alt Hacker NewsOne of the challenges here is that the skillset we are in danger of letting atrophy is essentially unbounded. It’s not a specialized tool like a calculator, where you have a well scoped domain of problems you are offloading. granted, in practice many people are using ai for specialized domains (like coding or producing visual designs). But whatever level of abstraction they are currently working at is not, in principle, something that they couldn’t also offload to ai.
The instinct of many people (myself included, a lot of the time) is "feed the AI the problems from the domains I'm least good at / familiar with" because those ones are the most frustrating and where I'm the most likely to spin my wheels. It's easy to imagine how this feeds into a cycle of "only put forth effort at things I'm already good at" and a consequent narrowing of professional / intellectual development.