Technology is part of humanity. Just as a hammer extends the hand, so too does the LLM extend the mind.

but you do manage to drive everywhere - a feat that wasn't possible previously (except perhapes for the select few who trained).

That's a big dependency, reminds me of the people in Wall-E.

And the criteria shouldn't be just the cost of the dependency, but the benefits too! I'd say every dependency we have in the modern life is worth it - otherwise people wouldn't have chosen to have it. Like electricity, mechanised farming, etc.

We often chose short term benfits over long term negative effects.

For instance eating too much sugar, too little sleep, destroying our own habitate by burning fossil fuels etc.

AI needs lots of money and resources ans the use case is more than once for useless stuff.