I've seen this as well, but more pronounced in the areas impacted by AI the most. If there is little to no professional work in a scope, people don't get smart

I've seen this as well, but more pronounced in the areas impacted by AI the most. If there is little to no professional work in a scope, people don't get smarter, they get dumber, and it happens through simple atrophy. Good engineering is the constant mental build up, natural tear down (atrophy) involved, where reality favors us with resiliency. AI replacing large swathes of work will cause those neurons to not fire as often, eventually you'll lose the connections. I don't think there is any safe amount of use that doesn't already create a persistent, self-fulfilling cycles of demand, where overuse would naturally occur just to compete in the labor market. Its effectively a n-body problem with no visibility since the measurements would ultimately be based on value which is subjective. It collapses the value of inherent skilled labor down to 0 paving the way for slavery or death when natural dynamics collapse the economic production system.