There's an undercurrent in a lot of writings like this that don't seem to grasp that LLMs enable access to a ton of knowledge that was otherwise out of reach for a ton of people.

I'll give an example. I just traveled to Serbia, and I went on a run through a park in New Belgrade, where I saw a monument written in Cyrillic. I snapped a pic of it and uploaded it to Claude; it translated and gave me some context.

I thought this was amazing!

But I'm sure someone could point out that I took a mental shortcut, that I made myself dumber by not grasping Serbian and Cyrillic to have a go at translating myself. Or they could say that I lost the human connection that would have come by finding a resident who spoke English and asking about what that meant.

In a sense, this are plausible critiques. But the reality is that I was on a run, and I almost certainly never would have done those things if Claude (or smartphones with cameras, for that matter) didn't exist. I didn't become lazier or lose the imperfections of human connections, the whole thing was a net add for me.

And so, in that light - it's okay to use a recipe book, or ask an LLM about fly fishing, or do some web searches to get some advice about how to write a wedding toast.

If that's missing the point somehow, so be it. Perhaps you could enlighten me (and thus cultivate a human connection)!

I was young, but I remember a world before the internet was widespread. I was also an adult for years before I had it in my pocket. In these Before Times, there were often conversations that would meander for minutes about some fact that would be trivially verifiable if we had an internet-connected computer nearby: who was the other lead in that movie? who was the first non-Italian Pope? Is Moldova landlocked? Once we exhausted our local supply of half-remembered knowledge about the subject, we would have to just say "well, who knows eh?" and go about whatever it was we were doing. It may be nostalgia talking, but I miss this. Even if I'm game to keep it up for a while before pulling out my phone, somebody else won't be, and the conversation will usually peter out (at least for a while) once we for-sure know the answer. I remember calling the library reference desk from the phone behind a bar to settle arguments (once free long distance became a thing, you could justify calling west coast libraries during east coast happy hour). Now they're settled before they even really get going.

I've also taken several trips to Europe and only on the last one did it make financial sense for me to get a local data plan. I admit that the language of the country we visit is kind of a hobby of mine, and so talking to the locals is a lot of the fun of going, but even if that's not the case, what's wrong with a little mystery? You can snap the photo, and then for years down the rode if you show it to somebody, you can say "Here's a cool statue I saw in Serbia, but I'll be damned if I can tell you what the inscription on the plinth says." Or even 3 years ago, you probably would have posted it to $SOCIAL_MEDIA_PLATFORM with a caption like "Who can tell me what this says?" and perhaps even gotten a reply from somebody in the same city you were in and made a little connection.

I don't think that's what the page talks about. There are lots of _valid_ opportunities in our day-to-day lives where we'd benefit _so much_ from doing the research, struggle with a problem or reach out to someone ourselves instead of just asking an LLM -- but we just take a shortcut.

I wouldn'tve asked a stranger in a park in Serbia about a statue, but I do recognize that:

- I'm not thinking for myself almost at all when writing code, just orchestrating the work.

- I don't google to learn about topics/questions that come up, i just ask Claude for a summary.

- I don't reach out to people around me if I can just write a prompt.

And it feels like I'm consuming so much more information but retaining only the surface levels of it.

I think the point is that when you get into the habit of asking the AI because it’s always immediately available, you inevitably miss the opportunities that asking other people provides, or even the serendipities that happen when looking up books and websites and videos about a thing.

[delayed]