8 ms·

Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them

100 points by ndr42 7mo ago

machardmachard 7mo ago
[dead]
lerp-io 7mo ago
dont you gain skills with ai? it teaches you how to do stuff, you ask it questions, etc like a tutor?
- Schmerika 7mo ago
  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. 0 - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/learning/teachers-on-how-ai-is-reshaping-the-classroom.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/learning/teachers-on-how-...
  - lerp-io 7mo ago
    meh....even before AI i remember memorizing random facts and dumping...the teacher would give flashcards for students to learn they just memorize and then forget. i felt more like some sort of special form of brain cache where i would just dump information in and then flush it after an exam...so maybe its good for imporving some sort of brain feature of short term memory, but i dont think the issue is having access to better information processing. systematic government education is like a one size shoe fits all passing down information bc ppl die and cant hold those correct brain patterns so civilization does not get lost (which may not even be as relevant with any sort of AGI). but individual people have different goals and values. I think education should be more about identifying those goals for the children and letting them figure things out on their own through their own journeys with some sort of feedback loop within some sort of controlled sandbox so they don't "veer" off into paths that are known as harmful for themselves or others and this can be done with AI... maybe where each kid just gets their own tutor and maybe they place them in special personality matching groups or something to improve social abilities with creative play...maybe people need to interact with world in more flexible way to learn through feedback not through indoctrination. like i can see even modern primitive ai being 99% than most teachers now anyway, a teacher just midlessly tells you want u need to know, they have no ability to understand each individual child on personal level or their level, values, abilities etc to put them on the right path for successs.
- bob1029 7mo ago
  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.
  - simianwords 7mo ago
    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.
    - Ekaros 7mo ago
      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...
    - bob1029 7mo ago
      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.
      - simianwords 7mo ago
        Yes agreed
    - 7mo ago
- curt15 7mo ago
  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.
- array_key_first 7mo ago
  Theoretically yes, in practice it's like 0.001% of people who are able to use it this way. We saw the same thing with the Internet. Infinite knowledge, all at your fingertips. So surely everyone becomes doctors and everyone can program right? No more university needed? Turns out no. The bottleneck has never been information, the bottleneck is you.
igor_mart 7mo ago
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.
itmitica 7mo ago
Why would cognitive overload work better? 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.
- gmerc 7mo ago
  I’m sorry what? Look at the world, overrun in slop and say this again with a. straight face
  - itmitica 7mo ago
    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.
    - mpalmer 7mo ago
      You really should read the linked article if you're going to comment this much.
      - itmitica 7mo ago
        If you have meaningful commentaries, I'm ready to learn from them.
- bogzz 7mo ago
  The last four words would have sufficed.
ookblah 7mo ago
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.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7mo ago
Books also cause loss of skills. 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.
- qsera 7mo ago
  >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?
  - Ekaros 7mo ago
    I think some of them might even value social-media trolls in some ways... At least there is lot of honest dishonest work there... Now future is to replace those with machines. No more human input. Just endless amount machines fighting with other machines...
- plastic-enjoyer 7mo ago
  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.
  - begemotz 7mo ago
    claude told me to say it.
  - semilin 7mo ago
    There's an irony to people repeating this claim without even having read the Phaedrus. If they had, they'd understand that the concern with writing was that it was not able to respond as a human in dialogue. One could think that LLMs are an improvement in this regard, but for the fact that LLMs are actually autonomous sophists. Socrates would have been against LLMs, and for good reason. Writing isn't unequivocally bad, but it is simply not a substitution for real dialogue and thought. We use books as a means by which to have more things to discuss with humans. LLMs can supplant the desire to even have dialogue with others, which is perhaps the more insidious thing.
bitbasher 7mo ago
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.
- AbstractH24 7mo ago
  As someone who has always had some software writing skills, but professionally I've always relied on low-code tools, it's helped me play around more without getting stuck in the mud. Am I the average person problay not? But for my population I'd say its helped me learn a ton. Now? Should I have just taken a few classes decades ago? Probaly.
vidarh 7mo ago
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.
- dyauspitr 7mo ago
  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.
  - vidarh 7mo ago
    So vibe coding won't be sufficient to replace a skilled Java developer, and won't obsolete that skill, and if there aren't alternatives that more completely replaces a skilled Java developer, this then isn't a relevant comparison.
- legacynl 7mo ago
  What is your argument actually based on? It seems you're just assuming this to be the case.
  - vidarh 7mo ago
    All of human history.
    - 7mo ago
adi_kurian 7mo ago
Lots of people gaining skills with AI too.
ramesh31 7mo ago
The skills I've lost are no longer valuable. No one with a brain will ever spend another minute writing HTML/CSS by hand anymore. But I spent a decade of my career doing that all day long every day. It's time to move on and up. The horizon for software is limitless now that we've been freed of the drudgery.
- the_real_cher 7mo ago
  I feel the same way!
childintime 7mo ago
Skills have a life cyle. That's something you learn as you get older. You are inevitably a part, an expression, of the time you grow up in. We become obsolete by the time we die. We die knowing our exact knowledge can't be replaced, it dies with us.
- legacynl 7mo ago
  I think you're right, and I think that's in large parts perfectly fine. As long as the important skills that we need continually keep replenishing themselves in young people. The problem is identifying which skills those actually are. Without an true answer, I'm going to be prudent, and assume that things involving learning and critical thinking are some of the important ones.
casey2 7mo ago
Research papers are already summarized, at the top there is a section called "Abstract" which includes the summary. Usually the first and last sentences are the relevant abstraction layer for most people. When automation comes along it gives humans the time to actually think about what they are doing and whether it even makes sense. Is your goal to motivate some research? That likely requires a conversation with one or more authors. Otherwise it's an exercise in narcissism. I am the elite who will bestow this sacred knowledge unto the commoners and cross-disciplinary researchers who cannae understand it without me. With automation more people are unfit, but some people are better in every metric that exists. What's important is that everybody has the freedom, if they wish, to achieve those top metrics. Insofar as those metrics don't involve direct control overs resources, since those will always be gatekept and require the approval of others.
the_real_cher 7mo ago
I like how it lets me pick what skills I want to learn. I want to run NixOS but I don't want to to learn their esoteric programming language? A.I. I want to set up a proxmox server but I don't want to read the entire manual and do extensive research I just want some working containers on my local network? A.I. This frees me up to learn other things

100 points by ndr42 7mo ago

machardmachard 7mo ago

[dead]

lerp-io 7mo ago

dont you gain skills with ai? it teaches you how to do stuff, you ask it questions, etc like a tutor?

Schmerika 7mo ago
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. 0 - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/learning/teachers-on-how-ai-is-reshaping-the-classroom.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/learning/teachers-on-how-...
- lerp-io 7mo ago
  meh....even before AI i remember memorizing random facts and dumping...the teacher would give flashcards for students to learn they just memorize and then forget. i felt more like some sort of special form of brain cache where i would just dump information in and then flush it after an exam...so maybe its good for imporving some sort of brain feature of short term memory, but i dont think the issue is having access to better information processing. systematic government education is like a one size shoe fits all passing down information bc ppl die and cant hold those correct brain patterns so civilization does not get lost (which may not even be as relevant with any sort of AGI). but individual people have different goals and values. I think education should be more about identifying those goals for the children and letting them figure things out on their own through their own journeys with some sort of feedback loop within some sort of controlled sandbox so they don't "veer" off into paths that are known as harmful for themselves or others and this can be done with AI... maybe where each kid just gets their own tutor and maybe they place them in special personality matching groups or something to improve social abilities with creative play...maybe people need to interact with world in more flexible way to learn through feedback not through indoctrination. like i can see even modern primitive ai being 99% than most teachers now anyway, a teacher just midlessly tells you want u need to know, they have no ability to understand each individual child on personal level or their level, values, abilities etc to put them on the right path for successs.
bob1029 7mo ago
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.
- simianwords 7mo ago
  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.
  - Ekaros 7mo ago
    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...
  - bob1029 7mo ago
    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.
    - simianwords 7mo ago
      Yes agreed
  - 7mo ago
curt15 7mo ago
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.
array_key_first 7mo ago
Theoretically yes, in practice it's like 0.001% of people who are able to use it this way. We saw the same thing with the Internet. Infinite knowledge, all at your fingertips. So surely everyone becomes doctors and everyone can program right? No more university needed? Turns out no. The bottleneck has never been information, the bottleneck is you.

igor_mart 7mo ago

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.

itmitica 7mo ago

Why would cognitive overload work better? 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.

gmerc 7mo ago
I’m sorry what? Look at the world, overrun in slop and say this again with a. straight face
- itmitica 7mo ago
  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.
  - mpalmer 7mo ago
    You really should read the linked article if you're going to comment this much.
    - itmitica 7mo ago
      If you have meaningful commentaries, I'm ready to learn from them.
bogzz 7mo ago
The last four words would have sufficed.

ookblah 7mo ago

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.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7mo ago

Books also cause loss of skills. 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.

qsera 7mo ago
>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?
- Ekaros 7mo ago
  I think some of them might even value social-media trolls in some ways... At least there is lot of honest dishonest work there... Now future is to replace those with machines. No more human input. Just endless amount machines fighting with other machines...
plastic-enjoyer 7mo ago
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.
- begemotz 7mo ago
  claude told me to say it.
- semilin 7mo ago
  There's an irony to people repeating this claim without even having read the Phaedrus. If they had, they'd understand that the concern with writing was that it was not able to respond as a human in dialogue. One could think that LLMs are an improvement in this regard, but for the fact that LLMs are actually autonomous sophists. Socrates would have been against LLMs, and for good reason. Writing isn't unequivocally bad, but it is simply not a substitution for real dialogue and thought. We use books as a means by which to have more things to discuss with humans. LLMs can supplant the desire to even have dialogue with others, which is perhaps the more insidious thing.

bitbasher 7mo ago

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.

AbstractH24 7mo ago
As someone who has always had some software writing skills, but professionally I've always relied on low-code tools, it's helped me play around more without getting stuck in the mud. Am I the average person problay not? But for my population I'd say its helped me learn a ton. Now? Should I have just taken a few classes decades ago? Probaly.

vidarh 7mo ago

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.

dyauspitr 7mo ago
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.
- vidarh 7mo ago
  So vibe coding won't be sufficient to replace a skilled Java developer, and won't obsolete that skill, and if there aren't alternatives that more completely replaces a skilled Java developer, this then isn't a relevant comparison.
legacynl 7mo ago
What is your argument actually based on? It seems you're just assuming this to be the case.
- vidarh 7mo ago
  All of human history.
  - 7mo ago

adi_kurian 7mo ago

Lots of people gaining skills with AI too.

ramesh31 7mo ago

The skills I've lost are no longer valuable. No one with a brain will ever spend another minute writing HTML/CSS by hand anymore. But I spent a decade of my career doing that all day long every day. It's time to move on and up. The horizon for software is limitless now that we've been freed of the drudgery.

the_real_cher 7mo ago
I feel the same way!

childintime 7mo ago

Skills have a life cyle. That's something you learn as you get older. You are inevitably a part, an expression, of the time you grow up in. We become obsolete by the time we die. We die knowing our exact knowledge can't be replaced, it dies with us.

legacynl 7mo ago
I think you're right, and I think that's in large parts perfectly fine. As long as the important skills that we need continually keep replenishing themselves in young people. The problem is identifying which skills those actually are. Without an true answer, I'm going to be prudent, and assume that things involving learning and critical thinking are some of the important ones.

casey2 7mo ago

Research papers are already summarized, at the top there is a section called "Abstract" which includes the summary. Usually the first and last sentences are the relevant abstraction layer for most people. When automation comes along it gives humans the time to actually think about what they are doing and whether it even makes sense. Is your goal to motivate some research? That likely requires a conversation with one or more authors. Otherwise it's an exercise in narcissism. I am the elite who will bestow this sacred knowledge unto the commoners and cross-disciplinary researchers who cannae understand it without me. With automation more people are unfit, but some people are better in every metric that exists. What's important is that everybody has the freedom, if they wish, to achieve those top metrics. Insofar as those metrics don't involve direct control overs resources, since those will always be gatekept and require the approval of others.

the_real_cher 7mo ago

I like how it lets me pick what skills I want to learn. I want to run NixOS but I don't want to to learn their esoteric programming language? A.I. I want to set up a proxmox server but I don't want to read the entire manual and do extensive research I just want some working containers on my local network? A.I. This frees me up to learn other things