Neither the original 1987 story nor the blog post make any sense to me. I feel the authors are focused on a niche aspect: exchanging deep human thoughts with other humans. For that use case, sure, don’t use a computer, don’t use AI.

But there’s nothing wrong with a car made by a robot factory. The car is useful, regardless of how it was made. AI lets some people create new products, those may be useful.

Probably not the author's point but to me, the takeaway is that these people are driven by emotion and can't be won over with rational arguments. They have an emotional attachment to their old ways, a fear of being obsoleted, a wish that there is something truly special and mysterious about humans, etc.

the point I see is that even if you automate all that is possible to automate, there are some core activities that can't be delegated to machines in order for a product to feel very good. May it be the design, or whatever: I don't have an opinion on which aspect must be curated by a human, but some aspect has to. Maybe this aspect is simply AI review and prompting, or AI infrastructure creation and maintenance... I don't know. But the point is that this part of production exists, and it's what makes a useful product something you want to buy more than another useful product.

I'm pretty undecided on where I stand on LLMs, but I have to point out that I use them before making my point. The thing with AI is that the output we get from it is not deterministic. With assembly lines you can get a good enough deterministic output (having component failures in mind) that everything is gonna be fine. I've never been to a car factory, but I'm sure there are guard rails in place to ensure minimum damage if something goes wrong. There is simply not such a thing with AI, thus the programmer has to be the guardrail. The blog post leans a bit heavy into sentimental words for the programmer's mind, but I'm guessing this is what they mean by the "deep human thoughts" part.