> Beautifully written essay.

Agreed! Great flow, structure, no BS, really good!

I would wager this didn't use LLM help to be written. Though if I'm wrong I'd really like to know and would be very impressed. (And if I'm right then the article is an illustration of its own message. You don't learn how to write such essays without having practised it for many years without opting for the easy way of letting the LLM do this for you.)

From the post, “and the incentive structures we have built are the experimental apparatus.” That’s a Claude sentence.

It was definitely written with significant LLM assistance. It's very obvious, and the essay is not good.

> The Waymo effect: how AI is *quietly* making research less collaborative

> The Waymo arrived with the serene confidence of a machine that has never once worried about where to find parking, and I climbed into the back seat, glanced instinctively at the driver’s seat to say hello, and found myself nodding politely at an empty chair.

> No obligation to make conversation. No silent negotiation over the radio. A guilt-free space to be alone with one's thoughts, finish an email, or take a call en route without the awkwardness about conducting it in front of a stranger. The car was quiet, smooth and entirely undemanding.

> The collaborator’s inconvenience, in other words, is *not a bug* in the collaboration; it largely is the collaboration. The value of another mind *lies exactly in the ways* it refuses to be an extension of your own.

It absolutely was used, and heavily. I won't even cover the "it's not ___, it's ___", of which there are MANY in this piece. But beyond that:

Count the lists of three:

    A guilt-free space to be alone with one's thoughts, finish an email, or take a call en route without the awkwardness about conducting it in front of a stranger.

   It costs travel and scheduling and the glacial work of building trust. It costs ego management and compromise and the periodic small heartbreak of the author-order negotiation.

    It took us slightly longer to name what we had lost.

    Swap “pilot” for “researcher” and “autopilot” for “agent”, and the mechanism Wang is guarding against is the one Bainbridge named four decades earlier.

    Two people who had crossed continents to talk to each other were quietly delighted by a technology whose central feature is that you don’t have to talk to anyone. (ed. - is that *really* Waymo's central feature?)

    once a frictionless option exists, we take it by default, and quietly surrender whatever the friction was doing for us

    Every conversation redirected from a colleague to a chatbot is a thread quietly withdrawn

    while the invisible thing that sustained it quietly falls below threshold

    competence quietly erodes precisely because it is needed only rarely

    the quiet risk is that our incentives are training us