I used to think about these things differently: I felt that because our models of reality are just models, they aren't really something humanity should be proud of that much. Nature is more messy than the models, but we develop them due to our limitations.
AI is a model, too, but of far greater complexity, able to describe reality/nature more closely than what we were able to achieve previously. But now I've begun to value these simple models not because they describe nature that well but because they impose themselves on nature. For example, law, being such a model, is imposed on reality by the state institutions. It doesn't describe the complexity of reality very well, but it makes people take roles in its model and act in a certain way. People now consider whether something is legal or not (instead of moral vs immoral), which can be more productive. In software, if I implement the exchange of information based on an algorithm like Paxos/Raft, I get provable guarantees compared to if I allowed LLMs to exchange information over the network directly.