I don't quite remember the details, but there's a fascinating section in Julian Jaynes's "Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" where he talks about how metaphors condense down into more complex forms, and as they do they unlock new realities previously impossible to fathom. The classical example here is the simultaneous discovery of calculus by Newton and Leibniz: the larger context defines what is possible.

I was recently running myself through a thought experiment similar to the author here: if LLMs truly do make generation of ideas cheap (I'm still a skeptic here even within software), then as soon as products enter the public awareness they become trivial to reproduce. For example, in a prompt like: "Uber but for babysitters," "Uber for" is doing a tremendous amount of work. Before Uber, its model, UX, modes of engagement would've taken pages and pages to describe, but after, it becomes comparatively much cheaper.

... in this way, LLMs could cheapen ideas and creativity so much that they make other factors (which are already the weighing functions) more important, and I think the imbalance here is deeply troubling. Those factors are namely network effects (existing customers, brand recognition, existing relationships, capital). And when balance is shifted more toward network effects, it means that the whole system becomes more brittle because it makes it even harder to boot out incumbents.

There are a whole slew of issues with LLMs, particularly around their intended devaluation of labor, and we aren't talking enough about them.