You can't talk to pond scum.

Pond scum has a kind of agency. But in a way that is foreign and distributed.

Where is the center? Where is the brain? Where is the little person making decisions that I can talk to?

We anthropomorphize these systems.

But they are actually more resilient if they don't require a central point.

The whole can survive even if any individual part of it dies.

These are swarm intelligences.

Totally alien, but not because they aren't common, but because we can't talk to them, so we don't think about them as a collective entity.

LLMs are like a pond scum; it feels like we can talk to them, but this is only a tiny fraction of what they can do, and it limits our imagination of how we might use them.