Humans are tool users. It is very difficult to pick a point in time and say, "it was here that we crossed the Rubicon". Was it the advent of spoken word? Written word? Fire? The wheel? The horse? The axe? Or in more modern times, the automobile, calculator, or dare I say the computer and the internet?
"With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism."
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Are we at battle with LLMs or with humanity itself?
> It’s really about basic human personal insecurity, and we all have that, to some degree. Getting around it, is a big part of growing up (...)
I believe he's right.
It makes me think back to my teenage years, when I first learned to program because I wanted to make games. Within the amateur gamedev community, we had this habit of sneering at "clickers" - Klik&Play & other kinds of software we'd today call "low-code", that let you make games with very little code (almost entirely game logic, and most of it "clicked out" in GUI), and near-zero effort on the incidental aspects like graphics, audio, asset management, etc. We were all making (or pretending to make) games within scope of those "clickers", but using such tools felt like cheating compared to doing it The Right Way, slinging C++ through blood, sweat and tears.
It took me over a decade to finally realize how stupid that perspective was. Sure, I've learned a lot; a good chunk of my career skills date back to those years. However, whatever technical arguments we levied against "clickers", most of them were bullshit. In reality, this was us trying to feel better, special, doing things The Hard Way, instead of "taking shortcuts" like those lazy people... who, unlike us, actually released some playable games.
I hear echoes of this mindset in a lot of "LLMs will rot your brain" commentary these days.
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[0] - https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=43351486