We live in an age of generative AI services, and summarization services are appearing in great numbers among them. Everyone already knows this, so it hardly needs mentioning, but there's ChatGPT, which summarizes text for you, and services like Lillys, which summarize the content of YouTube videos.
No matter how far AI services advance, there is an ability you must never depend on them for: summarizing. To put it in fancier terms, the ability to abstract. The moment a knowledge worker hands their abstraction skills over to someone else, their competitiveness will vanish at a rapid pace. It's like an athlete having a robot lift the barbell they're supposed to lift, or a pianist having a robot play the pieces they're supposed to practice every day. You must never depend on someone else for the ability to abstract. You have to train it every day.
They say the ability to ask questions will matter even more in the coming era. I agree. That's exactly why the ability to abstract will become even more important: the ability to look at an idea from a more macro perspective. An abstracted idea is easy to connect to the mental models I already have. An idea that has been abstracted and connected that way makes it easy to ask questions from a macro perspective, or to ask questions built on other ideas. (Aren't Zettelkasten permanent notes linked to one another?)
And if you keep using summarization services, you'll also lose the patience to dig deep into content. After all, reading only the summary makes you feel like you roughly know what it's about. (The Dunning-Kruger effect.) In truth, the details are what matter in all content. Knowing a superficial summary is meaningless, because problems arise when you try to apply it.
Of course, there are moments when summarized content shines. It's when you want a rough idea of a particular concept, or when you're deciding whether to dive deeper into a piece of content. After all, we live in an age of information overload. You look at the summary, judge whether this is information that matters to you right now, and decide whether to go further down the rabbit hole.