Sure. You can talk about the LLM gestalt, if you'd like, that's worth examining, as with any other tool; especially stuff like progressive brain rot.

But listening to the complaints people have about LLMs, it's mostly that it's being improperly used to replace human labor. Improperly in the sense that it can't actually do the job it is replacing humans in, which is a separate discussion of what kind of world it will be when there are no jobs for humans to do.

LLMs are used responsibly by people doing their own work. For instance, Linus Torvalds used Claude to find errors in the Linux kernel (I think), that he then fixed himself.

The problem is that capitalism, especially oligoplic capitalism, will create worse products at lower prices (or higher profits), and it will do so on the shortest timeline, ignoring things like future lawsuits over security flaws and future lack of programming talent and erosion of consumer trust.

Ah, thank you. The problem has been bedevilling me for weeks and I think this is the solution.

I initially thought it could be because the Minotaur isn't exactly half-man/half-animal as the centaur is, but a hybrid of the two; often represented with hoofs for feet, etc., which is another expression of what you're saying.

I guess calling them reverse centaurs visualizes the change that is happening in the relationship between human and machine. We used to be the head but we’re the butt now. It makes you reconstruct the image in your head.

Yes, but the minotaur is frequently just a person with the head of a bull, instead having to invert a centaur, which is already not a familiar image. In talks, Doctorow defaults to "Bojack Horseman", an acknowledgment that reverse centaur is perhaps too much imaginative labor for his audience.

Agree on the MBAs--capitalism eating itself.

Sweat is an evaporatve cooling system used to regulate the temperature of the mechanism that keeps a shovel moving. And if you've never considered killing yourself over the prospect of spending all day with a shovel, I can at least be confident you'd make an -excellent- archeologist.

(But mild humor aside, I do understand your point.)

There are several valid use cases for LLMs. It does solve problems, quite literally.