The GPS/map analogy is terrible tbh. I've been in cars with people til this day that can't travel if the GPS doesn't lead them. Living in a hurricane prone area if cell service is gone a majority of people can't travel in their own city cause they have no sense of direction.
I think I understand the feeling but to me there is no skill deterioration. I think there is skill progression.
What I am trying to say is that before everyone knew how to read a map but nowadays almost no one does because we have GPS. Does that mean we lost the ability to read a map? Yes, is it skill deterioration? Maybe, but do you really need to know how to read a map today? We moved the skill into something with new value.
It may not seem as evident with AI because it is broader and faster but I think if there is a technology that can do what you could do before, then we should take advantage of it to learn new things and extend our skills, even if it means loosing our previous skills (I know this is difficult to hear, specially when you spent half of your life or more, learning something, I’ve been there)
Practical example: we learned how to code. It was an art, difficult to learn. Now there are coding agents that can code for you faster. They are not completely reliable yet but good enough. So you don’t need anymore to know absolutely everything about coding, just like you dont need to read a map anymore. However, you still need to know where you want to go and how to get there, like choosing the destination in your GPS and the vehicle you will use.
So the skill is moving not deteriorating. It is being replaced. It frees space for you to learn new things.
To continue with the GPS/map analogy, I clearly remember and still even today, older people saying: “This GPS is weird, it does not know the shortcut I used to take. We cannot trust this technology…”Look familiar?
So the question is: does some of your current skills will still be necessary in the (very) near future? If the answer is no, then this is your sign to shift your knowledge into something new. 🙂
@0xTriboulet I was talking about this last week. Has services gotten better? Are you buying more stuff since LLMs? What I've noticed is the internet deteriorating because of LLMS and surveillance getting stronger. Eventually humans will abandon the internet.