Yes. Sooner or later, it will. And there isn’t much that can be done about it. You’ll put up a good fight, but trust me, you will eventually be almost completely deskilled. Your productivity, however, will improve. You’ll do more with less: fewer resources, less time, even fewer hands. In some cases, your hands might be the only ones.
A few days ago I was talking with a friend who is an associate professor at the University of Oslo, and these were the fears he raised. AI is now woven into our day-to-day lives, and some of our skills and abilities are slipping as a result. Maybe the most common sentence of the future will be, “Why learn that when AI can do it for you?” This is a stark reality, and it will shape curricula, teaching and learning, and how knowledge passes from teacher to student.
AI will deskill all of us… unless we make a conscious effort.
As a software engineer, I’m watching myself get deskilled. Because I can see it happening, I know what to do to slow it down. I know I’ll eventually be deskilled and dependent on prompts and responses from servers in San Francisco, but I intend to put up a really good fight. In the past year I’ve volunteered with teams that built, tested and shipped products in 60 days that would otherwise have taken about a year, payment gateways included! Yes, you read that right. Osu meji pere (2 months only). There were times I had to go into the codebase myself, because the AI was writing nonsense or, in Claude’s case, being very stubborn. I know that won’t last long, because AI will only get better.
I remember my first AI-powered application, Orunmila (dot) ai. It was a RAG application that broke documents down into vector objects bla bla bla. I did most of the heavy lifting myself: choosing the vector database (I used Weaviate), choosing a model, writing the Spring Boot connectors. It was fun. Not the coding, but the learning. Today, in 2026, Claude can build a complete RAG application for me in 10 minutes, and my only effort is writing the prompt. That’s just one example from software engineering.
Ever since I started coding in Java, I followed every JDK release to learn the new features and how the language as a whole was changing. In the J2SE days I never missed a release. Now I can’t remember the last time I read release notes or watched a YouTube video on what’s new in Spring Boot. Sadly, AI does all of that now. It follows the best practices of the standard toolchain as soon as they’re released. I even taught it to code like me, down to how I name my variables, without the flowery nonsense that sometimes comes with AI-generated code. In a nutshell, the more I teach the machine, the less of me I become.
Don’t even get me started on UI/UX designers. I have a lot of sympathy for them, and if there are any still left, please pick up another IT skill. With the release of Claude Design, the game was up long ago. AI will do the wireframes and the web and mobile designs, complete with assets and fonts, in minutes. That isn’t just deskilling. It’s erasing an entire profession, and there’s more of this to come.
As for the skills we call “handwork”, like this one here, I shall look away.
On the other side of my coin, I do a lot of development policy work, and I enjoy research too: the kind that has me reading four papers just to write 200 words. AI can swallow megabytes of PDFs, read them and work magic with their contents in the time it takes to make coffee. That’s amazing, and also scary. I worry the focus will shift to just producing research, not learning through research. Papers will be produced in record time, YES… but that’s us skipping a step. Cold water has to pass through warm before it gets hot. With AI, it goes from -100 to 100 degrees in seconds.
AI is efficient, learns fast and saves a lot of time on otherwise very complex projects. But society still needs to be skilled enough to maintain AI and keep it in its place… as an assistant. I also worry that, just as societies have a financial pyramid where those at the top decide the earnings and welfare of those at the bottom, we’re building the same pyramid with AI. Practically every profession is now powered with or by AI, from medicine to engineering to manufacturing. It’s an inevitable consequence of our quest for more knowledge.
So what can we do to make sure we don’t end up like some African intellectuals on social media, with 4GB of confidence and 2KB of knowledge or historical awareness on important subjects? How do we make sure that, as we apply AI to everything we do, we aren’t just becoming empty?
What say you?
But hey, as long as AI cannot perform Sipi Tau or Siva Tau…or render with the deepest emotions, the words and chants of Haka Tika Tonu…. I am good 🙂
My flight lands in 2 hours. Let me get some sleep… hopefully I’ll find the answers in my dreams.