Will AI and Automation cause us to lose the ability to operate the known world? Is this Wall-E on the horizon? It's a difficult question to answer. However, lets start by consulting history.

• Plato, ~370 BC. In the Phaedrus, Socrates has the Egyptian king Thamus reject the invention of writing: it will produce forgetfulness, because people will trust external marks instead of their own memory, and it will give them the appearance of wisdom without the reality. Outcome: he was half right. Oral memory feats (reciting the Iliad) genuinely vanished as a common skill. And writing enabled everything else. The skill was lost; the capability grew; the cost landed on a specific faculty nobody chose to keep.
• The printing press, 1400s–1500s. The abbot Trithemius wrote In Praise of Scribes (1492) arguing monks should keep copying by hand — printed books wouldn't last, and copying was how you learned the text. Conrad Gessner warned of information overload. Outcome: scribal skill died within a generation; literacy exploded.
• Calculators and arithmetic, 1970s. The debate is documented at length and had an unusually clean natural experiment: mental arithmetic fluency measurably declined, and the response was to redefine what math education was for (estimation, reasoning) rather than to ban the tool. Outcome: Our modern world is built around calculation and computation, and math and science advances have skyrocketted, including the creation of AI. 
• Bainbridge's "Ironies of Automation" (1983). Her argument is precise: automation takes over the easy, frequent cases, so operators stop practicing; but automation hands back control exactly in the rare, hard cases — so the human must handle the hardest situations with the most atrophied skill. Air France 447 (2009) is the canonical instance: autopilot disconnected in a storm, and a crew who had rarely hand-flown at altitude stalled a healthy aircraft into the ocean. Outcome: Atrophied skills have been replaced with systems and backups systems and checklists and redundancy. Judged by fatalities per passenger-mile, commercial aviation is among the safest human activities. 

The pattern across all of them: the tedious skill embedded in doing the thing disappears, because nobody assigns it practice and it adds little over the automation. What replaces it is not the old skill revived — it's a new one, shaped by the tool's failure modes: using the tool, diagnosing it, building the checklists and backups around it. The real cost of every automation in history has been the same: the lag between adopting the tool and learning to use it well. Aviation paid that lag in crashes. We get to pay it in something cheaper, if we name the skill early.

My hope? We are headed to a future with more opportunity for creative challenge than ever, because AI is compressing more tasks into automation of the tedious than any previous technology, ever, by a wide margin. Which will leave our human cycles for the truly value-add creative work in the new frontiers beyond current AI technology. And if you think that frontier does not exist, we will miss you on the other side.