No, AI isn't doing anything. When someone gets stabbed, do you say "are knives stabbing people?" No, just like you don't give credit to the knife for cutting up your vegetables.
"Just being aware that this phenomenon exists hopefully provokes some self-reflection about which skills people want to maintain and which they’re willing to outsource” to AI tools. Right. Obviously.
So we need to be teaching that core lesson to children -- they don't retain skills that they don't practice. And we need to be careful to decide what skills and verify they are learning them. We also should absolutely be using AI to provide personalized instruction to every single student.
Blaming the tools for things that humans do is incredibly stupid and dangerously misguided. Because it shirks responsibility onto the technology, when technology is the best lever humans and society have to improve things! It just happens to also be the best lever available to make things worse.
This negative view of improving technology starts from a warped and very unrealistic concept of the state of the world, where it has been, and the role technology has played.
1. Technologies, starting with fire, the printing press, etc. have been critical in raising life expectancy, standard of living, etc.
2. The world is still a profoundly unequal and exploitive place.
3. AI and robotics have the potential to provide everyone on earth who wants it with extremely inexpensive labor to help them with anything they need or can imagine. This will be a dramatic shift in quality of living.
Human society is the source of our problems, not technology. Part of this is that I think deep down people believe that any tools or developments that arise will just be used to exploit and suppress them more, and there is no alternative. In this case, I guess people think the best outcome is to go back to feudalism or some nonsense because technology just makes things worse.
But why stop there? Why not go back to, I don't know.. fire? Or maybe no one should ever eat any red fruit?