LLMs, Competence, and Institutional Knowledge

I think I've identified the core reason I instinctively dislike LLMs.

I strongly value competence. This applies institutionally as well as societally, not just individually. In a competent society, things just work.

You can take a hot shower because there is clean water and flammable gas piped into your home, a device on premise that burns the gas in a safe, controlled way to heat the water, and a sewerage system to carry the dirty water away to be disposed of cleanly. Not to mention the electricity being used to light your home and power the water heater, and the technology that went into building the home in the first place.

Almost none of this you could achieve alone. But you enjoy the benefits of a shared competence. There is an institutional knowledge at work that ensures you can take the benefits of our technological inventions for granted as part of your daily life.

LLMs replace this hard-earned institutional competence with statistical guesses - a literally incompetent imitation.

Of course, nobody can use an LLM to build a hot shower. But what if the people at the water company stopped knowing authoritatively how to purify water, and instead relied on an LLM? What if they stopped caring about fluid mechanics to get the water safely pumped to your house? What if the producers of the water heater stopped caring about controlled combustion, the sewage company about not dumping sewage into streets and rivers, the electricity company about electrical fundamentals or the builders of your home about solid architectural principles and following through with proven construction practices?

These are the institutional competencies we rely on. LLMs incite individuals to turn not to the institutional knowledge that we have collectively built, but instead to settle for a statistical approximation, eroding the forces that built the shoulders we stand on.