[hincey]

This is dead on. I'm not even a big AI fan, but this is a key idea about technology in general. I don't want to have to bring to mind the laws of physics every time I drive to work. The whole point is that a group of engineers encoded them into the machine for me, and now I enhance my capabilities without needing to know how. It's what the classic Alfred North Whitehead quote is talking about. I understand the impulse towards mastery and ever-expanding knowledge—who doesn't love the idea that they should be able to "plan an invasion, change a diaper, butcher a hog"—but the truth is we have finite capabilities we are capable of mastering in a lifetime. This is why even literal geniuses often fail when they step outside their field of expertise. It's a valid concern that as a society some skill will be lost, or concentrated in the hands off too few, but losing skills and knowledge (or I would simply call it "being permitted to forget") is in general fine. Now if AI literally killed people's ability to think, that would be one thing. But what I suspect is that like parent is saying, it allows you to turn off your brain for certain tasks, like every technology. Then the question is what more complex tasks can we do on top of the automatic and thoughtless ones.

EDIT: I see some good replies to parent about stability/reliability, alienation etc. There are definitely tradeoffs to the power you get from technology, and it's worth acknowledging those. But that's exactly the framework we should be thinking in. What are the tradeoffs involved? Often these kinds of stories are one-sided arguments that imply losing skills is straightforwardly bad, when in truth it's more complicated than that.