I am very pro learning, but I also have basically seen that our society doesn't value it. We're anti expertise to our detriment. I like figuring things out and learning... But I am not sure that that's any more than an opinion I hold. If the learning doesn't help you in life, I have a hard time defending it as more than a preference.

I guess what I'm trying to say is - my values and motivations aren't the only ones, and I can't prove them as the right ones. If someone is primarily motivated by making money, learning is a little correlated with that, but it's not overwhelmingly so. More specifically - writing ChatGPT style essays are something I believe plenty of people have lucrative careers without ever doing.

I not even convinced college has positive ROI anymore. In that context, the output is the issue. In the context of most jobs it is also the issue.

Maybe this analogy will help - do you feel that all the people taking better pictures than ever thanks to AI in their cellphone cameras and automatic post processing have missed an important skill of working out ISO, aperture and shutter speed? Do you think they would mostly agree those skills are useful? Are there a lot of jobs for "camera technicians" where the manual settings are what they're hired for?

Now, I agree that in my analogy - if you know how the settings relate to freezing motion or background blur or whatever, you can take better pictures and likely have a higher hit rate. But I don't think the world prioritizes that, and I am not sure in the bigger picture they are wrong.