I think the list of historical analogies is missing the biggest one - the internet. Memorization used to be a much more important skill than it is today. I am

I think the list of historical analogies is missing the biggest one - the internet. Memorization used to be a much more important skill than it is today. I am probably worse at rote memorization than I was when I was 13. Am I dumber? I would say no - I've just adapted to the fact that memorization is much less important in a world where I have access to basically the entire recorded history of human knowledge anywhere, anytime. LLMs are just another very powerful technology that changes what subdomains of intelligence matter. When you have an LLM that can write code better than any human being (and since I know I will get testy HN replies about how LLMs can't do that, I will clarify here that I mean this is a thing that is not true today but will be in the future), the skill that matters shifts from writing code to defining the problem or designing the product. > Looking at historical examples, successful cases of offloading occurred because the skills are either easily contained (navigation) or we still know how to perform the tasks manually but simply don’t need to anymore (calculator). The difference this time is that intelligence cannot easily be confined. This is true, but I think it just means we'll see a more extreme kind of the same change we've seen as we've created powerful new tools in the past. I think it's helpful to think of the tool less as intelligence and more as the products of intelligence that are relevant, like generating high quality code or doing financial analysis. You'll have tools that can do those things extremely well, and it'll be up to you to make use of them rather than worrying about the loss of now-irrelevant skills.