A good faith dollar-focused rebuttal would probably involve one or both of directly addressing the claims of the cost-benefit analysis or discussion of costs to the tax base not considered in the C-B A.
I think it's shortsighted to dismiss the utility of these technologies for learning. I find personally that putting the LLM into an argumentative state then having it challenge my assertions forces me to learn and develop my own thoughts and feelings more effectively than writing does these days, and I find that interrogating a model on a subject can teach me more about the subject per unit time than reading a textbook or research paper. Sometimes I'll even just have it read the raw text out loud- then interject and have a conversation about a specific thing that I don't have the domain knowledge to fully understand. Other times we'll end up off on a productive tangent.
Interactive learning and thinking is underrated, in part I think because of the cynical (and likely accurate) assumption about what the laziest among us will do with the tools, but projected onto everyone.
Agreed, people should only enjoy the features of it that I enjoy the way I like to enjoy them. Enjoying it the wrong way is at best stupid, possibly even evil.
You might think the people doing politics are manipulative ladder climbers, but they're climbing the same ladders available to you, so you should be one too.
I don't think there's anything I could tell you about the companies I've built that would dissuade you from your perspective that everyone is as intellectually lazy as your projection suggests.
>ones thinking power is diminished overtime by interacing with LLMs etc.
Sometimes I reflect on how much more efficiently I can learn (and thus create) new things because of these technologies, then get anxiety when I project that to everyone else being similarly more capable.
Then I read comments like this and remember that most people don't even want to try.