I think it's analogous to physical labour

In the past someone might have been physically healthy and strong enough to physically shovel dirt all day long

Nowadays this is rarer because we use an excavator instead. Yes, a professional dirt mover is more productive with an excavator than a shovel, but is likely not as physically fit as someone spending their days moving dirt with a shovel

I think it will be similar with AI. It is absolutely going to offload a lot of people's thinking into the LLMs and their "do it by hand" muscles will atrophy. For knowledge workers, that's our brain

I know this was a similar concern with search engines and Stack Overflow, so I am trying to temper my concern here as best I can. But I can't shake the feeling that LLMs provide a way for people to offload their thinking and go on autopilot a lot more easily than Search ever did

I'm not saying that we were better off when we had to move dirt by hand either. I'm just saying there was a physical tradeoff when people moved out of the fields and into offices. I suspect there will be a cognitive tradeoff now that we are moving away from researching solutions to problems and towards asking the AI to give us solutions to problems