The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

The article is well-written and makes cogent points about why we need "centaurs", human/computer hybrids who combine silicon- and carbon-based reasoning.

Interestingly, the text has a number of AI-like writing artifacts, e.g. frequent use of the pattern "The problem isn't X. The problem is Y." Unlike much of the typical slop I see, I read it to the end and found it insightful.

I think that's because the author worked with an AI exactly as he advocates, providing the deep thinking and leaving some of the routine exposition to the bot.

Bob can't do things, Bob's AI can do things that Bob asks it to do. And the AI can only do things that have been done before, and only up to a certain level of complexity. Once that level is reached, the AI can't do things anymore, and Bob certainly isn't going to do anything about that, because Bob doesn't know how to do anything himself. One has to question what value Bob himself even brings to the table.

But let's assume Bob continues to have an active role, because the people above him bought in to the hype and are convinced that "prompt engineer" is the job of the future. When things inevitably start falling apart because the Bobs of the world hit a wall and can't solve the problems that need to be solved (spoiler: this is already happening), what do we do? We need Alices to come in and fix it, but the market actively discourages the existence of Alice, so what happens when there are no more Alices left? Do we just give up and collectively forget how to do things beyond a basic level?

I have a feeling that, yes, we as a species are just going to forget how to do things beyond a certain level. We are going to forget how to write an innovative science paper. We are going to forget how to create websites that aren't giant, buggy piles of React spaghetti that make your browser tab eat 2GB of RAM. We've always been forgetting, really - there are many things that humans in the past knew how to do, but nobody knows how to do today, because that's what happens when the incentive goes missing for too long. Price and convenience often win over quality, to the point that quality stops being an option. This is a form of evolutionary regression, though, and negatively affects our quality of life in many ways. AI is massively accelerating this regression, and if we don't find some way to stop it, I believe our current way of life will be entirely unrecognizable in a few decades.

"He shipped a product, but he didn't learn a trade." I think is the key quote from this article, and encapsulates the core problem with AI agents in any skill-based field.

From the article:

> There's a common rebuttal to this, and I hear it constantly. "Just wait," people say. "In a few months, in a year, the models will be better. They won't hallucinate. They won't fake plots. The problems you're describing are temporary." I've been hearing "just wait" since 2023.

We're not trending towards superintelligence with these AIs. We're trending towards (and, in fact, have already reached) superintelligence with computers in general, but LLM agents are among the least capable known algorithms for the majority of tasks we get them to do. The problem, as it usually is, is that most people don't have access to the fruits of obscure research projects.

Untrained children write better code than the most sophisticated LLMs, without even noticing they're doing anything special.

> we're trending towards superintelligence with these AIs

The article addresses this, because, well... no we aren't. Maybe we are. But it's far from clear that we're not moving toward a plateau in what these agents can do.

> Whether a human does actual work or not isn't particularly exciting to a market.

You seem to be convinced these AI agents will continue to improve without bound, so I think this is where the disconnect lies. Some of us (including the article author) are more skeptical. The market values work actually getting done. If the AIs have limits, and the humans driving them no longer have the capability to surpass those limits on their own, then people who have learned the hard way, without relying so much on an AI, will have an advantage in the market.

I already find myself getting lazy as a software developer, having an LLM verify my work, rather than going through the process of really thinking it through myself. I can feel that part of my skills atrophying. Now consider someone who has never developed those skills in the first place, because the LLM has done it for them. What happens when the LLM does a bad job of it? They'll have no idea. I still do, at least.

Maybe someday the AIs will be so capable that it won't matter. They'll be smarter and more through and be able to do more, and do it correctly, than even the most experienced person in the field. But I don't think that's even close to a certainty.