>Why aren't LLM's just the tractors of the Information Age?

We didn't have every company and every government in the world spending trillions of dollars to completely reorganize society and technology around tractors, and to force them into every possible aspect of our lives whether people want them or not, to the point that tractors are all but existentially necessary to maintain our technological civilization.

We didn't have billionaires with deeply entrenched political interests believing in a cult of neo-fascist "tractor accelerationism."

We didn't have people forming parasocial relationships with tractors so deep and profound that they superceded their relationships with real people, and subsumed their own identities. Tractors didn't gaslight people into insanity and suicide. There's no such thing as "tractor psychosis." No one committed murder to pacify the Tractor Basilisk.

Tractors didn't flood every form of media with misinformation and slop that in a decade's time will make subjective reality and history utterly indecipherable from its own gibberish.

No one believed that tractors would lead to a perfect post-scarcity utopia... somehow. But only when everyone submits to tractors and the new world order that tractors will create and accepts that tractors are the new reality and that they just have to learn to live with that, regardless of any harm they might do.

No one forgot how to farm because they used tractors. There was no mass loss of farming knowledge or "deskilling," or degradation of cognitive or social abilities that came with using tractors.

There was no one complaining about how utterly meaningless farming had become now that tractors came along, but they themselves had become so addicted to tractor-maxxing that they couldn't simply stop.

And on top of that, no one wanted to replace farmers entirely with tractors, just because tractors didn't need to be paid. And then the plumbers. And the architects. And the cooks. And the doctors. And eventually the judges, police and politicians.

LLMs are very obviously not the tractors of the information age. If they were, Hacker News wouldn't be consumed by them. People wouldn't talk about them with the same awe and passion usually reserved for religion.

Your complaints are about the algorithmic feed, and civilizational over-dependence on mobile phones and feeds. I'm with you on that and I do wish AI wasn't introduced in that particular environment.

However behind it all most token usage is driven by automating TPS reports and writing code [1]. In that dominant token usage context, the LLM is clearly just a boring old tractor.

Yes, some people are falling in love with their tractor because of an existing technology that has opened us up to that possibility, but that doesn't change the fact that the tractor is mostly being used to till the farm and that our algorithm driven media environment no longer allows coverage of that because its too boring.

[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/research/economic-index-june-2026-...