If the book ‘The Secret of Our Success’ is to be believed (I suspect it theory is correct), then cultural learning does the heavy lifting from generation to generation keeping our knowledge base current, accurate and moving forward. Any disruption in that knowledge chain will break it irrevocably. If we skipped a generation, almost all we have built would disappear overnight in geological terms.
So consider the LLM / AI craze. Doctors, programmers, judges, increasingly rely on these data sifters, or quick books and will quickly not know anything really about their professions in the future. Vibe coding is all the rage. Have AI write your code for you. Brilliant.
We don’t need to have a world wide catastrophe to wipe out a single informational torch carrying generation. Think I am joking? How many no longer even taking the time to try and remember anything before doing a google search? Not many I think. Or how many even try to learn anything. Why learn when a phone can give you an answer to almost any question you want? We will be consumes of information, not holders of information very soon.
So we rely on AI more and more to do our current work and our thinking, making our current work less and less relevant. Hello unemployment. The only job left is to feed the machine. See Star Trek, The Apple.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apple_(Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series)
So what becomes of us when the machine can feed itself?