Yeah, the current LLM dilemma isn't really analogous. Offloading a task like multiplying two numbers is (A) safely reliable and (B) isn't delegating planning or decision-making.
> The average person [...] stopped doing math at the grocery store and became docile enough to allow the rise of modern consumer economics, Uber, Doordash, Klarna.
Disagree on this one: Wasteful spending by consumers (and vendors encouraging it) is a very old problem, much older than calculators or any withering of daily algebra skills. If anything, people have better/faster capabilities to see the "big picture" of how much a service is ripping them off than ever before.
I think a better explanation would be stuff like the psychological distance created when using digital payments (as opposed to cash or handwritten checks) and companies getting better tools for advertising/brain-hacking.
The average person didn't take freedom from manual long division to unlock whole new ways of mastering math, they stopped doing math at the grocery store and became docile enough to allow the rise of modern consumer economics, Uber, Doordash, Klarna.
And I don't know what invoking the obsolescence of horses is supposed to achieve. Yes, there are fewer horses for roles today. No, the remaining horse population hasn't been uplifted to whole new ways of thinking about labor and transportation. (I'm probably leaving myself open to a counter that today there are many horses living lives of leisure as pets.)
You're not going to find a sufficient historical analogue to general thought being the skill we no longer have to practice, you have to engage in new thought about the qualitative difference of this situation.