Bicycles for the mind vs horses for the mind.

A horse has a world outside of you.

You have to train it to do things.

A horse you have to think about even when you aren't using it.

Is it fed and watered?

Is it confined in a safe location?

A bicycle doesn't go on its own.

If you stop pedaling it stops.

Even electric bikes.

They don't have a mind of their own.

Bikes are about extending your agency.

No one gets upset about "killing" a bike.

Bicycles are dumber than horses.

But they're also easier to predict, easier to control.

They amplify your agency and allow you to go wherever you want to individually go.

Living things have a lossy API layer.

Sometimes they don't do what you tell them to do.

A bike always does roughly what you think it will unless it breaks.

Living things are also ends in and of themselves, you should feel bad if they die (especially due to actions you took).

LLMs are kind of like horses in that they have a mind of their own.

But they're unlike horses in that you don't have to worry about them "dying" through neglect or mistreatment.

Applying the "for the mind" frame to a few other technologies

Apps are a bus for the mind that only services fixed routes.

"I know your house is over there but the bus doesn't stop there. You'll have to overshoot and walk back"

The vision of a centralized cloud-hosted assistant is a self-driving car for the mind.

Removes agency from users.

But full self-driving is a hard standard to reach.

What happens in the cases where its quality isn't good enough to drive by itself?