Humans learn through peripheral participation in a context.

E.g things like apprenticeship, but also things like experimentation.

Knowhow / tacit knowledge / intuition.

Repeated tedious practice is required for mastery.

But why practice when you can just ask the friendly LLM for the answer?

If we take away that practice, we could lose an entire generation of talent and knowledge transfer.

Before, if you didn't yet have the knowhow, you could only bother the expert so often, so you had to develop the skill yourself.

But now you have LLMs who are always patient and eager to help, and to just heroically give you the right answer.

Ethan Mollick has noted that LLMs will break the implicit apprenticeship model in large organizations.

If you've completely stopped reading code, you just copy and paste back and forth between VS Code and Claude and add the text "fix the bug" you're not learning nearly as much any more.

This kind of fear is not new; it historically has been brought up for every game-changing technology.

Calculators in the past destroyed how math used to be taught.

It took us a long time to rebuild how to teach math in a world where everyone had calculators.

But with LLMs this process will happen faster… perhaps faster than we can successfully assimilate.