your comprehension of the modern world, and you show it by fighting the wrong battle with the wrong arguments.
Or maybe you are onto something.
You mean the state of affairs humans have enjoyed for the last four millennia? The status quo that led to all of the technology you seem to think we now can't live without?
> Many blank out in school on different subjects and the cognitive overload byproduct follows them all their life making them wary of new things.
They should try putting their phones down before we double down on solving tech problems with more tech.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47456153
dark app patterns, gambling, etc. like seriously, i know we all want to hate on llms or whatever stealing our jobs or making us stupider but has this been any different from the past in that regard?
whether it be radio, tv, computer, internet, video games, etc. all of these claimed to be doing something "to the children" but i agree with another comment said kids will figure out a way to learn and utilize the tools given to them.
did me "offloading" my thinking to google or some computer instead of cracking open some library book or doing calculations by hand damage my thinking at the time? no... because a sufficiently motivated person will learn regardless, figure out why things work the way they do, and rather it's better access to said information that helps.
we should be fixing the motivation problem rather than the tools which we've been trying to do for decades. teach people the framework for solving problems and critical thinking. kids nowadays have way more things demanding their attention and it's been on a decline far before this AI wave (cough social media). we literally sound like old farts lol.
If you go into AI as a way to get your school work done more quickly, you won't experience the friction you need to. AI should be used to make the work longer and deeper. More engaging and adapted to the individual. Not quicker and easier.
The problem is that AI is the most effective dual use technology we have ever created with regard to education and cheating at education. The monkey brain doesn't like to suffer, so on average I think we find most people tend toward the shittier use case.
The again we are not that far off from time when your AI glasses will read the price label. And then automatically add up total for you. Hopefully you then each time ask what does that total mean in context of your finances...
> In study hall, I watched a kid use Snapchat to take pictures of his computer screen. He was working on IXL skills. His Snap A.I. friend sent an immediate reply. He then clicked the answer on his screen. The next question popped up, he took a picture and got an answer. He swiftly went through the whole session this way. His right hand held the phone, he tapped the camera button, glanced at the reply, and his left hand entered the answers on his laptop. He didn’t know I was watching, but I saw the gold medal of 100 percent mastery bloom on his screen. I told the teacher who assigned the IXL. She didn’t realize Snapchat had an A.I. that would do her homework. It can answer all the questions.
... Now, can you use AI to learn things? Sure. But what the article is talking about it is critical thinking:
> Adults using AI mostly just sound generic. But for a child who never formed independent reasoning, "generic" is a major identity problem. The model’s reasoning doesn’t compete with the child’s reasoning but becomes the child’s reasoning. For children still building out the cognitive skills for evaluating the world, the effect will not be temporary but have a foundation impact on their thinking.
American's performance with critical thinking is already mixed at best. A new generation with even lower independent thinking ability combined with AI painstakingly engineered to suffer from severe bias is a powerful recipe for (even more) horrors beyond human comprehension. Paid for by our tax dollars.
0 - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/learning/teachers-on-how-...
One effect of widespread books is we don’t have poets like Homer. We don’t develop the memorization skills like they did in the past.
And that’s ok.
We can use the bandwidth for other stuff.
Like fighting on social media...
Seriously, what was the other stuff that we used our bandwidth for when the books caused the loss of skills.
We have lost Homer, but what have we gained? A million social-media warriors?
Books encode skill.
I’m not a hater. LLMs on search is the best research tool I’ve ever used because it’s read everything and can find minutia buried in places it would take me a long time to find.
But there’s a huge difference between using it to assist focus, or as a study aide, and offloading the whole act of thinking itself.