I don’t think this is the right take.

To take the car analogy: it matters how we use the car.

The car in itself can be used to save time and energy that would otherwise be used to walk to places. That extra time and energy can be used well, or poorly.

- It can be squandered by having a longer commute that defeats the point

- Alternatively, it can be wasted by sitting on a couch consuming Netflix or TikTok

- Alternatively, it can be used productively, by playing team sports with friends, or chasing your kids through the park, or building a chicken coop in your back yard

It’s all about wise usage. Yes it can be used as a way to destroy your own body and waste your time and attention, but also it can be used as a tool to deploy your resources better, for example in physical activities that are fun and social rather than required drudgery.

I think it’s the same for LLMs. Managers and executives have always delegated the engineering work, and even researching and writing reports. It matters whether we find places to continue to challenge and deploy our cognition, or completely settle back, delegate everything to the LLM and scroll TikTok while it works.

"The Medium is the Message" applies... or some analogy to that idea.

Yes, individuals have choices. But in a collective, dynamics occur and those dynamics can't usually be overcome by individuals.

Social media could be used differently, but the way it exists Irl is determined by the nature of the medium, the economic structure and other things outside of individuals' control.

OK but the car DID have the effects that Kyle described. The fact that you have to imagine a world where people collectively made some other "wiser" decision about how to use cars perfectly demonstrates that those decision's don't happen. In some cases it's because because other choices seemed rational, some times because people are irrational, and some times because of the prisoner-dilemma like situation where multiple people making the rational individual choice results in an irrational choice for all of society.

Kyle' recommendation to stop/slow using AI is phrased as another individual choice, but given that lesson I think it's appropriate to interpret it as a collective choice - collective through regulation, collective resistance etc.

While I agree in principle, I don’t know how much faith is warranted in humans using it wisely in practice.