steve jobs famously called the personal computer "a bicycle for the mind", in that it's a tool that makes you more efficient. calling language models "an automobile for the mind" in that it gets you there very quickly, without any expended effort, locks you into specific intrastructure, and is bad for the environment, seems pretty apt.
this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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locks you into
Can't go wrong with offline and open-source!
Locking in in this context means that you're relying on an LLM for your problem solving - atrophying your skills in the meantime, making you dependent on a model. So you can indeed go wrong with open weight abd self hosted ones. At least thats my understanding of this.
Here's the scary part... The skill of developers has been for about 20 years: "look it up on stack overflow. Find a similar problem. Fix it to suit my environment."
But... No one is posting to stack overflow anymore. So LLMs have effectively become stack overflow.
I try to not let the skill atrophy by doing it the old way. Can't. The well is running dry.
What I will say is that LLMs make parsing logs a lot easier. So, doing things the old old fashioned way is still in the cards.
It's weird out here.
No one is posting to stack overflow anymore. So LLMs have effectively become stack overflow.
Remember when Google gave relevant search results? Pepperidge Farm remembers….
it wasn't what i was getting at, but that's also true. the model requires a certain setup to be effective, so now you're locked into that. the model does things a certain way, so now you're locked into that. nobody reads the code it produces, so now you're locked into that.
all the while every other way of doing things disappears from your mind.
considering the massive accidents of models deleting codebases and production db's, the fact that the tool may be open source doesn't really help.
besides, i don't know any open source models. i know of open-weight models, but i've yet to see anyone share the training regime and source data for an even vaguely effective model.
This would be the same Steve Jobs that thought an all-fruit diet both killed cancer and made it so he didn't have to shower? The one who died when Eliza was still state of the art?
Broken clock etc
Well, you sorta have to be a little mad (crazy) to invent touchscreen phones, no?
just like the only guy to win two unshared nobel prizes, yes
The analogy is flawed:
The car gave mere humans superhuman traveling abilities.
AI gives Big Tech unprecedented surveillance power and control over the entire society, but puts people out of work and debases everything it touches.
Cars empowered people. AI empowers corporate fascists.
Cars empowered people at first.
But look at every single american town or city and you will see that it crippled them, made them dependent and robbed them of their freedom.
Maybe you should post this showerthought in the "fuck cars" community where more people might agree with your hot take.
Otherwise most of us know that cars are what you make of them. You can choose to walk a few miles a few times a week to run errands, even if you have the option to drive. This is how I live my life. I guess I live in what some people would call a "15 minute city" where everything we need is within walkable distance. So we're all healthy fit & get fresh air & exercise every day simply by living here. I also have this automobile to drive me over 100 miles in 2 hours which is what I'm doing tonight which would be impossible for me to walk or run or bike that distance in 2 hours.
I wouldn't exactly call this a hot take showerthought if you look at how many studies there already are that show the effects of car dependency in most of north america.
I am german, my work place is 700m away from where i live, the next supermarket is 450 meters away and i don't live in a big city where those numbers could go down to under 100m.
So, i know that my "hot take" is not true for most parts of the world. But my statement was specifically about american cities and towns. There is also the very big problem of segregation of incomes. If you can't afford a car, you can't afford to live in certain neighborhoods because you simply can't walk 15 minutes to the next supermarket or to your work.
And i cannot NOT call this crippling and robbing of freedom.
I am 100% with you on the fact that cars also enable freedom. And as i much as i rely on public transport, i also enjoy the freedom of simply hopping into my car and drive exactly where i want and when i want.
But depending on where you live, a car is a necessity instead of a "freedom-enabler" and that... is crippling....
That is great that you live in a walkable area. They were saying that cars have destroyed areas by making them non walkable. And that's not necessarily the residents fault, and a lot of the people that live there probably want it do be different but aren't able to move.
Cars don't empower people. We've had "super human" travailing abilities long before the car. Cars take away freedom. I don't understand how being forced to use one method of travel for daily commute is empowering.
I've come to dislike the word empowered. In recent times it is, more often than not, used to gaslight people into accepting something that has far more negative consequences than positive.
So obviously you don't like cars, that's fine, I respect that. But your comment makes no sense. It's like if I said, "I don't like cake, I don't understand how being forced to eat cake every day is enjoyable."
Having a car does not force you to drive it. Not having a car forces you to NOT drive it.
You can hate cars, hell, you can hate me just for having one, but saying it FORCES you to drive it everyday is just nonsense.
I don't hate cars, I like mechanical shit. I hate not being able to commute without one because that's how my country has built its towns and cities. The buses are shit, there are no trains and walking is out of the question because the pedestrian infrastructure is unsafe or non existent.
It's not your or any others singular car forcing anyone to drive. It's the expectation that an adult person can drive and needs to use a car that forces or at least pushes everything towards driving.
If the design and soundscape of almost any space weren't impacted negatively by cars I wouldn't think they'd be forcing anything onto me. But that is reality even in nominally not car dependent inner city Germany. So that's why I hate cars.
I don't understand how being forced to use one method of travel for daily commute is empowering.
You're.. what? You're not forced to work where you work; you can change to a closer workplace. Cars made it possible at all to go as far as you can for work. How do they remove freedom if they increase your options for where you can go?
I wonder if the most objective viewpoint is just that of neutrality; it's not better nor worse but just different. EVs sourcing from nuclear energy are probably objectively better.
What? I should just change jobs? What the fuck? I feel so empowered.
What's the problem? Unless you got forcibly relocated to a different branch or something midway through your career at a certain workplace, you knew exactly what the distance was from your home when you first applied, no? Alternatively, you could move closer to work, which is literally what I did and cut my commute by ⅔s. I wish my infrastructure had better public transit, too, but all I'm saying is there are usually ways out there to reduce the pain that you can try.
", in theory." Should probably be added to the statement that you can change workplaces. Cost of living, availability of good paying jobs, and a variety of factors work into that flow.
Fair...
~~AI~~ LLMs empower little people, too, though. They've taught me spreadsheet formulas and ways to use them at my job that I didn't even know existed. Granted, I didn't take any Excel course, and they didn't always work on their own (as expected of LLMs), but they at least gave me enough ideas to find out superior ways to manage my daily data.
That’s like saying getting injured in a car accident empowered you because it taught you humility.
Like props on finding the silver lining but it is objectively not a good thing for you and you shouldn’t view the event with gratitude
That's a wild analogy. How did it hurt me versus finally solving my frustration from being unable to find solutions online? I check manually first...
And it does not take away jobs because it messes up too much anyway in deeper stuff. Those who were laid off will be back soon enough, probably with better employers. All the "replacement" going on in big tech is only mounting technical debt from its incompetence; the bubble will burst spectacularly over the coming months or years. With that said, for bite-sized, instantly verifiable tasks, I think it's mostly okay if you at least tried to figure out the solution on your own first.
It harms you in the form of directly causing cognitive decline.
Just look at the way you have advocated for it within this very comment. You argue that it’s a valid “pressure release valve”, an avenue to seek solutions when you are otherwise frustrated.
Those moments, the ones where you have seemingly exhausted all possibilities, are the ones where your mind starts working. You are training yourself to interrupt the process. You can tell yourself this story about how you attempted to make an effort first, but the truth is your patience for that will get smaller every day.
And then what’s the plan? Why would I hire someone who is ultimately totally interchangeable with all the other prompters who can only forward what AI told them? Why would I give you a raise when I could just replace you with someone equally capable of reading off “AI solutions”?
Where are these “better employers” who will “probably” save you going to come from, and why would they bother? Is that assessment based on anything in particular? Why go to bat like this over something you can only call “mostly okay” for particularly small tasks?
People argued the same about calculators.
Is this just your bit? Make an inflammatory quip then edit in an entirely different paragraph after the person responds?
It will make below average people seem more like current average intelligence once they learn how to skillfully use AI. Collectively it will reduce overall intelligence and increase reliance on technology just like the Internet and smart phone have done. No high horse here, I'm just as guilty. But the AI rott will be a very big issue in the coming generations just like Internet rott has become a big issue with gen Z and gen Alpha.
Reading, writing, social skills, and general life skills are at an all time low already.
And that is not a byproduct, it's like that by design.
No, I whole heartedly believe that the scientists who made the first LLM, before openai got involved, did not have malicious intent.
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I don't believe LLMs are inherently evil. They can in some situations be the right tool to use. Unfortunately they came in a time where technical literacy was already declining and was also pushed by greedy corporations and investors. It's no the tool but rather how or by whom it's being used that's the problem.
If we start treating it like the auxiliary tool it's instead of the primary developer, writer, and manager, it becomes just another tool to support the process instead of replacing human skill and critical thinking. Just like how the computer and calculators did not replace professionals but made them more efficient, or how the internet and stack overflow didn't replace problem solving and critical thinking but made the process faster and gave you time to focus on more important tasks.
Coming back to OPs analogy, cars aren't inherently evil but it's the culture associated with them. With the right adaptation, technology, and infrastructure they can be a very amazing tool without replacing walking or human skill. If you're concerned about the environment we can find sustainable solutions (EVs), if you're concerned about loosing the human aspect you can find a human-first solution (infrastructure that rewards walking and public transport for short travel but allows car for long-distance or in emergency).
The issue is not with the technology itself but how we've been using it and how greedy individuals are pushing the unhealthy version for their own benefits despite a healthy adoption being possible.
The non-evil version unfortuntaely depends on nobody involved having any profit motive.
The Industrial Revolution should have been a turning point where our ability to build advanced tools meant the workload on humans was reduced. Instead of liberating people from the demands of hard labor sunup to sundown just to survive, it kept them toiling the same amount of hours but with ever increasing output demands. A person with a combine can clear exponentially more acres of wheat in a day than a team of people with sickles, but they still have to spend all day doing it just to survive. There was no gain for the worker, only the maximizing of profits for the bourgeoisie. If in their spare time the worker is a couch potato it’s because they’re too exhausted to pursue self-actualizing hobbies and still to close to broke to pursue them in the first place.
AI is coming in as more of an assault on the upper half of the workforce. I’m sure eventually it could find ways to eliminate construction workers, utility/infrastructure maintenance, mechanics, ag workers, but first they’re pushing out the jobs that require more mental labor than physical. It’s a double win. A programmer who loses their job to AI doesn’t cease to exist, they still need to work to survive in this system. If the only jobs available to humans are physical labor they’ll eventually compete to take the job, and that competition for dwindling jobs means employers can lower wages. If people are pushed to the point where their only option for income is a $7.25/hr job at McDonalds, they’ll either take it or accept poverty. I doubt they even want to use AI to takeover manual labor jobs because there’s no point in wasting the natural human resource that exists to exploit. That’s all we are to them, a resource to exploit, and unlike Artifical Intelligence, Human Intelligence has its own mechanical interface built in. You don’t even have to build them, they self replicate.
Until we start demanding that technology and advancements (physical or digital) are not output multipliers but tools that reduce the labor humans must expend to produce sufficient output to meet the needs of society, we will be exploited.
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