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I guess I don't see the actual conflict here; it feels like it's conflating several things. People don't have to know the internals to know if something works for them, and they don't need to be able to build the internals to describe something that works for them. "They won't even be able to judge if what it has done is desirable" feels just wrong if we aren't including "the internal structure" in the list of things that matter for desirability, and in a world where an AI can rebuild the internal structure at the snap of a finger, maybe "the internal structure" is something we shouldn't care about as much.
I think it depends on the product. Certainly with some products it is very easy to judge what you want.
I will tell a personal story: I was trying to figure out a way to organize, catalogue and track some data presented in a messy way on [public website]. My AI (Claude Opus) suggested a couple of options for standalone applications, while pointing out that both cases were tricky since they would need to ping the website to pull in the data, generating associated problems.
I said "let's just make it a browser extension," which sidestepped the problems and was perfectly suitable for my needs.
Someone with less technical expertise than myself who had to lean on the AI to have the best idea would have made an inferior product. Someone with more technical expertise than myself might have made a better product, being even better able than I was to guide the AI. (Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if you've already thought of one just reading this.)
If people decide collectively they don't need to build expertise because they think they can get AI to do everything, they will be worse at using AI, which will make their products worse (which could in turn poison the training data well and make the AI worse).
I mean, you're not wrong . . . but you know what would also make them worse at using AI? Not having AI available to use.
At some point there's just a limited amount of time to learn in. Yes, certainly it would be great if I could absorb the entire accumulated knowledge of humanity. But I can't. I don't have the millennia required to do that, especially because there's always a tradeoff between "learning things" and "doing things".
AI removes a bunch of the minimum-training requirements to accomplish many things, while simultaneously making some things far far faster to do. I don't pretend to understand where the new balance will land - that's two giant changes at the same time - but I am confident that in the end, for any reasonable definition of "accomplishment" that combines both quality and quantity, people will be accomplishing a lot more than they were before.
Some people will be doing this by learning the fundamentals anyway, some won't, and I'm okay with that.
To be clear, my concern is that culture will shift away from a culture where some people learn the fundamentals. Some people will still do so, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, but having institutions (such as schools) roll over (...more) on the need to instill understanding would be a mistake.
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