> The determining factor is always "did I come up with this tool". Somehow, subsequent generations always manage to find their own competencies (which, to be fair, may be different).
In a sense, I think you are right. We are currently going through a period of transition that values some skills and devalues others. The people who see huge productivity gains because they don't have to do the meaningless grunt work are enthusiastic about that. The people who did not come up with the tool are quick to point out pitfalls.
The thing is, the naysayers aren't wrong since the path we choose to follow will determine the outcome of using the technology. Using it to sift through papers to figure out what is worth reading in depth is useful. Using it to help us understand difficult points in a paper is useful. On the other hand, using it as a replacement for reading the papers is counterproductive. It is replacing what the author said with what a machine "thinks" an author said. That may get rid of unnecessary verbosity, but it is almost certainly stripping away necessary details as well.
My university days were spent studying astrophysics. It was long ago, but the struggles with technology handling data were similar. There were debates between older faculty who were fine with computers, as long as researchers were there to supervise the analysis every step of the way, and new faculty, who needed computers to take raw data to reduced results without human intervention. The reason was, as always, productivity. People could not handle the massive amounts of data being generated by the new generation of sensors or systematic large scale surveys if they had to intervene any step of the way. At a basic level, you couldn't figure out whether it was a garbage-in, garbage-out type scenario because no one had the time to look at the inputs. (I mean no time in an absolute sense. There was too much data.) At a deeper level, you couldn't even tell if the data processing steps were valid unless there was something obviously wrong with the data. Sure, the code looked fine. If the code did what we expected of it, mathematically, it would be fine. But there were occasions where I had to point out that the computer isn't working how they thought it was.
It was a debate in which both sides were right. You couldn't make scientific progress at a useful pace without sticking computers in the middle and without computers taking over the grunt work. On the other hand, the machine cannot be used as a replacement for the grunt work of understanding, may that involves reading papers or analyzing the code from the perspective of a computer scientist (rather than a mathematician).