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@yaxu i wouldn't read that as optimistic, as he certainly agrees with some skills being lost. the sigaut quote especially shows this, some skills are sucessfully "automated", in the sense that they tend to do what people have done before well enough that corporations can make more profit with the machines rather than with people. but "along a line of resistance" other skills are developed.

re: open vs closed, i'd assume he's talking not about open-source or "malleability" or anything of the like. he's quoting gilbert simondon before this paragraph, who also wrote a lot about the milieu or environments of technics. so in that context open would imo mean something like "interacting with the real world". so the circular saw from the prev paragraph, that is supposed to be a closed machine, sawing wood perfectly the same time every time, is actually open, because the wood that it saws is "imperfect" and has variable density etc.

similarily LLMs are used by real people, run on physical hardware with electricity and water from real sources, etc. a closed technology would be one that can perfectly enclose all parameters of that skill which it aims to automate, which is just something that no machine can ever achieve, certainly not LLMs. i suppose the "imperfections" would in this case be the differences and subleties in human language/writing, the idea to model "reasoning" as a stochastic process in general, etc.

to come back to the skills question again, it would be too early to say what skills people are developing through use of LLMs. that there is some de-skilling taking place is undeniable, the question is just what skills will take those places.

@yaxu i see people describe LLMs as algorithms quite often but i'm pretty sure that's not the right word

i suppose they can *mimic* algorithms though