I meet kids today who haven’t heard of Microsoft, who regularly play GTA and hand in assignments made in Powerpoint. 20 years ago I discovered that a friend didn’t know Xbox and Word were both from Microsoft. It’s really hard to understand what is common knowledge in different parts of society.

Indeed. You'd be shocked how few people on Hacker News even know the difference between cross stitch and blackwork.

Those are just products who cares?

I think the GP is alluding to understanding the fundamental way a thing works.

Kids today don’t even know where the files are stored or anything about partitions, drives, directory structure or even how much disk space is available.

They have some files, synced to OneDrive and do everything else fully online (Canva, etc.)

Most of them have never seen a computer with a drive other than C:

Kids today don't even know the most basic x86 assembly instructions! A whole class of third graders, and not one of them could tell me the difference between MOV and LEA!!!! Can you believe it?!?!

Apt username.

My son has never seen a C: drive before. Heck, we got him a Macbook Neo a few weeks ago and I don’t think he has left more than a few coding apps since then. Thankfully he isn’t using AI yet.

Kids in college 20 years ago didn’t know that either. Some of them didn’t understand that they had a school email address.

The point is, eventually not even experts will understand what it's doing

I'm always shocked by the amount of people that have been looking and using refrigerators their whole life.... And have zero idea how it works.

  > widespread, cheap AI makes it easier for the average person to learn how things around them work, if they are so inclined.

It looks to me that the far more common use case will be to manipulate technology rather than understand it.

The example with the synth is excellent. Today that kind of work demands somebody knowledgeable operate the AI harness. In short order, the AI may very well come up with the solution of looking online for example programs to decompile without the user even understanding what that means.

To your point, we would think that just because we gained access to a vast mass of knowledge via web archives (such as Wikipedia), people would have become smarter overall, that no person with access to this would choose not to acquire the knowledge at hand. But here we are, surrounded by people who choose to stay ignorant. So, I imagine the same will happen with AI. The vast majority of people will keep using their chatbots and never in their lives will they solve their problems with these tools beyond asking general questions for troubleshooting.

I don’t think much of them will be inclined to since information and “knowledge“ will be easily available via a prompt in any LLM. They won’t care to know what’s going on under the hood of anything. I mean, they already don’t want to and they have Google, Wikipedia and all sorts of things available to them.