It’s not mutually exclusive. LLMs aren’t doing the same job as social encouragement to do better.

There’s also limit to how much you can expect coworkers, friends, and family to review your work. An LLM can act as a rubber duck debug partner or a reviewer hundreds of times per time. You cannot have friends and family at your service all day.

> This used to be the job of our friends, families, and coworkers: To push us harder. I think we are losing something.

No, and if you think that, your friends, family, and coworkers probably don't like you that much. You can push yourself harder for someone else, but it is and has always been something you do. Making it everyone else's problem to improve you makes you a codependent asshole. You can and should find purpose and meaning, even motivation and inspiration in others. It is not anyone's "job" to make you a better person.

That's precisely the kind of thinking that's landed us in the mess we're in. Abdication of personal responsibility. Shifting blame and responsibility from yourself onto anyone nearby. It is your job to make yourself a better person for the people around you. Not the other way around.

Why can’t they continue to do so?

If anything an underlying truth about humanity is being exposed: we take the easy way out far more often than we’d like to admit.

Perhaps, this truth being made explicit is a wakeup call that will teach us the value of that hard work anew.

After all, nothing the author’s written isn’t also true about Google, but nobody realized how bad of a mistake that was.

Odd. I never had any friends, families, or coworkers who were willing to be available for a dozen rough drafts. I've only had ones who were willing to talk during the idea stage, or after it was closer to a final speech.

For me, AI gives me feedback at places that I wouldn't have received it before. It does not replace the human feedback that I still look for.

You could make the same argument for the internet pre-LLM; it could be relied upon over immediate connections. It's also reminiscent of Socrates's skepticism of written text over oral tradition.

Speeches haven't gone away, videos are more popular than ever, and consulting within our social circle will continue on.

I think there's something to be said about there being an isolationist phenomenon in society that might be contributing in part to low fertility, but that significantly pre-dates LLMs. It's easy and convenient for us to be alone - people create friction. We've been entertained by the TV set for a century now. That said, we remain social creatures and enduringly have a need to be with others, at least to some extent.