> It’s that we shouldn’t depend on AI always being available.

I made the general tech-dependence statement, but it sounds like you think it is only AI tech that shouldnt' depend on. I wouldn't worry about it; humanity has proven itself to be INCREDIBLY resilient and adaptable when the things we've come to depend on go away or change materially.

We aren’t just talking about technology, we are talking about knowledge.

Like I said, I have zero issue being “AI first”. 90% of my day-to-day is using AI. But the part I objected to in the OP was “we don’t need to know things because we have AI” (to paraphrase. So I was asking the question: what if AI goes away?

I agree humans are resilient. But that’a not a good excuse for complacency.

I think open weights and local AI will distribute the knowledge across the planet, avoiding a single point of failure. All you would need is electricity and a computer. And if we have no way to access it, there will always be enough people who either have sufficient knowledge already or the hunger to rediscover things.

I think we are still a long way from that becoming an option due to the cost of hardware to run even the lower end models. But I do like this prediction of yours