These tools are broadly forced on everyone. Can you really avoid smartphones, social media, content feeds, etc these days? It's not a matter of choice -- society is reshaped and it's impossible to avoid these impositions.

Smartphone didn’t take off because it was forced on people. Otherwise we’d all be using Windows Mobile. Smartphone has real benefits, to state the obvious. The right course is to deal with the downsides, such as limiting using it in classroom, but not hint its development. Same with LLM.

It’s not about the tool itself, but more so the corporate interests behind the tools.

Open source AI tools that you can run locally in your machines? Awesome! AI tools that are owned by a corporation with the intent of selling your things you don’t need and ideas you don’t want? Not so awesome.

And employers requiring an increase in productivity off the back of providing you with access to those tools

Generally, yes. Is this just an argument against safety precautions?

"Who needs seat belts and airbags? A well-disciplined defensive driver simply won't crash."

Seat belts and airbags (and the legislation that enforced them) were introduced as carefully designed trade-offs based on accumulated research and knowledge as to their impact.

We didn't simply avoid inventing cars because we didn't know how to make crashes safe.

Reducing car use is the best way to avoid crashes. Practically any other means of transportation is safer. You can save lives simply by making it harder for the average person to get a car.