this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
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I don't believe LLMs are inherently evil. They can in some situations be the right tool to use. Unfortunately they came in a time where technical literacy was already declining and was also pushed by greedy corporations and investors. It's no the tool but rather how or by whom it's being used that's the problem.
If we start treating it like the auxiliary tool it's instead of the primary developer, writer, and manager, it becomes just another tool to support the process instead of replacing human skill and critical thinking. Just like how the computer and calculators did not replace professionals but made them more efficient, or how the internet and stack overflow didn't replace problem solving and critical thinking but made the process faster and gave you time to focus on more important tasks.
Coming back to OPs analogy, cars aren't inherently evil but it's the culture associated with them. With the right adaptation, technology, and infrastructure they can be a very amazing tool without replacing walking or human skill. If you're concerned about the environment we can find sustainable solutions (EVs), if you're concerned about loosing the human aspect you can find a human-first solution (infrastructure that rewards walking and public transport for short travel but allows car for long-distance or in emergency).
The issue is not with the technology itself but how we've been using it and how greedy individuals are pushing the unhealthy version for their own benefits despite a healthy adoption being possible.
The non-evil version unfortunately depends on nobody involved having any profit motive.
The Industrial Revolution should have been a turning point where our ability to build advanced tools meant the workload on humans was reduced. Instead of liberating people from the demands of hard labor sunup to sundown just to survive, it kept them toiling the same amount of hours but with ever increasing output demands. A person with a combine can clear exponentially more acres of wheat in a day than a team of people with sickles, but they still have to spend all day doing it just to survive. There was no gain for the worker, only the maximizing of profits for the bourgeoisie. If in their spare time the worker is a couch potato it’s because they’re too exhausted to pursue self-actualizing hobbies and still to close to broke to pursue them in the first place.
AI is coming in as more of an assault on the upper half of the workforce. I’m sure eventually it could find ways to eliminate construction workers, utility/infrastructure maintenance, mechanics, ag workers, but first they’re pushing out the jobs that require more mental labor than physical. It’s a double win. A programmer who loses their job to AI doesn’t cease to exist, they still need to work to survive in this system. If the only jobs available to humans are physical labor they’ll eventually compete to take the job, and that competition for dwindling jobs means employers can lower wages. If people are pushed to the point where their only option for income is a $7.25/hr job at McDonalds, they’ll either take it or accept poverty. I doubt they even want to use AI to takeover manual labor jobs because there’s no point in wasting the natural human resource that exists to exploit. That’s all we are to them, a resource to exploit, and unlike Artifical Intelligence, Human Intelligence has its own mechanical interface built in. You don’t even have to build them, they self replicate.
Until we start demanding that technology and advancements (physical or digital) are not output multipliers but tools that reduce the labor humans must expend to produce sufficient output to meet the needs of society, we will be exploited.