"A machine doing it all" is willful ignorance: on the human expertise behind LLMs
provisionalidea · x · 2026-10-20
provisionalidea reflects that the more he uses language models, the more humbled he is by the depth of human expertise—and his own ignorance across fields. The systems only do what they do because they are trained on and linked to vast literatures; prompts merely guide them to tap into that accumulation.
He argues that seeing the same outputs as "a machine doing it all on its own" is willful ignorance of both the social technology (networks of human experts building on each other's work) and the computational technology (transformers and related architectures) underwriting the models, driven by an itch to erase the human element. The thread sparked a counter-debate on tool neutrality (see gerardsans' hammer analogy).
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