I don't think the real threat is at the individual level, but at the societal level.

Building skills over time leads to insights that lead to innovation.

AI does many interesting things, but it doesn't innovate (yet).

The real threat isn't that we'll all lose our skills (possibly) and then lose access to AI (unlikely), it is that AI will remain at roughly currently levels and we'll dull our skills due to reliance on it and innovation will stall because we've offloaded too much of the thinking to the non-innovative machine.

I'm not saying this is what definitely will happen, but it does seem like a very possible outcome.

> I'm sure people got worse at arithmetic after the invention of the calculator

For LLMs, we can see this sentence but replace "arithmetic" with a variable X

I'm sure people got worse at X after the invention of LLMs"

The problem isn't that X skills atrophy necessarily

The problem is that for LLMs, X is "basically all knowledge and communication skills"

Can we really tolerate a society where "basically all knowledge and communication skills" are atrophying?

At worse you suffer from cognitive atrophy. Become more dumb and lazy.