This is the conceit of knowledge work in general. You're only as relevant as much as you keep up.
It's why it continues to tend young.
The older you get, the more opinionated you get and with opinions come inflexibility so the less you are open to new ways of thinking, even those which may be superior.
Essentially people have criticisms of newer tools that have become industry standards as unnecessary and inferior.
Regardless of the merits of that argument, the new tooling is where the industry is at. The best hackers I know are extreme versions of this. Increasing dissagreability appears to be the crucial flaw of competency unless you work hard to avoid it.
The most extreme version of this I remember was about 20 years ago when I met a man of about 55 who was clearly a very brilliant computer engineer with impressive credentials that I have forgotten (a prestigious PhD and work history) but said he had always dismissed microcomputers, yes, as in not minicomputers and mainframes as toys and a waste of time. This was like 2002. I was still in college then and I vowed to never become that guy.
I was reminded that Karate borrows the term Shoshin (beginner's mind) from Buddhism to express overcoming this dialectical.
In the world of martial arts this is expressed essentially by the fact that you work with the same people so this tends to a false sense of generality in ones understanding. Within any particular discipline there's confinements because there's a core focus and rubric of things you do with is necessarily exclusionary and reductive because of the constraints of time.
Serious martial arts practitioners (think career professionals) claim people will plateau indefinitely, as in for the remainder of their lives, unless they effectively practice shoshin. This can go in odd directions. Take George Dillman for example, who has developed a mechanism that he, and maybe nobody, really understands and as a result he's considered a fraud although he and his students experience it as genuine.
True shoshin demands an open investigation as to why, where, and how people feel a mechanism and a good faith assumption that there's something poorly understood there.
People will widely agree with the concept of shoshin but when it's demonstrated with an example, that previous consensus disappears. It's not easy or popular.
Which learning? If anything AI will render (highly) skilled humans even more relevant in most creative fields: the literature translator and it's ability to transfer emotion, the artist that can create art outside AI reach, the software engineer who can architect a solution, etc.
What is menaced is low to mid quality work, and less educated/skilled people. This is in my opinion where the real danger of AI lies: a world where it's so easy to let a program write an email that the sheer ability to think about it's content, then type it is lost to the majority. Some with anything requiring some effort the learn. This will exacerbate the divide between classes, with a handful people who can understand and act on the world, and those who don't.
Learning itself is not obsolete. Burning scarce time on arcana associated with various platforms and libraries may become so.
The various LLMs are decently good at recreating known solutions to problems that may require arcane knowledge, which covers a lot of human memory. Is there something lost here? Probably. But who yet knows what may replace it.
It reminds me of the days when electronics hobbyists -- and plenty of older engineers -- had to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the vacuum-tube era.
