Joseph Jacquard introduced a simple form of programming into textile manufacturing and created the first automated machine [1] in 1804.

Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace then improved on the design. In just over 200 years we've automated so much of our modern world and have become codependent on these machines: cars, mobile phones, LLMs, etc.

I say codependent because the LLMs are trained on human language, games, etc. and we're leveraging them to improve productivity. We have self-driving cars that learn our roads and from how we drive and are manufactured by people in assembly lines.

This, to me, is similar to how mitochondria being absorbed into another bacterial cell enabled both to thrive symbiotically [2]. Over time the vast majority of the biomass on Earth has come to rely on mitochondria. That combination dominates.

It's becoming clear that cultures who adopt automation are able to outcompete those who don't. We're adapting to offload tasks to machines and even embedding them within our bodies (e.g. pacemakers or brain-computer interfaces). And for now the machines that are proliferating are the ones most useful to humans.

One million years from now the fossil record will show a leap much like mitochondria entering another cell and we're living through that age right now. Something to think about.

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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine

2. https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-origin-of-mitochondria-14232356/