> I’m not convinced that LLMs are the future. I’m certainly not convinced that they’re the future I want. But what I’m most certain of is that we have choices about what our future should look like, and how we choose to use machines to build it.

It seems to me that you’ve missed OP’s point. The internet was an indeed promising technology - that has been turned to mass surveillance, polarization, and had a not insignificant role in the rise of authoritarianism in the global north. Positive things have indeed come out of it too, like Wikipedia. Are we better off on balance? I’m not sure.

OP’s point, as I read it, is that we should choose our own future. LLMs indeed hold promise - your example of automatic program generation. But they also accelerate climate change and water scarcity, and are tools for mass surveillance and Kafkaesque algorithmic decision making - from Gaza to health insurance.

There seems to be a widespread notion - found for example in Sam Altman’s promotions - that equates technology with progress. But whether technology amounts to progress on balance - whether the good outweighs the bad - is up to us; it’s something we choose, collectively. When we treat something as inevitable, on the other hand, we give up our collective agency and hand it over to the most irresponsible and dangerous members of our society. That’s how we find ourselves suffering poisonous outcomes.