Stones underwater

 River-washed rocks are Mill stones of a sort

For JS Mill, what people do may, in some cases, matter less than “what manner of men” they become in doing it. The route by which we arrive somewhere can shape us, and that shaping may itself be part of what matters. That’s because Mill espoused a broader ideal in which autonomy, individuality and the active cultivation of one’s faculties are constituents of a good human life, not merely useful tools for achieving it. A technology that alters how we think, judge, attend or feel may leave us diminished even when it improves performance.

Mill could not have had large language models in mind, of course. But he did imagine a world in which machines “fight battles” and “try causes”, a prospect that now sounds strikingly contemporary. In such a world, human beings would turn over not only labor but decision-making. We would no longer be shaped by doing difficult things and by making consequential decisions. That, Mill says with characteristic restraint, would be a “considerable loss.”

Or as Whassisname put it  . . .

The general sentiment of mankind is that a man who will not fight for himself, when he has the means of doing so, is not worth being fought for by others, and this sentiment is just. For a man who does not value freedom for himself will never value it for others, or put himself to any inconvenience to gain it for others. Such a man, the world says, may lie down until he has sense enough to stand up. It is useless and cruel to put a man on his legs, if the next moment his head is to be brought against a curbstone.