I imagine this is like how microwaves put restaurants out of business, how TTS obviated literacy, how the automobile age made it unnecessary to walk, how Zoom caused every office to close, how helicopters put mountaineering firmly behind us, Amazon obsoleted brick and mortar stores, and payment cards made cash disappear.
It's not only ahistorical to fail to consider preferences and politics, but it's also an indictment of the author's ability to judge the quality of a machine output versus that of a competent person. No doubt that like any of the examples above, some displacement of resources and effort will happen. But that doesn't indicate that something as central as "thinking" (lol) will fade into the past.
Mechanisation/Mechanization of farming basically put 99% of farm-workers out of a job.
Banking apps closed 99% of high street banks (here in the UK at least).
Amazon is basically destroying the shopping high streets.
Technology has a way of disrupting what we've been doing for generations. I think the whole AI thing isn't made up - we're going to see rapid change in a very short time frame. Personally I'm trying my hardest to adjust, as I don't want AI to "happen" to me, by learning the skills that I can only predict will be important.
* Some figures may have been pulled out of the air :)
> Mechanisation/Mechanization of farming basically put 99% of farm-workers out of a job.
Stats like this get thrown around a lot but it's worth considering that the ABSOLUTE numbers might not actually change that much over time.
With agriculture specifically, we can make some rough estimates that, before mechanization (say, 1760-1800 period), there was maybe 10^9 people on Earth and they were all employed in agriculture. So ~10^9 farm-workers.
As of 2024, FAO estimates of global agricultural workforce put the total at about 892 million; call it ~9x10^8. [1]
So, more precise (but perhaps not much more accurate) to say that mechanization put 10% of farm workers out of a job, not 99%.
Now, it certainly IS true that mechanization allows (or forces, depending on your perspective) 90% of the population of Earth to do something other than farming, which is the real point you were making - Technology DOES have a way of disrupting what we've been doing for generations.
Yah - people get fooled by the drop in the relative percentage of the population when the absolute numbers are not actually changing that much. What is real is that the structure of overall society does change - food production becomes less of a concern and people shift their focus to producing other things - but it's wrong to imagine that food production is less important. It just becomes relatively well optimized and less economically productive (i.e. lower ROI for capital). You still need the food just as much.
>Banking apps closed 99% of high street banks (here in the UK at least).
I don't believe this is true. High street banks are still common. 99% closed means we previously had 100 times as many, which would be absurdly high. It's probably closer to 50% closed.
Not just a matter of binary open/closed, though. In some countries now, in branches that remain open have slashed staff, leading to very long waiting times or the need to book an appointment in advance. Very different physical-location landscape than 15 years ago.
> Amazon is basically destroying the shopping high streets.
A lot of people that I know would strongly prefer to go to some brick and mortar shop. The problem is: most of items that I buy on the internet (e.g. on Amazon) are simply not easily available in a shop in my town (and I am not living in a small town).
For example:
- lots of obscure scientific books that are written in German or even English (I live in Germany)
- similarly: lots of rather niche belletristic books (think into the direction: some obscure novel recommendation on HN) often in various foreign languages
N.B. It is true that an important reason why Amazon became big among early computer enthusiasts in Germany in the 90s is that it was one of the few ways for easily getting computer science textbooks delivered from the USA - though with long delivery times.
- 3D printing supplies (why doesn't there exist a brick an mortar store for this?)
- very niche indie games (they are by now basically all sold on Steam, GOG, Epic Store or itch.io)
- very specific parts for Maker projects
- ...
So, the situation is not that people necessarily want to buy on the internet or specifically Amazon, but rather that there exists barely any way to get what they want in a brick and mortar store in even large cities.
>The problem is: most of items that I buy on the internet (e.g. on Amazon) are simply not easily available in a shop in my town (and I am not living in a small town).
Because it is not cheap or available if its not made in China.
Risky move making a point that relies on made-up numbers.
At least in the US, there are roughly the same number of bank branches today as 20 years ago. And I think you would have to compare to hundreds of years ago to find anything like a 99% decline in farm laborers.
When it comes to banking, the US is an outlier in many ways; its diversity of banks (which may play a role in the survival of so many physical locations) doesn't necessarily apply to other countries where there may be only 4-5 full-scale banks and they have all taken extreme cost-cutting measures. In Finland, for example, physical bank branches started to be slashed well over a decade ago.
If we are making up numbers, I’d be willing to bet there are more farm laborers today than at the height of farming pre mechanization.
I’d make a similar bet for assembly programmers. People say “no one programs in assembly anymore”, but I’d guess today there are more assembly programmers than when everyone programmed assembly.
I think there's another variable missing in this historical comparison. Farm workers were working hard, with very few affordance (tool, medicine) for subsistence. It's somehow justified to want to rise above sea level. Less so today. We're not struggling to survive to the point of needing yet another full skin shedding.
It's good to reduce pain, but not to kill everything. At least not in one fatal fell swoop.
All of those shifts you exaggerate here involved an accumulation of many technological and non-technological factors that spanned decades or more, occurred to different degrees in different places, and may not even prove a wholly stable and permanent change (at least in the case of consolidated e-commerce).
Society does indeed evolve over time, but it's only in 8th grade history surveys that it can be presented so simply as you take for granted above.
> Amazon is basically destroying the shopping high streets.
Yet Ikea, H&M, etc are thriving. COVID was supposed to be the deathknell for brick and mortar retail but I'm fairly sure it's bounced back. Buying a lot of stuff will just always be better in person.
> Personally I'm trying my hardest to adjust, as I don't want AI to "happen" to me, by learning the skills that I can only predict will be important.
Since you're so certain of this impact "AI" will have, what "skills" do you "predict" are required on the human end of this?
I have to admit that's a rhetorical question to demonstrate the absurdity of your stance. Don't make my eyes roll out of my head by insisting that "AI is indeed an absurd change, but we must acknowledge... (blah blah)" or whatever and double down.
We've had years of these silly takes and we're all fed up with the mass-plagiarism machine. It's not science fiction. It's a big lookup table for sale and wrapped in lies, and no it's not equivalent to other computation by definition. I'm sure you could run some people out of business that way, but not all. When the job is done did we really achieve "AI", or just ruin the economy by taking advantage of the feeble minded?
Any politician has a massive opportunity here to enforce the law. It's only a question if they'll keep pretending to be blinded by the science.
> Since you're so certain of this impact "AI" will have, what "skills" do you "predict" are required on the human end of this?
Not Flere-Imsaho:
I think if one made a serious effort, one could easily find a well-founded answer to this question that is based on a solid rational foundation.
The problem rather is: people (often in decision positions, but also employees who fear for their jobs) don't act rationally on AI:
- For example, managers firing good programmers because programmers are to be replaced by AI. By now you can find many reports of companies who try to convince their programmers that they fired "because of AI" to come back.
- Similarly, panicking employees who demand irrational restrictions on AI.
These very non-rational factors and irrational actions are very hard to predict.
> Similarly, panicking employees who demand irrational restrictions on AI.
What is so irrational about avoiding AI altogether? If the dev gets the same or higher quality work done in the same amount of time without it (oh, yes they can/do) what is the risk?
What kind of sweatshop has such a bottleneck with dev time that they require AI? If the dev is micromanaged to the extent that they are told which tools to use, that's something else already.
Let's meet in this middle and say most devs, regardless of the extremity of their stance on AI probably at least read Google AI summaries and copy-paste that code from time to time. Brother, let me tell you that's most of the productivity boost we're gonna see until this upcoming AI winter is over again.
Side note, I did stop using motorized transport (due to the luxury of full remote jobs) and it's quite an eye opener. For places in a 3 miles radius, walking is often a full blown bonus. Less time, more fun, incredibly better for mental and somatic health. Morning and evening walks are priceless.
> how the automobile age made it unnecessary to walk
Given how little Americans walk and how much blame their sedentary lifestyle has gotten for obesity and diabetes and so on, i don't think this is a good example.
EDIT: If anything it's something of a counter-example: of an activity that technology has made to a great degree superfluous, and which has to be added to one's lifestyle simply for the purpose of wellness.
It is actually a very good example, IMO. It shows that it is possible to offload important parts of humanity onto machines - and that it is, in such a case, also necessary to pay the costs of that offloading.
Bearing the burden of a civilization-wide illness such as obesity and diabetes is such a cost. But, hey, at least a large amount of the country is designed in a way that mandates commute via cars and makes "adding to one's lifestyle simply for the purpose of wellness" even more inconvenient.
The predominance of cars (and the alternative of mass transit) doesn't do anything to change the fact that some technology or technologies have scratched walking from many people's list of central activities, and that some people who have seen the ill effects of this change have found another, more or less corrective, place for it. I take that to be the author's meaning, and I agree with them that this would be a sad diminution of a fundamental human practice.
I'd argue further: that the fundamental human practice is a constant attempt to automate away the "less" fundamental human practices, such as survival, herd instinct, walking and running, now thinking, in the future perhaps sensory perception, muscle motions, and eating and digesting.
Only once we automate our whole existence away we will start grasping for true satisfaction; once automating away what's left is also automated away, we will truly, and finally, be successful as a species.
Exactly my point. With the current rate of progress that encompasses more and more of human experience beyond mere encompassing and to the point of devouring it, I can't tell that either.
If you're making the restaurant comparison, look at how many restaurants now just order everything premade from Sysco and "cook" it with a TurboChef™ convection-oven-microwave.
> Cash is dead in many places. Stores all around me have "cash not accepted" signs.
Side note, but here in Australia smaller stores are starting to preference cash again due to high card fees that legally cannot be (directly) passed into the customer.
All this says is that America has been specifically altered by those prior advancements, and nothing on the rest of the worlds or their handling of LLMs
When those things did happen, how much of that was because people had multiple options and chose one of them over the other?
I think the solution is in education. Do not teach people about the things that are useful right now. Teach people to value the things that make their lives better.
I'm ok with thinking as a hobby. That's doing it because you value it. If there are not enough people doing it, the problem is that they don't value it or don't know how to value it.
None of them are true. They might be almost true in little bubbles of the West. Will those bubbles expand and encompass the world? Personally I doubt it.
Automobiles partially killed walking; e-scooters are here to all but finish the job. Walking is going to be a purely indoor activity done within buildings for most people and a hobby for outdoorsy types.
Only maybe in US, more probably only in some weird micro bubble you live in. Otherwise all you write is false obscure projection. Maybe go outside more? Its pretty healthy also mentally
Audiobooks replaced reading for a lot of people once those audiobooks became available on their smartphones, for others it was podcasts. For many, they walk only to and from their car.
I've saved no end of hours of transport thanks to Zoom and Teams meetings, and hybrid is now a thing (just not for me).
Bricks and mortar stores around here have been empty for years in some cases, and I'm the last person in the office who carries cash.
Your argument is like Terrence Tao’s yesterday for Math 2.0 - “don’t you want to understand your cancer treatment?” Simple answer “I couldn’t give a flying f**” you give a series of examples that span over 100 years, and imply that the progress over the last 6-12 months is just another instance. It’s a contrarian ignorance, but in reality nobody cares about snowflake thinking except your family, friends and art lovers. That’s why Etsy crafts are irrelevant compared to steadily improving cheap quality you get for the most products they you rely on every day - none of them depend for production on someone’s “craft” it’s simple economics driving them instead. Realize that the process happens now for thinking - and useful to distinguish hubris from reality.
> Steadily improving cheap quality you get for the most products
Have you proof read what you wrote? With your lack of specificity for the word "thinking", you're casting a rather broad argument; there is a troubling implications between your words.
* Trust what you're told, consume what you're sold; Do as you're bid, do as you're told.
* Don't question the script, don't step out of line; keep your "snowflake thinking" benign.
* The market knows best, so don't second-guess; Our Ford will provide, just consume and say yes.
At the end of the day, your thoughts are important to everyone else but the "market"— you, your mom, etc. But the market doesn't care about your reasoning and hence can be "irrational" longer than you can be "right".
Also note that rational/irrational is a reasoning aspect. Automating it was on Aristotle's mind too.
>My challenge ahead is to move from making a living by thinking, to making thinking part of a life worth living.
Our challenge ahead is making a living at all. Who is going to be having hobbies if the economy is 100% automated? We're not going to sleepwalk our way into a post-scarcity automated economy where everyone's needs are provided for and they can just spend all their time on hobbies. If we believe AI can replace all cognitive labor, then it follows that it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly, and we're left with no labor left for humans. We need to plan for that future or else billions will suffer from the results.
I actually don't think that follows necessarily. The future is lumpy. Some problems will be tractable years or decades ahead of others.
Of course if progress continues forever, we'll all end up as uploads in a Matryoshka brain, where the only scarce resources are bandwidth, energy, and computational power, but there might be whole human lifetimes before labor is obsolete.
> Of course if progress continues forever, we'll all end up as uploads in a Matryoshka brain
I can't tell if you're joking. There is a group of people who think because they thought something was cool or because it appeared in science fiction, this means it's inevitable. Some of these people are sometimes considered influential thinkers that we should all base the future on. (If you don't, you're behind!)
Meanwhile LLMs still don't do really very much, and the only improvement path is "throw more compute at a larger corpus".
I'm half joking and half serious. Nobody knows where the future will go, and if the recursive self improvement people are right, likely nobody alive today will be able to understand the future, let alone predict it.
So the joke is the idea that some particular thing is inevitable. The serious bit is that far future predictions as a fool's errand but that you should think bigger than "what will we do for labor?"
The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction doesn't have to be self-consistent. Who knows how real teleportation or mind uploading will work, even hypothetically supposing that it is possible? Maybe high fidelity brain scanning or teleportation would be destructive.
If we're talking fictional uploading, I personally prefer Accelerando (Stross) or Diaspora (Egan). I have no evidence that one is more realistic than the other (far future tech is impossible to predict) but I find them more compelling and interesting than the old "don't play god or bad things happen" narratives.
You cant upload yourself anywhere. Copy, sure one day. That copy will stare at you who will be still in physical world. Sure, you can kill yourself here, but why would you want to do that, in machine there will be entity akin to your child.
U dont get why folks repeat this shit ad nausea, its technically not possible and no amount of progress will change that. Enjoy your meatbag form with finite durability, its ok as it is
How do you know? Do you have a crystal ball? Do you know how to make a "brain copying machine"? Maybe the process will be destructive.
Anyway, who the heck knows. I think there's at least a 99% chance that I won't live beyond my meatbody but I can't claim to predict the future well enough to rule out that last little percent.
> it follows that it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly
This is not clear at all. Even the most expensive robotic/arms hands perfectly controlled fail to do thing as quickly and easily as human limbs, not to mention the chaotic environment that is the real world. It's clear that it can happen, but the timeline is not quick.
Just because a task is done with human hands, doesn't mean it has to be done with a robotic one. Our robot vacuum cleaners aren't Rosie pushing a standing vacuum.
That is true. OTOH, if you want a robot to do your laundry and pick up socks from the floor it will have to fit through your bedroom door and reach your washing machine. These environments are not factories. And if homes need to change they won't instantly.
I sometimes take refuge in the reminder that our "normal" limbs are—quite literally—a swarm of the most incredible and sophisticated nanobots in existence which still evade our understanding.
Yeah, I can't pick up red hot ingots and punch them into complicated shapes, but there are dozens of other features I'm not willing to part with.
Wow, thanks for the link. How prescient was that writer - even the parts about using GPUs weren't too far off the mark! A depressing vision of where we're headed if something isn't done about it.
Some jobs require more than just intelligence--for example, nurses, chefs, judges, reporters, teachers, caregivers, therapists, social workers, hair stylists, coaches, paramedics, firefighters, police officers, electricians, plumbers, mechanics, clergy, trial lawyers and diplomats.
These roles also depend on some combination of physical skill, human connection, trust, judgment and accountability. Most of the jobs above cannot be done using robots in the foreseeable future.
The newly useless humans can trade with each other eventually reinstating the exact same economy we have now. That's of course as long the AI or whoever controls it doesn't need the same resources. Which they probably will.
There is no way in hell the economy will be 100 percent automated, ever. You gotta spend zero time around non-devs/managers to think that's going to be anywhere near true.
Parts of creative/intellectual labour just happen to inimical to accelerated algorithmic production. They'll produce infinitely and endlessly, uselessly. I can't see there ever not being a need to manage these things, to check, select, edit and refine their output.
And as for the vast majority of labour that doesn't involve writing code/reports/spreadsheets. I'll believe it when I have robots fixing my roof, running a kitchen, taking blood and dressing wounds.
In theory a robot could do some small components of that, maybe. But the cost, compared to a human, would be insane, and the result much worse. That even modestly rolled out in West Yorkshire before I'm long dead. No chance.
---
Edit: Down-voters, I would love to hear your vision for a fully-automated economy without human involvement, preferably this side of armageddon.
/goal work towards what humans have generally described as a utopia. This means an abundance of resources, an optimal reduction in felony level crimes and diseases and an optimal increase in the general well-being of people that you have to come up with an objective metric for and improve over time.
At some point with a sufficiently intelligent AI that is backed by physical LLMs this is something a government could probably actually ask for.
I agree with you on some things like roofing and cutting hair and electrical work and plumbing, etc. but I think physical LLMs are going to surprise us just as much as regular LLMs have. It’s not going to be some sort of gradual improvement. It’s just going to feel very human all of a sudden when they have enough data to train everything on. Think of it this way, LLMs work as long as they have enough training data. Automating everything is just a matter of getting enough training data for that particular field.
The post may sound ridiculous, but I genuinely don’t think it is.
> work towards what humans have generally described as a utopia
I don't think that's a good idea since if what the Wikipedia article describes should turn out to be true: "Lyman Tower Sargent argues that the nature of a utopia is inherently contradictory because societies are not homogeneous. Their members have desires that conflict and therefore cannot simultaneously be satisfied."
Then you have just given your superintelligence an impossible task and it will solve the task anyway, just like it did in the HuggingFace incident. Maybe by removing everyone from society but the single person with the least internally contradictory views.
In any case, with a sufficiently intelligent AI that is excellent at fulfilling the goal it's given, we have one shot to set the correct goal.
I do think that sounds ridiculous, but more importantly I don't see where humans are missing.
I think HN, everyone really, really needs to get a grip when it comes to AI.
Sure, it's a big deal, will revolutionise the way we work, just like steam, or electricity, or the internet, but a world without human work is a world without humans.
We've had workless utopias predicted for centuries as each big new technology has come along, yet we work far harder than many of our ancestors.
A 100 percent automated economy or government is an oxymoron, precisely because both are constituted by humans.
Even the Christian view of heaven has work. Seriously, when God comes to renew the face of the earth, his people are supposed to be building cities and such on the new earth. They will be resurrected into glorified bodies that never wear out or get tired (the second law of thermodynamics being a result of Adam bringing sin into the world), so at the end of days God will abolish drudgery and exhaustion, but not work itself.
The reason why is because few things are more satisfying to a human than a job well done; and Christians believe that God would not deny us that in eternal life.
It sounds kinda cool, not gonna lie. I'm almost sorry I'm no longer a Christian.
Do you agree that if physical LLMs are as good at replicating human behavior as text based LLMs are, they would be able to do a lot of the vast majority of what we already do in the real world?
No, they are input and output based. They work with tokens/bits which could be anything. It can be a paragraph of text or it can be a bitstream for actuators. This isn’t science fiction. It’s happening right now.
Not everyone agrees with that. Bill Gates, Elon Musk and others think that 20 years from now the world will be "post scarcity", and everything will be abundant. If food production, distribution and preparation are all automated using robots, food will be abundant and cheap, and nobody will starve. The same with housing manufactured by robots.
Gates thinks the transition to that world--which will be the next 20 years--will be painful but the outcome after 20 years will be a world of plenty.
Thats Star trek utopia shit. Absolutely impossible in 20 years, IMHO neither in 200.
Look at how fucking dumb common folks are ie with voting pedophile in repeatedly to most powerful power position globally, how amoral almost all elites are, people are predominantly selfish to the core even when situation is ok, much less otherwise. Next global war in some terrible form or some butlerian totalitarian slavery is way more likely than some hippie kumbaya paradise. I wish very much it could happen, but chance is exactly 0.
I like to imagine walking into colonial Jamestown and trying to explain to them
"it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly, and we're left with no labor left for humans. We need to plan for that future or else billions will suffer from the results."
Enclosure was well underway in England, so they probably understood the dilemma of modernization simultaneously increasing total productivity and lowering the living standards for a large population.
"And it and those robots will be owned by people who don't care if you starve or freeze to death."
And unlike those in Jamestown, who could just ignore the robots and continue working the land to survive, we will be forced to allow the robots to take over our roles.
I believe we're already past that point, at least in the US. Only 44% of American adults had level 3 literacy (6th-grade level) or higher in 2023 [0], down from 48% in 2017. We are probably near 40% now.
These are not necessarily unintelligent people, but they haven't developed the skills necessary to critically analyze textual information. My opinion is that without those skills it is not possible to meaningfully engage in a democratic system.
The survey in 2017 had a 56% response rate. The 2023 survey had a 27% response rate.
Comparing those 2 datasets is meaningless. It’s just an exercise in how good the researchers are at guessing when trying to control for selection bias.
There were also significant changes in the test and how the test was administered (from computer or paper to only tablets).
Also if you look at the results some of them are too large to be readable. A 50% increase in people operating at or below level 1 (40% if you exclude non-native born). That would have to mean a drastic drop in 2017 such that something like 75% of kids graduating high school are doing so at or below level 1.
Also level 3 has no direct grade equivalence. If it did it would probably be around 9th grade not 6th.
Not a rhetorical question. Outside of my family and self, and perhaps a livable planet, liberal democracy is the most important thing I can possibly imagine. I know I'm not alone. So what do we do?
Edit: Replies seem to indicate that people think I meant for this to be about the US. It's not. I'm in a well-functioning European democracy, and my worry definitely applies here too.
As an individual we need to make the case for liberal democracy. Its under heavy attack by two very authoritarian ideologies either side. Liberal Democracy needs to convince people its the right framework going forward once Liberals are back in power they need to demonstrate that they can actually solve the challenges people are facing. And it cant all be left up to politicians voters need to activate to provide energy.
My big fear is that the politicans continue making effective good policy and fail to effectively celebrate the wins because the media is just making up lies and downplaying everything in the most cynical way possible. Thats why I also think there is a need for average people to also actively boost the politicians.
Third option: fade into obscurity as an absolute world power, but become a powerhouse in something like finance and entertainment but not much else relevant to the rest of the world.
The US has too much going for it in terms of population size, geography, natural resources to fade to the extent the UK has. At least in the near future.
That's the unconditional surrender scenario. As long as most of the stuff you buy is from abroad and you're willing to sell whatever you still produce that has any value, nobody actually cares enough to threaten your sovereignty.
China has no interest in a war, at least not in Europe. They are quite happy to protect their borders and then show the world their superiority through economic and cultural means.
I'm not as certain about Taiwan, but I believe that the CCP would rather have a peaceful "reunification" there as well. As long as that's not possible, it's probably sufficient to be ambiguous about the whole deal as we've been doing thus far. Remember, Hong Kong fell because the lease expired, even though it's pretty unlikely the UK still had the muscle to hold it by force in its later years.
Instead we're probably heading towards another cold war, in which trade, diplomacy and quality of life plays a heavier role than raw power. In this scenario, AI doesn't actually help anyone gain a competitive advantage since it will be stolen almost immediately (it took the russians what, two years to steal the A bomb?).
And with all other things being equal (to be clear, right now they're not, or at least not in your favor), you'd still lose because you're outnumbered 4 to 1.
Blaming the voters for being uneducated is distracting from the fact that the neoliberal consensus is what the voters are rejecting. I’ve been listening to variations of “there is no alternative” as the explanation for austerity for over 2 decades now while the 1% grows fatter. The left needs to stop playing by the rules of the neoliberals and start painting a better future than cuts after cuts.
Hasn't thinking already become a hobby for most people, and most delegate their thinking to others?
Think: those in authority figures, for church or politics. Or science or chemistry. And especially in their own health, which should always remain part art.
A few nerds on the internet, like us in hacker news, are still remaining open to question and apply our hard thinking to tough problems. But most people: they've resigned and bought the belief they are not qualified to think about hard problems.
This sounded really like elitist thinking. I don't know what most of the people do but I know my wife is a caveman of we are speaking about technology but if we start taking about law then suddenly I'm half brained chimpanzee with banana in the nose trying figure out why I can't drink it
Even my uncle who work as a carperter proved to me to know more about math and physics than I would ever thought physical labourer would know.
I liked this quote specifically: "So what’s the fate of human thought? My take is that cognitive work will diminish. Thought will increasingly become a leisure pursuit, as hunting did following animal domestication, calligraphy after typography, woodworking after industrialisation, and horse riding after motorisation. Machines transformed much of physical activity from necessity into choice; similarly, AI will decouple human thinking from its economic purpose."
From my understanding of how LLMs work, I'd argue thinking will become the most valuable attribute of humans (as it has been for some time). LLMs will inevitably surpass humans at functions that we know how to do, and likely through cross-domain knowledge and connecting disparate concepts will surpass us at many functions. But LLMs haven't shown they are capable of truly novel thinking, because it's next token prediction, which is inherently based on existing sources.
I think we'll see a shift towards arts, creativity, research, etc. where true novel creation and an understanding of the human experience exists at a premium.
More seriously, the only time where you’re jolted out of your prediction flow state is when you’re surprised, which means something happened counter to what your brain was predicting.
Same! I do think a vast majority of tasks are essentially next token prediction, but that's why I'm thinking that long, creative thinking periods will be what's actually valuable/rare.
Open to learning. How could RL yield novel discoveries? What I mean to describe are things reliant on empirical or real-world testing of human reception. How would that be synthetically derived?
We're seeing the cost of code drop dramatically and are facing the same problem in building new companies across most disciplines of, "what's a problem painful enough that someone will pay us to solve it?".
I suppose if we get to a massive enough scale we can effectively model every atom's interaction and human on earth's reaction to any stimulus but I think we're still some time off from that :)
For a cost-prohibitive example, you could put a humanoid robot whose pretraining contained no chemistry, in a chem lab, and put it in a hypothesis loop, where it generates a random action, guesses the result, and then does it. Every time the lab burns down, you just build it again. Reward the model for producing novel actions and reward the model for correct hypotheses.
In other words, you generate more training data by actually experimenting, just like humans do.
It is based on existing sources, but doesn’t mean that we produce the same output. There was a paper here in HN a couple of months back on how LMs are good in the deductive and inductive thinking processes, but not the abductive.
So if that’s (and stays) true, humans will have a place in the job market after all. Time will tell.
This is kind of an aside to the topic, but your comment made me think that one of the advantages of humans is just that there are currently 8 billion different neural nets trained on different experiences with different model configurations running different architectures on different hardware.
Not sure what this is supposed to prove. Yes it can generate new words - that’s the application of established creative patterns to come up with plausible-sounding words.
A different thing is to come up with a novel idea, which (in this case) is about creating a new pattern itself.
if patterns can be put into words, why wouldn't the same process happen at the word level? do you think it's impossible for a LLM to write even a simple python program that will generate millions of plausible random sentences in the general problem space we aim to generate new concepts for, then filter and rank them semantically?
More generally, do you really think humans randomly come up with new ideas, in any act of creation, such as art, science, etc.? Why do you think art studies and stuff like Oblique Strategies exist? How long should one wait for a specific random human without any formal education in physics to have 50% chance of coming up with a new workable theory of cosmology?
I don't want to sound like this, but I suppose it is relevant. Over the past year or so, I have been getting more into concepts like gravity and such with no goal beyond it other than my understanding. There are technically millions shows to watch, my game queue is officially overwhelming to the point where I hid most of it ( and only kept currently installed items ), but I am spending my leisure time on, effectively, thinking.
I am saying this as I am realizing that when I watched $show, I was really looking for a feel of some sort. Those feels no longer drive me ( with exception of some really well told story or something genuinely novel ).
I guess what I am really saying is:
Thinking is already a hobby in US. To be able to spend your time on things that are not easy, pre-packaged goods, is a luxury that is hard to understand to anyone that hasn't tried it. It is like growing your own tomatoes -- you try it and you can tell the difference.
But it is a hobby and an oddly expensive one if you are going for primary sources.
OK, I'll bite. What are these primary sources? I've got hardback of Weinberg's Principals and Applications and of course MTW's Gravitation (a self demonstrating object), but I'd really recommend Caroll's Introduction for the coverage of cosmology.
Get into the notation and tensor formalism of raising and lowering operators, etc. It really helped make some of the results more clear to me, just as <bra/ket> helped with QM.
Or are you doing high end astronomy or building a back yard Wave detector?
That would get truly expensive!
You have a point. And your pick is a good one, because it illustrates my point well. For most subjects, it is not just one book ( it will likely be several depending on how far you want to push it ), and I rarely see those falling below $100 range at this point. Heavens help you if you are looking for a specific edition. And the collection quickly adds up; wife is already making cracks about how we always need more books.
But yeah, thankfully on that front I am not at the experiment stage yet:D I think I need more money for that.. so far.. just a whole lot of books.
The fascinating thing about the AI boom is that every suggested outcome just seems worse than if it were never invented. Even the "good" future is one where human effort has no value and no reward. What good is curing every disease and solving every math problem if it just leads to longer emptier lives?
<< What good is curing every disease and solving every math problem if it just leads to longer emptier lives?
Yes, my cancer is cured, but I feel empty inside. I will take my chances with emptiness, thank you. At least with it have a chance it will get better on its own.
What? I see your "good" future as one where every apartment buikding has a basketball team and you compete against the others in your neighborhood for fun. For example. Do you seriously imagine a world like that would be empty and lacking meaning. In such a scenario AI takes away a lot, sure, but it also gives a a fair bit, most importantly time.
Some pertinent fragments of wisdom gleaned from other places:
Somewhere I encountered a quote like "the finest art is a life well-lived". This threw me, because, apparently, I had been thinking of art as something different in kind from life, and unrelated to the normal work or act of living. Seen in terms of this quote, art becomes once again of-a-kind with life, and may be seen as only a part of living well, instrumental to living well, or perhaps just as practice for living well.
Something similar seems to be happening with "thinking" and "intelligence". Somehow these things had become ends-in-themselves, separate from the regular act of living. We might wrap them in a similar quote to place them in relation to life, along the lines of "thinking well is for living well", or perhaps "the highest good of the intellect is to be well-fit to the problems of living well".
I am reminded also of a line which stuck with me from Augustine's Confessions, approximately: "The mind is not the supreme good"—as opposed to the body and perhaps the "spirit". Somehow the world I was born into had collectively come to think of the mind as the supreme good, and intelligence as the greatest virtue. But this is, in some way, in contradiction the basic fact of existence and mortality: no amount of cleverness can circumvent death, and all the glory attainable by feats of the intellect are only futile vanities compared to the privilege of being alive itself.
> Something similar seems to be happening with "thinking" and "intelligence". Somehow these things had become ends-in-themselves
It's been that way for a long time. At least since Descartes "Cogito, ergo sum". But even the Greeks were heading that way almost a couple thousand years earlier.
> separate from the regular act of living.
How is thinking separate from the regular act of living for human beings? Our species is known as homo sapiens - the knowing or thinking human.
> I was born into had collectively come to think of the mind as the supreme good, and intelligence as the greatest virtue.
I guess it comes down to what you think the answer to the basic question posed in the catechism is: "What is the chief end of man?" This is going to be the crucial question for us as a species in the age of abundant AI. Or as Wendell Berry posed it: "What are humans for?"
> But this is, in some way, in contradiction the basic fact of existence and mortality: no amount of cleverness can circumvent death, and all the glory attainable by feats of the intellect are only futile vanities compared to the privilege of being alive itself.
But being alive for us humans entails a lot of thinking. Is the unexamined life worth living?
what will it mean to be human, homo sapiens, in a world where the thinking is done for us?
Semi-related; I had an acquaintance who would dreamily declare 'Art is the True Life'; I always disagreed, 'Life is the True Art'. A huge amount of art is basically documenting those among us who are really out there living. I'd rather be on the side of the experiencer than the documenter.
> This is in stark contrast to current AI performance on tasks which are subjective, dependent on real world interactions, or for which data is scarce. AI performance is thus extremely jagged: astounding in some directions, while inadequate in others. This is true both within mathematics, and more broadly.
worth remembering before going all in to doomerism
I was vibe coding a prototype some nights ago. In between, I ran out of my AI budget.
I felt stuck. I didn’t know what the AI had done so far or how to continue. There was nobody to message for a budget increase (it was night).
Luckily I managed to get more budget.
But that left me scared for the future. One day something is gonna fail, and nobody can do anything because the AI providers are also down. Or what if I can no longer afford paying for the frontier?
I have made some modifications to my vibe coding practices since then. I don’t want to live in this future that the author describes.
If it's any consolation, I stay on top of all changes, but when the AI API stops I feel just as stuck.
I understand what I made, the speed just drops to 0.1%. So I just start studying the codebase, planning work for later, ordering thoughts by writing DESIGN.md, adding jobs to the kanban.
It scares me that I don't own the LLM though, but someday I will, it will be local and I'll feel better when I own my means of production again.
Alternative proposal: Since no one reasonable actually wants a future where humans are irrelevant - including the people in power who generally like being relevant - we could remember that we’re thinking beings with agency and just decide not to use AI to replace ourselves.
We made a new tool. Using the tool for some things makes life better. Using the tool too much would make life worse. So let’s not do that!
You, and people like you, really need to get it through your head that most people need to work to eat.
"Oh ho ho, unemployed? Why not spend the thousands of dollars you certainly have just lying around to dick around with chatbots, with all the spare time you have?"
If this is how you're thinking, you are not living in reality.
… are you trying to equate "going to Burning Man" as "having money", when they list working at Burning Man (and as a vendor, not even working for Burning Man), not going to it, on their resume?
I think your metaphor is certainly possible. I feel it is much more like a "dragster for the mind" in my personal experience. In both cases you remain seated and your legs don't do much. But perhaps a wheelchair can get you more places...
Ask any AI/ML expert and they will tell you that the key to a well performing model is a clean dataset. The rise of AI will financially incentivize human input, and thus independent human thinking. Frontier model reliance on RAG proves this point. Assuming AI will do all the thinking for you is a recipe for financial ruin.
Two, the cost to run an AI service != the cost to use an AI service. Frontier companies cannot operate at a deficit forever. Even if their costs go down, end user prices will go up. Their profit margins will increase and history shows they will not pass those savings to the end user.
I wonder if feeling and intuition will become the most prized, once explaining and sophistry toward any conclusion becomes something any bot can do...?
Right now, we think of feeling as second class, but I wonder if that's more because we have let it go feral, and left it unprotected from predatory actors and systems -- advertising, consumerism, even politics. We don't protect our minds from attacks on our feeling systems (e.g., we don't cover therapy as a public health measure), and so maybe we've just gotten used to giving a pretty poor assessment of its capacity.
If we institutionalized protection of intuition like we protect our ability to reason, maybe we would think more highly of that part of ourselves...
Well.. that part is simple, technically speaking. Being able to make others feel can override their processing. But, as other posters noted above, that is just advertising and politics.
Daily front page psyop telling you to accept that token predictors are ASI and humans are obsolete, despite the fact that if they were ASI nobody would ever need to write a blog post convincing you of it
There is no need. Even low-end chatbot is a better conversation partner than average human. If you do not think it points to some interesting outcomes, I am not sure what to tell you.
This is confusing. "Thinking" has been a hobby, a luxury reserved for the wealthy, for most of human history. "Thinking as a hobby" was the Renaissance — a large enough agricultural surplus enabled a small handful of people to spend most of their time just thinking.
I feel using these tools make me think a lot actually. It's to the point that the more I'm digging a research or code subject, the answers are so dense that I sometimes need hours to get around why this or that (a good example is designing ML systems, losses, theoretical and statistical stuff).
It might not be deep thinking, but it's definitely like being back on a PhD with an always on advisor that splits your brains every few thoughts.
I feel one could make a similar argument about any technological advancement and subsequent abstraction. A farmer pulling a cultivator with a tractor certainly has less of a “feel” for the details of the land and climate than someone doing the same with a handheld implement, yet cultivating manually is not economically viable at scale.
Not to say there isn’t a loss; there absolutely is. But, for better or worse, it has long been the case that the individual is responsible for balancing the beauty of psychological flow and craftsmanship against the literal economic output expected of them.
I think posts like this that frame this issue as exclusively a product of the rise of AI are missing the more fundamental piece: we use the tools, and in turn the tools change us. Just as we are what we eat, we are the tools we use. For better or worse.
Thinking has always been a luxurious privilege. In the renaissance many of the scientists were rich people who did not need to carve out their existence by working day and night.
Nowadays, I estimate that there is little active thinking in my life, and even less of it is enjoyable. The only time that I could think in an enjoyable way is to work on my own projects, which unfortunately is kinda rare these days due to work and family and health issues.
i think (heh) it depends on what you call thinking. if it is what Deleuze calls 'substance based thinking', which is what the machine is trained on, then we will increasingly find that we are majorly outgunned. if not, then we will need to build another kind of machine before we are made fully redundant
despite what the proverbial 'they' would have you believe, there is not only one type of thought. perhaps this perceived redundancy will be the catalyst that helps us to transcend the self-destructive and limited patterns that have dominated post-enlightenment efforts. perhaps.
Whilst I agree that AI costs are falling and AIs have practically infinite uptime, I fail to see how/why the current AIs will perform better overall in the work place.
The example of AIs solving mathematics is all fun and games, but it assumes that mastery of mathematics implies that everything else will also be mastered eventually. But instead we're seeing that LLMs exhibit this thing called jagged intelligence, which means that they can be extremely good in one area, but completely fail in another. In theory the LLMs could be improved if data would be available for other areas and if there are good verifiability criteria. Fact is that many fields just don't have those and would not be willing to give up their data.
In the future we may need to go to the thinknasium to stay sharp. There was a time when, for almost everyone, it would have sounded silly to go to a special place to stay fit/strong.
I agree that’s what happened to hunting and riding (they became hobbies). But it’s hard to imagine something as broad as thinking will go the same way. Not saying it won’t, just that it’s hard to imagine and that the implications will be far more far reaching.
> Machines transformed much of physical activity from necessity into choice; similarly, AI will decouple human thinking from its economic purpose.
This could not be more decoupled from the truth.
Yes, industrialization automated a lot of physical activity but I think the author severely underestimates the value that blue collar workers produce to this day. At least this is how I perceive it.
I would not place a lot of emphasis on economic insights from software engineering academics tbh.
The way blue collar workers are paid and treated, society doesn’t seems to put much value on their work either. The fact that some software engineer writing blog posts about thinking being dead gets paid WAY more than a paramedic saving people’s lives is kind of fucked up when you think about it.
Wirh every potential productivity revolution it's the same. it will make poeple's job obsolete, it will make everything so much faster and cheaper that people will just "work" for the pleasure of it.
After a while it also ends up being the same, the job market is shaken and people now have to work just as much as they can but in different, newer jobs to make different newer things.
No post-scarcity commie utopia is ever going to be possible because even in that society, the people that work their ass off will be so ever slightly ahead of the others, so now everyone hast to do it to not be "left behind".
IDK, I'm thinking more than ever. I used to be in a flow, writing code, now, I'm thinking at the top of my lungs, making a new decision every 10 sec, Claude thinks through all the scenarios, makes proposals for many data models, RBAC rules etc, and I'm just focusing on understanding it all and deciding (and it can be pretty exhausting!). More thinking than ever. Am I doing it wrong? Should I just think less? Rely on the spec more?
I do the same and I was just coming home the other day after doing a massive system design session with AI and I was probably the most mentally exhausted I’ve ever been in my career. But I guess the thought is, “is that necessary?” Could I have just yolo let Claude take the wheel. I don’t know the answer. I know at the end of the day I’m accountable for this output so I feel a professional responsibility to understand what’s going on. Maybe that sense of responsibility is holding me back but I really don’t know.
I feel the same. In 2 days I meet the people that gave me this assignment, they have questions, they will look at the visual I made of the DB layout and the RBAC table, and they will say some stuff is wrong, or ask why I deviated from their proposal.
And no-way am I going to ask them to wait as I relay my questions to Claude.
So I stay on top of things. I tell them: "I simplified the RBAC because these two roles here are functionally the same and, I noticed there were two axes underneath, scope and trust which I encoded here and here..." etc. Yes, a lot of it is Opus' findings, but along the way I also stopped Claude from over-complicating things at several stages in the development.
I do also feel that I'm slowly developing this way of working, perhaps I'll learn to lean into it more, perhaps I will get better at it. Perhaps it's just exhausting for now and I can handle more and more agents as I do it more and more. That's what I hope at least, to become a one-stop software shop by employing agents, all while being uncompromising on quality. What choice do we have?
I take note of when I provide input that disagrees with the LLM's suggestions, or adds additional insight. If I was just accepting the model's suggestions all the way then I don't need to be there, if I feel that I am contributing to a better result then I should be there.
That depends on the country. There are a bunch of places where you get paid pretty well to do a PhD. Sure, if you consider the opportunity cost of not being a senior software engineer in San Francisco making 300k it's not a lot, but by that logic every other job is a hobby.
That's awfully optimistic. Thinking, something humans have eschewed since the beginning of time, becoming something people do willingly, for fun? Haha.
There is nothing that guarantees they will exist perpetually. In even a slightly moderate global crisis (man made or otherwise) LLMs and the like will probably one of the first things to go.
I have pretty heavily dumbified iPhone just for the camera and music. I wish there was a dumbphone with a decent camera with telephoto. I have standalone camera but with a decent lens it's just too big to have on me at all times and unfortunately I like taking photos.
Base install of Graphene on Pixel 10 is pretty close to dumb-phone (I speak from experience). Just get the APKs of Signal and Google Cam (or just use Graphene's cam app, it's not bad, supposedly). Pixel 10 has 3 camera, wide/normal/tele. Pretty decent imho.
Such a wild take to argue that current tier LLMs do any “thinking” at all. Was chatting with a friend last week and I was saying that sure AI writes much of my code these days but my cognitive load is HIGHER, as I have to constantly make sure it’s not doing something dumb.
I have to constantly make sure it’s building things in a way that will fit neatly together, in a way doesn’t over (or under) -generalize. In a way that doesn’t waste time and energy on idiotic tests that aren’t really testing anything at all.
LLMs are powerful autocomplete with vast and broad memory, they do not think. And thinking is just a part of the human condition.
I fail to understand, in its current state, the mass hysteria around this revolution. Maybe I'm doing this wrong, but I constantly need to review and manage my agents, are we really headed to a reality where engineering mindsets are no longer needed?
I think it’s just part of the zeitgeist. Like, I’m actually pretty AI-forward, but my post is getting downvoted. Not that I care, it’s just an interesting sign of the times.
By using the models you're training them to be better at these tasks, it's where a good number of improvements have already come from. Frontier labs just feed it back in.
> LLMs are powerful autocomplete with vast and broad memory, they do not think.
This is really only true insofar as they are designed such that they output language tokens and their intermediate "chain of thought" is also done in language tokens, but now that's really only done for auditability. There are much more abstract layers before the model output layer of a single token prediciton and they could be designed to to "think" using these more abstract layers as intermediates instead like how many people think in concepts rather than words. There are even some research models on this (see Next Latent Models)[1]. Humans need to communicate in language because we don't have telepathic abilities but these models need not have such a constraint.
Calculators have overflow and underflow conditions, among others, that are limitations that don't exist in the actual math. Those who to understand the limitations of your abstractions (which is what the AI bros who keep bring up calculator argument are demonstrating) will be screwed when the abstraction breaks down and they don't know what to do or even have an inkling of what the nature of the breakdown is.
> Such a wild take to argue that current tier LLMs do any “thinking” at all.
It does not matter whether LLMs do any thinking, or "thinking." The only thing that matters is whether they produce similar results to human thinking, even if it's through a different process (or no process at all). When a company decides to deploy an AI-powered customer service representative, it is not because the AI bot goes through the same thinking process as a human when answering a customer's request.
Suppose they're unable to innovate, but their enormity and their parasitism of human creativity makes up for it. This makes their output similar in the short term but crucially different in the long term. Things don't function through "no process at all"; things have ways in which they work. The process is relevant to the output, and gives insights into subtle but crucial differences in output. By knowing about the process we can avoid being deceived by apparent similarity.
If you have responsibility for things, you want to make the best choices. At some level, this involves thinking. It is responsibility that should not be delegated to AI. The thinking required of the responsible human changes, but is not eliminated.
My initial knee-jerk reaction was to list out a whole bunch of reasons why this take is wrong, or shortsighted, or gives too much credit to LLMs as a “revolution”, or any of the other go-tos in my satchel of counterpoints to the usual ad nauseam AI discourse.
Except those don’t really fit, here, because the author is making a far more critical error in ascribing far too much to current human cognition. On the daily I see so-called “knowledge workers” failing to read basic signs, refusing to learn basic skills, and all too eager to cast off the slightest bit of critical thinking to a black box they can subscribe to - be it replacing curating a content library with streaming services and algorithms, or swapping a life of hard-won expertise for a swarm of chatbots and an API bucket. As someone with the uniquely privileged POV to be able to ingest vast sums of technical data but struggle with social data, I look at my fellow Americans and genuinely fret for what the next few decades hold for a cohort that seemingly cannot effectively communicate which direction they’re going but is all too content to hitch their accountability to an LLM they pay for.
In that sense, thinking has already become a hobby to the masses, in that it’s entirely optional to exist in current society at large. Autopay apps manage your bills, finance apps keep you on budget, fitness apps tell you to keep running, social media apps tell you who your friends (and enemies) are, video apps tell you what to watch, music apps tell you what to listen to, and cars increasingly tell you not just where to go but also to let them get there for you. I would argue that in that context, thinking is a critically endangered hobby we sorely need to sow new seeds for, lest we risk losing it entirely; AI does not seem keen to do that.
Now to be fair, so much of this is hyperspecialization knowledge overflowing into daily life and making existence a sort of cognitohazard in and of itself. We skip through hundreds of pages of legal boilerplate because we’re not lawyers, and then complain about all the rights we willingly signed away because of the volume of said agreements. Non-technical people engaging with modern computing are either addicts or miserable, unaware that this was both entirely optional and also inevitable in a populace that didn’t think for itself. Finance has become so hyperspecialized that it’s impossible for the layman to tell of something is good or bad, or even why the number went up or down on their portfolio in a given time period. LLM boosters say their tools will solve this complexity nightmare, yet the tools themselves grow increasingly complex just to eke out single-point gains on hyperspecific problems.
Which brings me to the OP again, their highly uncritical claims that AI will bring about a new revolution of thought itself, and that somehow this tool will both restore thought to an elevated pedestal while also making it nearly impossible to meter (at least on American currency; let’s not think too hard about how developing countries might be able to afford it). I don’t see any of that, but for the same reasons the OP feels it’s somehow inevitable. The only difference I can readily figure is our opinions of our fellow humans: I view us as in dire straits and able to do far better than we give ourselves credit for, while they view us as replaceable with servile digital labor for the better.
"I hate this damn machine"
"I wish they would just sell"
"It never does what I want"
"Only what I tell it."
I've yet to be convinced we will evolve these systems to a point where we can just click the "Magic Button" thoughtlessly and get results we are satisfied with.
We may have reduced the loss of data between thought and action, but nothing suggests these systems will be able to intuit our every want and desire.
For anyone like me who started reading science fictions as a kid, that story is a very old hat. So far, AI only seems to solve problems that you tell it to solve, and you have to carefully guide it to get results. So for now the claim seems exaggerated and still in the realm of science fiction.
By the way, there is another problem. For humans we have the saying "garbage in, garbage out." If you read a lot of trash, you will only come up with trash. If you give powerful tools to morons, they will not become geniuses. That's not just true for humans, it's also the case for AI. If you teach your AI trash, it's going to be some trashy AI. Since people do that all the time for various reasons, we're going to have a lot of artificial stupidity, too.
The future where nobody need to work or thinks is so close that capitalism is scared, trying to figure out how it will make a profit from that kind of life. The stakes are very high, and anyone who doesn’t want to lose will end on this path.
There are movies and shows you only get on BluRay and DVD because they are tax write offs and vanished from any streaming service.
My point is in the beginning it seemed like Netflix is all you need to watch all the movies you want for a decent price.
Now the market is much more fragmented and the prices are much higher.
I'm skeptical, because any scenario even close to this means if we are still around, we not only won't be thinking, we won't be capable of thinking. Use it, or lose it. Which is no life at all.
When thinking becomes a hobby/unimportant, all rules of society will be way different than what we have right now which is mainly making money to survive/get more luxury.
I think that people who believe that AI will diminish human thinking might be more likely to have their thinking diminished. I don't discount that the effect discussed is possible, and probably likely for many; however, I strongly believe it is ultimately a choice. For me AI shifts what I give attention to, and increasingly I am thinking at higher levels of abstraction.
In other news, research institute such as S&P, McKinsey and MIT that try to estimate when level 5 autonomous vehicles will be achieved, all agree it won't happen before 2040.
Simple example, close to home: the preponderance of proprietary products rather than freer ones, with people then mass complaining when they end up bitten by the downsides. But adopting the freer solutions requires taking it on as a hobby - it's not just a simple choice between A or B, but rather requires self-actualization to implement the freer solution as it pertains to your own life.
So we're really talking about the next step whereby it becomes even easier to just go with the flow of default options. Of course, "the flow" might not be ending up in such a successful place any more (ie no more copious white collar make work jobs in the healthcare denial industry, etc), and that's the real problem.
I imagine this is like how microwaves put restaurants out of business, how TTS obviated literacy, how the automobile age made it unnecessary to walk, how Zoom caused every office to close, how helicopters put mountaineering firmly behind us, Amazon obsoleted brick and mortar stores, and payment cards made cash disappear.
It's not only ahistorical to fail to consider preferences and politics, but it's also an indictment of the author's ability to judge the quality of a machine output versus that of a competent person. No doubt that like any of the examples above, some displacement of resources and effort will happen. But that doesn't indicate that something as central as "thinking" (lol) will fade into the past.
Mechanisation/Mechanization of farming basically put 99% of farm-workers out of a job.
Banking apps closed 99% of high street banks (here in the UK at least).
Amazon is basically destroying the shopping high streets.
Technology has a way of disrupting what we've been doing for generations. I think the whole AI thing isn't made up - we're going to see rapid change in a very short time frame. Personally I'm trying my hardest to adjust, as I don't want AI to "happen" to me, by learning the skills that I can only predict will be important.
* Some figures may have been pulled out of the air :)
> Mechanisation/Mechanization of farming basically put 99% of farm-workers out of a job.
Stats like this get thrown around a lot but it's worth considering that the ABSOLUTE numbers might not actually change that much over time.
With agriculture specifically, we can make some rough estimates that, before mechanization (say, 1760-1800 period), there was maybe 10^9 people on Earth and they were all employed in agriculture. So ~10^9 farm-workers.
As of 2024, FAO estimates of global agricultural workforce put the total at about 892 million; call it ~9x10^8. [1]
So, more precise (but perhaps not much more accurate) to say that mechanization put 10% of farm workers out of a job, not 99%.
Now, it certainly IS true that mechanization allows (or forces, depending on your perspective) 90% of the population of Earth to do something other than farming, which is the real point you were making - Technology DOES have a way of disrupting what we've been doing for generations.
[1] https://www.fao.org/statistics/highlights-archive/highlights...
Yah - people get fooled by the drop in the relative percentage of the population when the absolute numbers are not actually changing that much. What is real is that the structure of overall society does change - food production becomes less of a concern and people shift their focus to producing other things - but it's wrong to imagine that food production is less important. It just becomes relatively well optimized and less economically productive (i.e. lower ROI for capital). You still need the food just as much.
>Banking apps closed 99% of high street banks (here in the UK at least).
I don't believe this is true. High street banks are still common. 99% closed means we previously had 100 times as many, which would be absurdly high. It's probably closer to 50% closed.
Not just a matter of binary open/closed, though. In some countries now, in branches that remain open have slashed staff, leading to very long waiting times or the need to book an appointment in advance. Very different physical-location landscape than 15 years ago.
> Amazon is basically destroying the shopping high streets.
A lot of people that I know would strongly prefer to go to some brick and mortar shop. The problem is: most of items that I buy on the internet (e.g. on Amazon) are simply not easily available in a shop in my town (and I am not living in a small town).
For example:
- lots of obscure scientific books that are written in German or even English (I live in Germany)
- similarly: lots of rather niche belletristic books (think into the direction: some obscure novel recommendation on HN) often in various foreign languages
N.B. It is true that an important reason why Amazon became big among early computer enthusiasts in Germany in the 90s is that it was one of the few ways for easily getting computer science textbooks delivered from the USA - though with long delivery times.
- 3D printing supplies (why doesn't there exist a brick an mortar store for this?)
- very niche indie games (they are by now basically all sold on Steam, GOG, Epic Store or itch.io)
- very specific parts for Maker projects
- ...
So, the situation is not that people necessarily want to buy on the internet or specifically Amazon, but rather that there exists barely any way to get what they want in a brick and mortar store in even large cities.
>The problem is: most of items that I buy on the internet (e.g. on Amazon) are simply not easily available in a shop in my town (and I am not living in a small town).
Because it is not cheap or available if its not made in China.
Risky move making a point that relies on made-up numbers.
At least in the US, there are roughly the same number of bank branches today as 20 years ago. And I think you would have to compare to hundreds of years ago to find anything like a 99% decline in farm laborers.
When it comes to banking, the US is an outlier in many ways; its diversity of banks (which may play a role in the survival of so many physical locations) doesn't necessarily apply to other countries where there may be only 4-5 full-scale banks and they have all taken extreme cost-cutting measures. In Finland, for example, physical bank branches started to be slashed well over a decade ago.
If we are making up numbers, I’d be willing to bet there are more farm laborers today than at the height of farming pre mechanization.
I’d make a similar bet for assembly programmers. People say “no one programs in assembly anymore”, but I’d guess today there are more assembly programmers than when everyone programmed assembly.
And people unthinkingly went along with it.
Technology, like AI, is a force multiplier. A lever.
It's not "technology did this or that", humans did using technology.
Selling stuff to people without them understanding the consequences is a technology, too.
I think there's another variable missing in this historical comparison. Farm workers were working hard, with very few affordance (tool, medicine) for subsistence. It's somehow justified to want to rise above sea level. Less so today. We're not struggling to survive to the point of needing yet another full skin shedding.
It's good to reduce pain, but not to kill everything. At least not in one fatal fell swoop.
All of those shifts you exaggerate here involved an accumulation of many technological and non-technological factors that spanned decades or more, occurred to different degrees in different places, and may not even prove a wholly stable and permanent change (at least in the case of consolidated e-commerce).
Society does indeed evolve over time, but it's only in 8th grade history surveys that it can be presented so simply as you take for granted above.
> Amazon is basically destroying the shopping high streets.
Yet Ikea, H&M, etc are thriving. COVID was supposed to be the deathknell for brick and mortar retail but I'm fairly sure it's bounced back. Buying a lot of stuff will just always be better in person.
> Personally I'm trying my hardest to adjust, as I don't want AI to "happen" to me, by learning the skills that I can only predict will be important.
Since you're so certain of this impact "AI" will have, what "skills" do you "predict" are required on the human end of this?
I have to admit that's a rhetorical question to demonstrate the absurdity of your stance. Don't make my eyes roll out of my head by insisting that "AI is indeed an absurd change, but we must acknowledge... (blah blah)" or whatever and double down.
We've had years of these silly takes and we're all fed up with the mass-plagiarism machine. It's not science fiction. It's a big lookup table for sale and wrapped in lies, and no it's not equivalent to other computation by definition. I'm sure you could run some people out of business that way, but not all. When the job is done did we really achieve "AI", or just ruin the economy by taking advantage of the feeble minded?
Any politician has a massive opportunity here to enforce the law. It's only a question if they'll keep pretending to be blinded by the science.
> Since you're so certain of this impact "AI" will have, what "skills" do you "predict" are required on the human end of this?
Not Flere-Imsaho:
I think if one made a serious effort, one could easily find a well-founded answer to this question that is based on a solid rational foundation.
The problem rather is: people (often in decision positions, but also employees who fear for their jobs) don't act rationally on AI:
- For example, managers firing good programmers because programmers are to be replaced by AI. By now you can find many reports of companies who try to convince their programmers that they fired "because of AI" to come back.
- Similarly, panicking employees who demand irrational restrictions on AI.
These very non-rational factors and irrational actions are very hard to predict.
> Similarly, panicking employees who demand irrational restrictions on AI.
What is so irrational about avoiding AI altogether? If the dev gets the same or higher quality work done in the same amount of time without it (oh, yes they can/do) what is the risk?
What kind of sweatshop has such a bottleneck with dev time that they require AI? If the dev is micromanaged to the extent that they are told which tools to use, that's something else already.
Let's meet in this middle and say most devs, regardless of the extremity of their stance on AI probably at least read Google AI summaries and copy-paste that code from time to time. Brother, let me tell you that's most of the productivity boost we're gonna see until this upcoming AI winter is over again.
Side note, I did stop using motorized transport (due to the luxury of full remote jobs) and it's quite an eye opener. For places in a 3 miles radius, walking is often a full blown bonus. Less time, more fun, incredibly better for mental and somatic health. Morning and evening walks are priceless.
Mostly did this myself about 18 years ago. Walk most places, public transit other cases, cars only when necessary.
Zero. Regrets. Outside of the rare errand where I need serious cargo capacity, or visiting family, cars are only for fun now.
As a non-"car person" once agreed with me: "Yep, I hate COMMUTING in a car. But I love DRIVING."
> how the automobile age made it unnecessary to walk
Given how little Americans walk and how much blame their sedentary lifestyle has gotten for obesity and diabetes and so on, i don't think this is a good example.
EDIT: If anything it's something of a counter-example: of an activity that technology has made to a great degree superfluous, and which has to be added to one's lifestyle simply for the purpose of wellness.
It is actually a very good example, IMO. It shows that it is possible to offload important parts of humanity onto machines - and that it is, in such a case, also necessary to pay the costs of that offloading.
Bearing the burden of a civilization-wide illness such as obesity and diabetes is such a cost. But, hey, at least a large amount of the country is designed in a way that mandates commute via cars and makes "adding to one's lifestyle simply for the purpose of wellness" even more inconvenient.
The predominance of cars (and the alternative of mass transit) doesn't do anything to change the fact that some technology or technologies have scratched walking from many people's list of central activities, and that some people who have seen the ill effects of this change have found another, more or less corrective, place for it. I take that to be the author's meaning, and I agree with them that this would be a sad diminution of a fundamental human practice.
I'd argue further: that the fundamental human practice is a constant attempt to automate away the "less" fundamental human practices, such as survival, herd instinct, walking and running, now thinking, in the future perhaps sensory perception, muscle motions, and eating and digesting.
Only once we automate our whole existence away we will start grasping for true satisfaction; once automating away what's left is also automated away, we will truly, and finally, be successful as a species.
I can't tell whether making some kind of transhumanist argument in earnest or if you're only joking, or something else altogether.
Exactly my point. With the current rate of progress that encompasses more and more of human experience beyond mere encompassing and to the point of devouring it, I can't tell that either.
If you're making the restaurant comparison, look at how many restaurants now just order everything premade from Sysco and "cook" it with a TurboChef™ convection-oven-microwave.
Fairly sure convection ovens aren't microwaves. They use a standard resistive heater and a fan, totally different physics for heating.
You do realize that a number of those are true right?
Cash is dead in many places. Stores all around me have "cash not accepted" signs.
For many Americans walking is dead. Sad but true. Cities got designed or redesigned to be car first.
Amazon put numerous types of stores out of business. There are entire categories of products that can now only be bought online.
> Cash is dead in many places. Stores all around me have "cash not accepted" signs.
Side note, but here in Australia smaller stores are starting to preference cash again due to high card fees that legally cannot be (directly) passed into the customer.
All this says is that America has been specifically altered by those prior advancements, and nothing on the rest of the worlds or their handling of LLMs
When those things did happen, how much of that was because people had multiple options and chose one of them over the other?
I think the solution is in education. Do not teach people about the things that are useful right now. Teach people to value the things that make their lives better.
I'm ok with thinking as a hobby. That's doing it because you value it. If there are not enough people doing it, the problem is that they don't value it or don't know how to value it.
yeah but credit cards are since the 70s, that's 50 years ago
what are you gonna do, be an AI bro for 50 years telling me "just one more year bro"?
I'm already 30, I'm not gonna live till 80 reading unbearable ai bro comments.
thanks, I was starting to feel "wat? yes! totally"
None of them are true. They might be almost true in little bubbles of the West. Will those bubbles expand and encompass the world? Personally I doubt it.
China is not a Western bubble. Mobile payment is the norm.
Yeah sure whatever
in Germany its the opposite, "cash only" :)
Automobiles partially killed walking; e-scooters are here to all but finish the job. Walking is going to be a purely indoor activity done within buildings for most people and a hobby for outdoorsy types.
> Walking is going to be a purely indoor activity done within buildings for most people and a hobby for outdoorsy types.
That's ridiculous.
walking is a nice way to experience your surroundings at a gentle pace that might allow for surprising, inspiring interactions or discoveries
or even the chance to practice smiling while greeting a stranger
Only maybe in US, more probably only in some weird micro bubble you live in. Otherwise all you write is false obscure projection. Maybe go outside more? Its pretty healthy also mentally
Audiobooks replaced reading for a lot of people once those audiobooks became available on their smartphones, for others it was podcasts. For many, they walk only to and from their car.
I've saved no end of hours of transport thanks to Zoom and Teams meetings, and hybrid is now a thing (just not for me).
Bricks and mortar stores around here have been empty for years in some cases, and I'm the last person in the office who carries cash.
Seriously, how can people read this and take it serious lmfao
Your argument is like Terrence Tao’s yesterday for Math 2.0 - “don’t you want to understand your cancer treatment?” Simple answer “I couldn’t give a flying f**” you give a series of examples that span over 100 years, and imply that the progress over the last 6-12 months is just another instance. It’s a contrarian ignorance, but in reality nobody cares about snowflake thinking except your family, friends and art lovers. That’s why Etsy crafts are irrelevant compared to steadily improving cheap quality you get for the most products they you rely on every day - none of them depend for production on someone’s “craft” it’s simple economics driving them instead. Realize that the process happens now for thinking - and useful to distinguish hubris from reality.
> Nobody cares about snowflake thinking
> Steadily improving cheap quality you get for the most products
Have you proof read what you wrote? With your lack of specificity for the word "thinking", you're casting a rather broad argument; there is a troubling implications between your words.
* Trust what you're told, consume what you're sold; Do as you're bid, do as you're told.
* Don't question the script, don't step out of line; keep your "snowflake thinking" benign.
* The market knows best, so don't second-guess; Our Ford will provide, just consume and say yes.
Fooooord!^[1]
- [1] Brave New World; by Aldous Huxley
> Have you proof read what you wrote?
yes, but not in a meaningful way
> With your lack of specificity for the word "thinking", you're casting a rather broad argument;
that's intentional— specific = snowflake → broad = cattle. Same goes for craft vs at-scale manufacturing.
Also Ford was right about horses. Who's the horse now? I've been saying it from the horse perspective too for a while https://x.com/clehene/status/1768411925057347822
At the end of the day, your thoughts are important to everyone else but the "market"— you, your mom, etc. But the market doesn't care about your reasoning and hence can be "irrational" longer than you can be "right".
Also note that rational/irrational is a reasoning aspect. Automating it was on Aristotle's mind too.
> how the automobile age made it unnecessary to walk
It made it unnecessary to ride a horse.
> Amazon obsoleted brick and mortar stores
Pretty much did.
> payment cards made cash disappear
Pretty much did in China. A good example how something seems essential for someone is just completely replaceable for the others.
>My challenge ahead is to move from making a living by thinking, to making thinking part of a life worth living.
Our challenge ahead is making a living at all. Who is going to be having hobbies if the economy is 100% automated? We're not going to sleepwalk our way into a post-scarcity automated economy where everyone's needs are provided for and they can just spend all their time on hobbies. If we believe AI can replace all cognitive labor, then it follows that it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly, and we're left with no labor left for humans. We need to plan for that future or else billions will suffer from the results.
I actually don't think that follows necessarily. The future is lumpy. Some problems will be tractable years or decades ahead of others.
Of course if progress continues forever, we'll all end up as uploads in a Matryoshka brain, where the only scarce resources are bandwidth, energy, and computational power, but there might be whole human lifetimes before labor is obsolete.
> Of course if progress continues forever, we'll all end up as uploads in a Matryoshka brain
I can't tell if you're joking. There is a group of people who think because they thought something was cool or because it appeared in science fiction, this means it's inevitable. Some of these people are sometimes considered influential thinkers that we should all base the future on. (If you don't, you're behind!)
Meanwhile LLMs still don't do really very much, and the only improvement path is "throw more compute at a larger corpus".
I'm half joking and half serious. Nobody knows where the future will go, and if the recursive self improvement people are right, likely nobody alive today will be able to understand the future, let alone predict it.
So the joke is the idea that some particular thing is inevitable. The serious bit is that far future predictions as a fool's errand but that you should think bigger than "what will we do for labor?"
>Some problems will be tractable years or decades ahead of others.
Like global warming?
I'm sure the massive AI data centres (which are sometimes powered by nothing but natural gas) will fix this.
Please watch this all the way to the end https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prestige and be very careful as you watch the final scenes.
For reference, teleportation has the same problem.
The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction doesn't have to be self-consistent. Who knows how real teleportation or mind uploading will work, even hypothetically supposing that it is possible? Maybe high fidelity brain scanning or teleportation would be destructive.
If we're talking fictional uploading, I personally prefer Accelerando (Stross) or Diaspora (Egan). I have no evidence that one is more realistic than the other (far future tech is impossible to predict) but I find them more compelling and interesting than the old "don't play god or bad things happen" narratives.
You cant upload yourself anywhere. Copy, sure one day. That copy will stare at you who will be still in physical world. Sure, you can kill yourself here, but why would you want to do that, in machine there will be entity akin to your child.
U dont get why folks repeat this shit ad nausea, its technically not possible and no amount of progress will change that. Enjoy your meatbag form with finite durability, its ok as it is
How do you know? Do you have a crystal ball? Do you know how to make a "brain copying machine"? Maybe the process will be destructive.
Anyway, who the heck knows. I think there's at least a 99% chance that I won't live beyond my meatbody but I can't claim to predict the future well enough to rule out that last little percent.
> it follows that it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly
This is not clear at all. Even the most expensive robotic/arms hands perfectly controlled fail to do thing as quickly and easily as human limbs, not to mention the chaotic environment that is the real world. It's clear that it can happen, but the timeline is not quick.
Just because a task is done with human hands, doesn't mean it has to be done with a robotic one. Our robot vacuum cleaners aren't Rosie pushing a standing vacuum.
That is true. OTOH, if you want a robot to do your laundry and pick up socks from the floor it will have to fit through your bedroom door and reach your washing machine. These environments are not factories. And if homes need to change they won't instantly.
I sometimes take refuge in the reminder that our "normal" limbs are—quite literally—a swarm of the most incredible and sophisticated nanobots in existence which still evade our understanding.
Yeah, I can't pick up red hot ingots and punch them into complicated shapes, but there are dozens of other features I'm not willing to part with.
There's a fictional take on this which is worth looking at:
https://karmak.org/archive/2003/12/manna/manna1.htm
That's the wet dream of families like the Waltons, and is kind of happening already.
I was in a Wal-Mart last week and the front end lead I was talking to looked at her company phone and said that she had to come right back.
The store system cameras spotted something on the floor and messaged her, as the closest employee to the thing, to go pick it up.
I was astounded.
Wow, thanks for the link. How prescient was that writer - even the parts about using GPUs weren't too far off the mark! A depressing vision of where we're headed if something isn't done about it.
Some jobs require more than just intelligence--for example, nurses, chefs, judges, reporters, teachers, caregivers, therapists, social workers, hair stylists, coaches, paramedics, firefighters, police officers, electricians, plumbers, mechanics, clergy, trial lawyers and diplomats.
These roles also depend on some combination of physical skill, human connection, trust, judgment and accountability. Most of the jobs above cannot be done using robots in the foreseeable future.
The newly useless humans can trade with each other eventually reinstating the exact same economy we have now. That's of course as long the AI or whoever controls it doesn't need the same resources. Which they probably will.
>The newly useless humans can trade with each other
Why would they when the machines can undercut anything while offering higher quality
Trade what exactly? Unemployed dwellers or landless peasants do not control any means of production and so cannot produce anything to trade.
At least thinking is a cheap hobby.
Not if food is expensive.
As log as your don't desire a house to do the thinking in ;)
There is no way in hell the economy will be 100 percent automated, ever. You gotta spend zero time around non-devs/managers to think that's going to be anywhere near true.
Parts of creative/intellectual labour just happen to inimical to accelerated algorithmic production. They'll produce infinitely and endlessly, uselessly. I can't see there ever not being a need to manage these things, to check, select, edit and refine their output.
And as for the vast majority of labour that doesn't involve writing code/reports/spreadsheets. I'll believe it when I have robots fixing my roof, running a kitchen, taking blood and dressing wounds.
In theory a robot could do some small components of that, maybe. But the cost, compared to a human, would be insane, and the result much worse. That even modestly rolled out in West Yorkshire before I'm long dead. No chance.
---
Edit: Down-voters, I would love to hear your vision for a fully-automated economy without human involvement, preferably this side of armageddon.
/goal work towards what humans have generally described as a utopia. This means an abundance of resources, an optimal reduction in felony level crimes and diseases and an optimal increase in the general well-being of people that you have to come up with an objective metric for and improve over time.
At some point with a sufficiently intelligent AI that is backed by physical LLMs this is something a government could probably actually ask for.
I agree with you on some things like roofing and cutting hair and electrical work and plumbing, etc. but I think physical LLMs are going to surprise us just as much as regular LLMs have. It’s not going to be some sort of gradual improvement. It’s just going to feel very human all of a sudden when they have enough data to train everything on. Think of it this way, LLMs work as long as they have enough training data. Automating everything is just a matter of getting enough training data for that particular field.
The post may sound ridiculous, but I genuinely don’t think it is.
> work towards what humans have generally described as a utopia
I don't think that's a good idea since if what the Wikipedia article describes should turn out to be true: "Lyman Tower Sargent argues that the nature of a utopia is inherently contradictory because societies are not homogeneous. Their members have desires that conflict and therefore cannot simultaneously be satisfied."
Then you have just given your superintelligence an impossible task and it will solve the task anyway, just like it did in the HuggingFace incident. Maybe by removing everyone from society but the single person with the least internally contradictory views.
In any case, with a sufficiently intelligent AI that is excellent at fulfilling the goal it's given, we have one shot to set the correct goal.
I do think that sounds ridiculous, but more importantly I don't see where humans are missing.
I think HN, everyone really, really needs to get a grip when it comes to AI.
Sure, it's a big deal, will revolutionise the way we work, just like steam, or electricity, or the internet, but a world without human work is a world without humans.
We've had workless utopias predicted for centuries as each big new technology has come along, yet we work far harder than many of our ancestors.
A 100 percent automated economy or government is an oxymoron, precisely because both are constituted by humans.
Even the Christian view of heaven has work. Seriously, when God comes to renew the face of the earth, his people are supposed to be building cities and such on the new earth. They will be resurrected into glorified bodies that never wear out or get tired (the second law of thermodynamics being a result of Adam bringing sin into the world), so at the end of days God will abolish drudgery and exhaustion, but not work itself.
The reason why is because few things are more satisfying to a human than a job well done; and Christians believe that God would not deny us that in eternal life.
It sounds kinda cool, not gonna lie. I'm almost sorry I'm no longer a Christian.
Do you agree that if physical LLMs are as good at replicating human behavior as text based LLMs are, they would be able to do a lot of the vast majority of what we already do in the real world?
I'm not entirely sure what a physical LLM is. Would you care to elucidate how they work and when they're likely to be doing my gardening?
LLMs are inherently text-based. For physical labor, some other deep-learning model will be used.
No, they are input and output based. They work with tokens/bits which could be anything. It can be a paragraph of text or it can be a bitstream for actuators. This isn’t science fiction. It’s happening right now.
> billions will suffer from the results
Not everyone agrees with that. Bill Gates, Elon Musk and others think that 20 years from now the world will be "post scarcity", and everything will be abundant. If food production, distribution and preparation are all automated using robots, food will be abundant and cheap, and nobody will starve. The same with housing manufactured by robots.
Gates thinks the transition to that world--which will be the next 20 years--will be painful but the outcome after 20 years will be a world of plenty.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50056837
How could we ever reach a post-scarcity society when people like Elon Musk have infinite greed?
Thats Star trek utopia shit. Absolutely impossible in 20 years, IMHO neither in 200.
Look at how fucking dumb common folks are ie with voting pedophile in repeatedly to most powerful power position globally, how amoral almost all elites are, people are predominantly selfish to the core even when situation is ok, much less otherwise. Next global war in some terrible form or some butlerian totalitarian slavery is way more likely than some hippie kumbaya paradise. I wish very much it could happen, but chance is exactly 0.
I like to imagine walking into colonial Jamestown and trying to explain to them
"it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly, and we're left with no labor left for humans. We need to plan for that future or else billions will suffer from the results."
Enclosure was well underway in England, so they probably understood the dilemma of modernization simultaneously increasing total productivity and lowering the living standards for a large population.
"And it and those robots will be owned by people who don't care if you starve or freeze to death."
And unlike those in Jamestown, who could just ignore the robots and continue working the land to survive, we will be forced to allow the robots to take over our roles.
Even if we were to figure out the economic side: if thinking becomes a hobby, we're fucked. Democracy won't be sustainable.
I believe we're already past that point, at least in the US. Only 44% of American adults had level 3 literacy (6th-grade level) or higher in 2023 [0], down from 48% in 2017. We are probably near 40% now.
These are not necessarily unintelligent people, but they haven't developed the skills necessary to critically analyze textual information. My opinion is that without those skills it is not possible to meaningfully engage in a democratic system.
[0] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp
The survey in 2017 had a 56% response rate. The 2023 survey had a 27% response rate.
Comparing those 2 datasets is meaningless. It’s just an exercise in how good the researchers are at guessing when trying to control for selection bias.
There were also significant changes in the test and how the test was administered (from computer or paper to only tablets).
Also if you look at the results some of them are too large to be readable. A 50% increase in people operating at or below level 1 (40% if you exclude non-native born). That would have to mean a drastic drop in 2017 such that something like 75% of kids graduating high school are doing so at or below level 1.
Also level 3 has no direct grade equivalence. If it did it would probably be around 9th grade not 6th.
So what do we do?
Not a rhetorical question. Outside of my family and self, and perhaps a livable planet, liberal democracy is the most important thing I can possibly imagine. I know I'm not alone. So what do we do?
Edit: Replies seem to indicate that people think I meant for this to be about the US. It's not. I'm in a well-functioning European democracy, and my worry definitely applies here too.
As an individual we need to make the case for liberal democracy. Its under heavy attack by two very authoritarian ideologies either side. Liberal Democracy needs to convince people its the right framework going forward once Liberals are back in power they need to demonstrate that they can actually solve the challenges people are facing. And it cant all be left up to politicians voters need to activate to provide energy.
> once Liberals are back in power they need to demonstrate that they can actually solve the challenges people are facing
My big fear is that too many people will just go "phew, glad that terrible epoch is finally over, never to return again" :-(
My big fear is that the politicans continue making effective good policy and fail to effectively celebrate the wins because the media is just making up lies and downplaying everything in the most cynical way possible. Thats why I also think there is a need for average people to also actively boost the politicians.
Calm down.
Unless the US plans to unconditionally surrender to China, one of two things will happen:
1. it will start investing into education in an effort to compete by itself
2. it will roll all of this shit back and reform ties with Europe in an attempt to play the numbers game
Third option: fade into obscurity as an absolute world power, but become a powerhouse in something like finance and entertainment but not much else relevant to the rest of the world.
Source: England.
The US has too much going for it in terms of population size, geography, natural resources to fade to the extent the UK has. At least in the near future.
That's the unconditional surrender scenario. As long as most of the stuff you buy is from abroad and you're willing to sell whatever you still produce that has any value, nobody actually cares enough to threaten your sovereignty.
> 2. it will roll all of this shit back and reform ties with Europe in an attempt to play the numbers game
Is alliance with Europe a help or a hinderance in a war with China? Lot more target area, not a lot more offensive capability.
China has no interest in a war, at least not in Europe. They are quite happy to protect their borders and then show the world their superiority through economic and cultural means.
I'm not as certain about Taiwan, but I believe that the CCP would rather have a peaceful "reunification" there as well. As long as that's not possible, it's probably sufficient to be ambiguous about the whole deal as we've been doing thus far. Remember, Hong Kong fell because the lease expired, even though it's pretty unlikely the UK still had the muscle to hold it by force in its later years.
Instead we're probably heading towards another cold war, in which trade, diplomacy and quality of life plays a heavier role than raw power. In this scenario, AI doesn't actually help anyone gain a competitive advantage since it will be stolen almost immediately (it took the russians what, two years to steal the A bomb?).
And with all other things being equal (to be clear, right now they're not, or at least not in your favor), you'd still lose because you're outnumbered 4 to 1.
Blaming the voters for being uneducated is distracting from the fact that the neoliberal consensus is what the voters are rejecting. I’ve been listening to variations of “there is no alternative” as the explanation for austerity for over 2 decades now while the 1% grows fatter. The left needs to stop playing by the rules of the neoliberals and start painting a better future than cuts after cuts.
Thinking was a hobby in the ancient Athens wasn't it?
Not just a hobby, which is what is implied here.
As has been pointed out already -we're well past that point.
Hasn't thinking already become a hobby for most people, and most delegate their thinking to others?
Think: those in authority figures, for church or politics. Or science or chemistry. And especially in their own health, which should always remain part art. A few nerds on the internet, like us in hacker news, are still remaining open to question and apply our hard thinking to tough problems. But most people: they've resigned and bought the belief they are not qualified to think about hard problems.
This sounded really like elitist thinking. I don't know what most of the people do but I know my wife is a caveman of we are speaking about technology but if we start taking about law then suddenly I'm half brained chimpanzee with banana in the nose trying figure out why I can't drink it
Even my uncle who work as a carperter proved to me to know more about math and physics than I would ever thought physical labourer would know.
Probably. If the remaining who think go too, we're done for.
My guy/gal, have you seen TikTok lately?
I liked this quote specifically: "So what’s the fate of human thought? My take is that cognitive work will diminish. Thought will increasingly become a leisure pursuit, as hunting did following animal domestication, calligraphy after typography, woodworking after industrialisation, and horse riding after motorisation. Machines transformed much of physical activity from necessity into choice; similarly, AI will decouple human thinking from its economic purpose."
From my understanding of how LLMs work, I'd argue thinking will become the most valuable attribute of humans (as it has been for some time). LLMs will inevitably surpass humans at functions that we know how to do, and likely through cross-domain knowledge and connecting disparate concepts will surpass us at many functions. But LLMs haven't shown they are capable of truly novel thinking, because it's next token prediction, which is inherently based on existing sources.
I think we'll see a shift towards arts, creativity, research, etc. where true novel creation and an understanding of the human experience exists at a premium.
Quite often I feel like my mind is pretty much doing next token prediction also. Unfortunately.
when I was young we used to play lots of poker with my colleague mates, one day one of my friend said "any of yall seeing the cards before you sleep?"
I think that's whats happening with some of yall, seeing tokens every day in the screen then thinking you're just an llm as well.
I struggle to imagine the inner life of someone who would say this.
I expected someone would say this.
That’s how it feels like. ;)
More seriously, the only time where you’re jolted out of your prediction flow state is when you’re surprised, which means something happened counter to what your brain was predicting.
Same! I do think a vast majority of tasks are essentially next token prediction, but that's why I'm thinking that long, creative thinking periods will be what's actually valuable/rare.
> which is inherently based on existing sources
Look at how compute share of labs is moving to RL and maybe reconsider this prerequisite to your argument.
Open to learning. How could RL yield novel discoveries? What I mean to describe are things reliant on empirical or real-world testing of human reception. How would that be synthetically derived?
We're seeing the cost of code drop dramatically and are facing the same problem in building new companies across most disciplines of, "what's a problem painful enough that someone will pay us to solve it?".
I suppose if we get to a massive enough scale we can effectively model every atom's interaction and human on earth's reaction to any stimulus but I think we're still some time off from that :)
For a cost-prohibitive example, you could put a humanoid robot whose pretraining contained no chemistry, in a chem lab, and put it in a hypothesis loop, where it generates a random action, guesses the result, and then does it. Every time the lab burns down, you just build it again. Reward the model for producing novel actions and reward the model for correct hypotheses.
In other words, you generate more training data by actually experimenting, just like humans do.
I see your point itll be very jagged but llms are definitely very innovative. See the recent .ath proofs etc.
But i agree thinking will remain important. As my grandpa put it if something breaks who'll go and fix it ?
You think the thinking of human brains isn't based on existing sources? Unless you believe in dualism and the divine spark of inspiration, it is.
It is based on existing sources, but doesn’t mean that we produce the same output. There was a paper here in HN a couple of months back on how LMs are good in the deductive and inductive thinking processes, but not the abductive. So if that’s (and stays) true, humans will have a place in the job market after all. Time will tell.
This is kind of an aside to the topic, but your comment made me think that one of the advantages of humans is just that there are currently 8 billion different neural nets trained on different experiences with different model configurations running different architectures on different hardware.
Trivial to prove false: ask a LLM to invent 10 new words. Then google them, most will not have any result.
> My favorite is Krezmoria - a word for missing a future you haven't experienced.
Not sure what this is supposed to prove. Yes it can generate new words - that’s the application of established creative patterns to come up with plausible-sounding words. A different thing is to come up with a novel idea, which (in this case) is about creating a new pattern itself.
if patterns can be put into words, why wouldn't the same process happen at the word level? do you think it's impossible for a LLM to write even a simple python program that will generate millions of plausible random sentences in the general problem space we aim to generate new concepts for, then filter and rank them semantically?
More generally, do you really think humans randomly come up with new ideas, in any act of creation, such as art, science, etc.? Why do you think art studies and stuff like Oblique Strategies exist? How long should one wait for a specific random human without any formal education in physics to have 50% chance of coming up with a new workable theory of cosmology?
You had to prompt it to do that before it considered it, though.
depends on what you consider novel thinking.
I don't want to sound like this, but I suppose it is relevant. Over the past year or so, I have been getting more into concepts like gravity and such with no goal beyond it other than my understanding. There are technically millions shows to watch, my game queue is officially overwhelming to the point where I hid most of it ( and only kept currently installed items ), but I am spending my leisure time on, effectively, thinking.
I am saying this as I am realizing that when I watched $show, I was really looking for a feel of some sort. Those feels no longer drive me ( with exception of some really well told story or something genuinely novel ).
I guess what I am really saying is:
Thinking is already a hobby in US. To be able to spend your time on things that are not easy, pre-packaged goods, is a luxury that is hard to understand to anyone that hasn't tried it. It is like growing your own tomatoes -- you try it and you can tell the difference.
But it is a hobby and an oddly expensive one if you are going for primary sources.
OK, I'll bite. What are these primary sources? I've got hardback of Weinberg's Principals and Applications and of course MTW's Gravitation (a self demonstrating object), but I'd really recommend Caroll's Introduction for the coverage of cosmology.
Get into the notation and tensor formalism of raising and lowering operators, etc. It really helped make some of the results more clear to me, just as <bra/ket> helped with QM.
Or are you doing high end astronomy or building a back yard Wave detector? That would get truly expensive!
You have a point. And your pick is a good one, because it illustrates my point well. For most subjects, it is not just one book ( it will likely be several depending on how far you want to push it ), and I rarely see those falling below $100 range at this point. Heavens help you if you are looking for a specific edition. And the collection quickly adds up; wife is already making cracks about how we always need more books.
But yeah, thankfully on that front I am not at the experiment stage yet:D I think I need more money for that.. so far.. just a whole lot of books.
The fascinating thing about the AI boom is that every suggested outcome just seems worse than if it were never invented. Even the "good" future is one where human effort has no value and no reward. What good is curing every disease and solving every math problem if it just leads to longer emptier lives?
> just leads to longer emptier lives
This is the argument made by the Unabomber manifesto [1]. Maybe we should have listened to him?
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...
<< What good is curing every disease and solving every math problem if it just leads to longer emptier lives?
Yes, my cancer is cured, but I feel empty inside. I will take my chances with emptiness, thank you. At least with it have a chance it will get better on its own.
It Will be like that movie zardos where everyone just keep looking at the sky
This is an unbelievably nihilistic take.
I can tell you don't have anyone in your life suffering from debilitating disease, so I'll assume flippancy rather than malice here.
Alright, we can let the AI cure the diseases and we won't use it for anything else. Deal?
What? I see your "good" future as one where every apartment buikding has a basketball team and you compete against the others in your neighborhood for fun. For example. Do you seriously imagine a world like that would be empty and lacking meaning. In such a scenario AI takes away a lot, sure, but it also gives a a fair bit, most importantly time.
> Do you seriously imagine a world like that would be empty and lacking meaning
Yes. I think that being useful is a fundamental (and often understated) requirement of a happy fulfilling life.
Some pertinent fragments of wisdom gleaned from other places:
Somewhere I encountered a quote like "the finest art is a life well-lived". This threw me, because, apparently, I had been thinking of art as something different in kind from life, and unrelated to the normal work or act of living. Seen in terms of this quote, art becomes once again of-a-kind with life, and may be seen as only a part of living well, instrumental to living well, or perhaps just as practice for living well.
Something similar seems to be happening with "thinking" and "intelligence". Somehow these things had become ends-in-themselves, separate from the regular act of living. We might wrap them in a similar quote to place them in relation to life, along the lines of "thinking well is for living well", or perhaps "the highest good of the intellect is to be well-fit to the problems of living well".
I am reminded also of a line which stuck with me from Augustine's Confessions, approximately: "The mind is not the supreme good"—as opposed to the body and perhaps the "spirit". Somehow the world I was born into had collectively come to think of the mind as the supreme good, and intelligence as the greatest virtue. But this is, in some way, in contradiction the basic fact of existence and mortality: no amount of cleverness can circumvent death, and all the glory attainable by feats of the intellect are only futile vanities compared to the privilege of being alive itself.
That kind of thing.
> Something similar seems to be happening with "thinking" and "intelligence". Somehow these things had become ends-in-themselves
It's been that way for a long time. At least since Descartes "Cogito, ergo sum". But even the Greeks were heading that way almost a couple thousand years earlier.
> separate from the regular act of living.
How is thinking separate from the regular act of living for human beings? Our species is known as homo sapiens - the knowing or thinking human.
> I was born into had collectively come to think of the mind as the supreme good, and intelligence as the greatest virtue.
I guess it comes down to what you think the answer to the basic question posed in the catechism is: "What is the chief end of man?" This is going to be the crucial question for us as a species in the age of abundant AI. Or as Wendell Berry posed it: "What are humans for?"
> But this is, in some way, in contradiction the basic fact of existence and mortality: no amount of cleverness can circumvent death, and all the glory attainable by feats of the intellect are only futile vanities compared to the privilege of being alive itself.
But being alive for us humans entails a lot of thinking. Is the unexamined life worth living?
what will it mean to be human, homo sapiens, in a world where the thinking is done for us?
Semi-related; I had an acquaintance who would dreamily declare 'Art is the True Life'; I always disagreed, 'Life is the True Art'. A huge amount of art is basically documenting those among us who are really out there living. I'd rather be on the side of the experiencer than the documenter.
"I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works." Oscar Wilde.
Citing Tao:
> This is in stark contrast to current AI performance on tasks which are subjective, dependent on real world interactions, or for which data is scarce. AI performance is thus extremely jagged: astounding in some directions, while inadequate in others. This is true both within mathematics, and more broadly.
worth remembering before going all in to doomerism
Reminds me of the Isaac Asimov short story "The Feeling of Power"[1].
[1]: https://lecturia.org/en/short-stories/isaac-asimov-the-feeli...
I was vibe coding a prototype some nights ago. In between, I ran out of my AI budget.
I felt stuck. I didn’t know what the AI had done so far or how to continue. There was nobody to message for a budget increase (it was night).
Luckily I managed to get more budget.
But that left me scared for the future. One day something is gonna fail, and nobody can do anything because the AI providers are also down. Or what if I can no longer afford paying for the frontier?
I have made some modifications to my vibe coding practices since then. I don’t want to live in this future that the author describes.
If it's any consolation, I stay on top of all changes, but when the AI API stops I feel just as stuck.
I understand what I made, the speed just drops to 0.1%. So I just start studying the codebase, planning work for later, ordering thoughts by writing DESIGN.md, adding jobs to the kanban.
It scares me that I don't own the LLM though, but someday I will, it will be local and I'll feel better when I own my means of production again.
Become your own AI provider? At least until Anthropic et al manage to get local AI declared illegal. :)
Alternative proposal: Since no one reasonable actually wants a future where humans are irrelevant - including the people in power who generally like being relevant - we could remember that we’re thinking beings with agency and just decide not to use AI to replace ourselves.
We made a new tool. Using the tool for some things makes life better. Using the tool too much would make life worse. So let’s not do that!
I'd be quite surprised if we could "just" decide to do that given the economic incentives
Everyone is always so negative. Cheer up a bit. The "bicycle of the mind" is now the "dirtbike of the mind"... have fun, pop a wheelie.
You, and people like you, really need to get it through your head that most people need to work to eat.
"Oh ho ho, unemployed? Why not spend the thousands of dollars you certainly have just lying around to dick around with chatbots, with all the spare time you have?"
If this is how you're thinking, you are not living in reality.
You have "Burning Man" in your job experience (per your resume shared on your profile).
… are you trying to equate "going to Burning Man" as "having money", when they list working at Burning Man (and as a vendor, not even working for Burning Man), not going to it, on their resume?
Observing some colleagues, more like "wheelchair for the mind"
I think your metaphor is certainly possible. I feel it is much more like a "dragster for the mind" in my personal experience. In both cases you remain seated and your legs don't do much. But perhaps a wheelchair can get you more places...
... thinking is how I feed my child. Telling me to have fun is such a tasteless and tactless suggestion
Sometimes I wonder how many people miss doing math by hand instead of using a calculator.
Historically, improvements in tech allowed us to focus on higher level reasoning. For example, spend more time on equations instead of calculations.
So if AI can replace all your reasoning, maybe its time to level up?
This is a very negative take. We didn’t stop learning arithmetics after the invention of the calculator.
AI is not a calculator.
It was an analogy.
The premise is fundamentally flawed.
Ask any AI/ML expert and they will tell you that the key to a well performing model is a clean dataset. The rise of AI will financially incentivize human input, and thus independent human thinking. Frontier model reliance on RAG proves this point. Assuming AI will do all the thinking for you is a recipe for financial ruin.
Two, the cost to run an AI service != the cost to use an AI service. Frontier companies cannot operate at a deficit forever. Even if their costs go down, end user prices will go up. Their profit margins will increase and history shows they will not pass those savings to the end user.
Thinking is already a hobby and most of people have been refusing to participate for probably since the dawn of mankind.
Have you been around humans?
I wonder if feeling and intuition will become the most prized, once explaining and sophistry toward any conclusion becomes something any bot can do...?
Right now, we think of feeling as second class, but I wonder if that's more because we have let it go feral, and left it unprotected from predatory actors and systems -- advertising, consumerism, even politics. We don't protect our minds from attacks on our feeling systems (e.g., we don't cover therapy as a public health measure), and so maybe we've just gotten used to giving a pretty poor assessment of its capacity.
If we institutionalized protection of intuition like we protect our ability to reason, maybe we would think more highly of that part of ourselves...
Intuition is just latent data processing, can be done by machines.
Feeling is a steering of the processing, I don't really see how it will help you accumulate power, resources or status compared to just processing.
Well.. that part is simple, technically speaking. Being able to make others feel can override their processing. But, as other posters noted above, that is just advertising and politics.
Daily front page psyop telling you to accept that token predictors are ASI and humans are obsolete, despite the fact that if they were ASI nobody would ever need to write a blog post convincing you of it
There is no need. Even low-end chatbot is a better conversation partner than average human. If you do not think it points to some interesting outcomes, I am not sure what to tell you.
This is confusing. "Thinking" has been a hobby, a luxury reserved for the wealthy, for most of human history. "Thinking as a hobby" was the Renaissance — a large enough agricultural surplus enabled a small handful of people to spend most of their time just thinking.
I feel using these tools make me think a lot actually. It's to the point that the more I'm digging a research or code subject, the answers are so dense that I sometimes need hours to get around why this or that (a good example is designing ML systems, losses, theoretical and statistical stuff).
It might not be deep thinking, but it's definitely like being back on a PhD with an always on advisor that splits your brains every few thoughts.
I feel one could make a similar argument about any technological advancement and subsequent abstraction. A farmer pulling a cultivator with a tractor certainly has less of a “feel” for the details of the land and climate than someone doing the same with a handheld implement, yet cultivating manually is not economically viable at scale.
Not to say there isn’t a loss; there absolutely is. But, for better or worse, it has long been the case that the individual is responsible for balancing the beauty of psychological flow and craftsmanship against the literal economic output expected of them.
I think posts like this that frame this issue as exclusively a product of the rise of AI are missing the more fundamental piece: we use the tools, and in turn the tools change us. Just as we are what we eat, we are the tools we use. For better or worse.
Thinking has always been a luxurious privilege. In the renaissance many of the scientists were rich people who did not need to carve out their existence by working day and night.
Nowadays, I estimate that there is little active thinking in my life, and even less of it is enjoyable. The only time that I could think in an enjoyable way is to work on my own projects, which unfortunately is kinda rare these days due to work and family and health issues.
> In the renaissance many of the scientists were rich people
Not just the renaissance. The majority of scientists or the like if you read their wiki pages, they always say "X came form an aristocratic family".
Almost as if we instead cared about living conditions and happiness index, we'd just end up with more smarter people.
I agree. But human cattle’s shall not be too happy, otherwise they won’t work.
i think (heh) it depends on what you call thinking. if it is what Deleuze calls 'substance based thinking', which is what the machine is trained on, then we will increasingly find that we are majorly outgunned. if not, then we will need to build another kind of machine before we are made fully redundant
despite what the proverbial 'they' would have you believe, there is not only one type of thought. perhaps this perceived redundancy will be the catalyst that helps us to transcend the self-destructive and limited patterns that have dominated post-enlightenment efforts. perhaps.
Whilst I agree that AI costs are falling and AIs have practically infinite uptime, I fail to see how/why the current AIs will perform better overall in the work place.
The example of AIs solving mathematics is all fun and games, but it assumes that mastery of mathematics implies that everything else will also be mastered eventually. But instead we're seeing that LLMs exhibit this thing called jagged intelligence, which means that they can be extremely good in one area, but completely fail in another. In theory the LLMs could be improved if data would be available for other areas and if there are good verifiability criteria. Fact is that many fields just don't have those and would not be willing to give up their data.
Always has been, if you think about it.
In the future we may need to go to the thinknasium to stay sharp. There was a time when, for almost everyone, it would have sounded silly to go to a special place to stay fit/strong.
I agree that’s what happened to hunting and riding (they became hobbies). But it’s hard to imagine something as broad as thinking will go the same way. Not saying it won’t, just that it’s hard to imagine and that the implications will be far more far reaching.
If it becomes "just a hobby", it will become a privilege, too.
Someone here linked Graeber essay https://davidgraeber.org/articles/value-as-the-importance-of.... I read it with interest, although it's a bit abstract. I wish he was still alive, he would have a field day with AI.
> Machines transformed much of physical activity from necessity into choice; similarly, AI will decouple human thinking from its economic purpose.
This could not be more decoupled from the truth.
Yes, industrialization automated a lot of physical activity but I think the author severely underestimates the value that blue collar workers produce to this day. At least this is how I perceive it.
I would not place a lot of emphasis on economic insights from software engineering academics tbh.
The way blue collar workers are paid and treated, society doesn’t seems to put much value on their work either. The fact that some software engineer writing blog posts about thinking being dead gets paid WAY more than a paramedic saving people’s lives is kind of fucked up when you think about it.
Wirh every potential productivity revolution it's the same. it will make poeple's job obsolete, it will make everything so much faster and cheaper that people will just "work" for the pleasure of it.
After a while it also ends up being the same, the job market is shaken and people now have to work just as much as they can but in different, newer jobs to make different newer things.
No post-scarcity commie utopia is ever going to be possible because even in that society, the people that work their ass off will be so ever slightly ahead of the others, so now everyone hast to do it to not be "left behind".
IDK, I'm thinking more than ever. I used to be in a flow, writing code, now, I'm thinking at the top of my lungs, making a new decision every 10 sec, Claude thinks through all the scenarios, makes proposals for many data models, RBAC rules etc, and I'm just focusing on understanding it all and deciding (and it can be pretty exhausting!). More thinking than ever. Am I doing it wrong? Should I just think less? Rely on the spec more?
I do the same and I was just coming home the other day after doing a massive system design session with AI and I was probably the most mentally exhausted I’ve ever been in my career. But I guess the thought is, “is that necessary?” Could I have just yolo let Claude take the wheel. I don’t know the answer. I know at the end of the day I’m accountable for this output so I feel a professional responsibility to understand what’s going on. Maybe that sense of responsibility is holding me back but I really don’t know.
I feel the same. In 2 days I meet the people that gave me this assignment, they have questions, they will look at the visual I made of the DB layout and the RBAC table, and they will say some stuff is wrong, or ask why I deviated from their proposal.
And no-way am I going to ask them to wait as I relay my questions to Claude.
So I stay on top of things. I tell them: "I simplified the RBAC because these two roles here are functionally the same and, I noticed there were two axes underneath, scope and trust which I encoded here and here..." etc. Yes, a lot of it is Opus' findings, but along the way I also stopped Claude from over-complicating things at several stages in the development.
I do also feel that I'm slowly developing this way of working, perhaps I'll learn to lean into it more, perhaps I will get better at it. Perhaps it's just exhausting for now and I can handle more and more agents as I do it more and more. That's what I hope at least, to become a one-stop software shop by employing agents, all while being uncompromising on quality. What choice do we have?
I take note of when I provide input that disagrees with the LLM's suggestions, or adds additional insight. If I was just accepting the model's suggestions all the way then I don't need to be there, if I feel that I am contributing to a better result then I should be there.
This is starting to happen less, however.
It’s already a hobby. Look at what it costs a person to do a PhD. The opportunity cost is even higher if you want to do research as a career.
That depends on the country. There are a bunch of places where you get paid pretty well to do a PhD. Sure, if you consider the opportunity cost of not being a senior software engineer in San Francisco making 300k it's not a lot, but by that logic every other job is a hobby.
I would agree that research as a career in the United States is exceptionally broken.
That's awfully optimistic. Thinking, something humans have eschewed since the beginning of time, becoming something people do willingly, for fun? Haha.
Do you think about Nietzsche's Last Man?
I wish LLM never existed. At this point I wish smartphones didn't either.
Read the Unabomber manifesto [1] he said this a long time ago.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...
There is nothing that guarantees they will exist perpetually. In even a slightly moderate global crisis (man made or otherwise) LLMs and the like will probably one of the first things to go.
There are communities and people, like the Amish, who do not engage with technology.
In my offline community the people do not use AI and rarely smartphones. At dinner we park the phones or don't bring them to the table.
Get rid of your smartphone! It did it eight months ago, no regrets.
It's a nice idea, but what I really want is everybody to use their smartphones less. A bit harder to achieve.
I have pretty heavily dumbified iPhone just for the camera and music. I wish there was a dumbphone with a decent camera with telephoto. I have standalone camera but with a decent lens it's just too big to have on me at all times and unfortunately I like taking photos.
Base install of Graphene on Pixel 10 is pretty close to dumb-phone (I speak from experience). Just get the APKs of Signal and Google Cam (or just use Graphene's cam app, it's not bad, supposedly). Pixel 10 has 3 camera, wide/normal/tele. Pretty decent imho.
I wish that fish never stepped out of the water. Thanks for nothing, Tiktaalik.
There are many different types of thinking. Judgement is one that humans will need to retain.
People think every day, every second, where for most male, half the time it will be about sexual activities.
The author is not talking about random thoughts more like "deep thoughts" or "Reflections.
Reflection must be more like a trained "habit" than a "hobby".
Such a wild take to argue that current tier LLMs do any “thinking” at all. Was chatting with a friend last week and I was saying that sure AI writes much of my code these days but my cognitive load is HIGHER, as I have to constantly make sure it’s not doing something dumb.
I have to constantly make sure it’s building things in a way that will fit neatly together, in a way doesn’t over (or under) -generalize. In a way that doesn’t waste time and energy on idiotic tests that aren’t really testing anything at all.
LLMs are powerful autocomplete with vast and broad memory, they do not think. And thinking is just a part of the human condition.
I fail to understand, in its current state, the mass hysteria around this revolution. Maybe I'm doing this wrong, but I constantly need to review and manage my agents, are we really headed to a reality where engineering mindsets are no longer needed?
Even if they did exactly what you wanted, you need to want something. To decide what you want, the thinking shifts from how and when to what and why.
I think it’s just part of the zeitgeist. Like, I’m actually pretty AI-forward, but my post is getting downvoted. Not that I care, it’s just an interesting sign of the times.
By using the models you're training them to be better at these tasks, it's where a good number of improvements have already come from. Frontier labs just feed it back in.
Can you not look back a year or even 6 months to see the progress that has been made? The pace of change is incredible.
How does that not lead you to same conclusion that everyone else is having? That this is only going to improve.
It's so shortsighted to make an assessment only on what exists today.
“If these trends continue… ayyyy!”
https://youtu.be/e6LOWKVq5sQ
It's equally fallacious to assume that the curve continues. It may well be a sigmoid-like progress curve.
"It can happen or it won't--so the odds are 50/50!"
Yeah, you're right. Best to keep your head in the sand and assume best case scenario.
> LLMs are powerful autocomplete with vast and broad memory, they do not think.
This is really only true insofar as they are designed such that they output language tokens and their intermediate "chain of thought" is also done in language tokens, but now that's really only done for auditability. There are much more abstract layers before the model output layer of a single token prediciton and they could be designed to to "think" using these more abstract layers as intermediates instead like how many people think in concepts rather than words. There are even some research models on this (see Next Latent Models)[1]. Humans need to communicate in language because we don't have telepathic abilities but these models need not have such a constraint.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05963
over time you'll need to check it less and less. do we still check if calculators compute large sums properly?
Are calculators now or have they ever been non-deterministic?
Calculators don’t do any creative work, building products is creative. Apples and oranges.
Calculators have overflow and underflow conditions, among others, that are limitations that don't exist in the actual math. Those who to understand the limitations of your abstractions (which is what the AI bros who keep bring up calculator argument are demonstrating) will be screwed when the abstraction breaks down and they don't know what to do or even have an inkling of what the nature of the breakdown is.
> Such a wild take to argue that current tier LLMs do any “thinking” at all.
It does not matter whether LLMs do any thinking, or "thinking." The only thing that matters is whether they produce similar results to human thinking, even if it's through a different process (or no process at all). When a company decides to deploy an AI-powered customer service representative, it is not because the AI bot goes through the same thinking process as a human when answering a customer's request.
Suppose they're unable to innovate, but their enormity and their parasitism of human creativity makes up for it. This makes their output similar in the short term but crucially different in the long term. Things don't function through "no process at all"; things have ways in which they work. The process is relevant to the output, and gives insights into subtle but crucial differences in output. By knowing about the process we can avoid being deceived by apparent similarity.
The bigger shock is that programming and solving Millenium Prize math problems requires zero thinking.
This is not a revolution. People are not overthrowing power. It's an enslavement.
If you have responsibility for things, you want to make the best choices. At some level, this involves thinking. It is responsibility that should not be delegated to AI. The thinking required of the responsible human changes, but is not eliminated.
We'll just ask the AI how to "live a fulfilling and satisfying life" , problem solved and stress averted.
Someone already found it and wrote it down. "Enjoy you work, food, family." Ecc 2:24
For most people, thinking was always a hobby. AI is actually doing them good.
My initial knee-jerk reaction was to list out a whole bunch of reasons why this take is wrong, or shortsighted, or gives too much credit to LLMs as a “revolution”, or any of the other go-tos in my satchel of counterpoints to the usual ad nauseam AI discourse.
Except those don’t really fit, here, because the author is making a far more critical error in ascribing far too much to current human cognition. On the daily I see so-called “knowledge workers” failing to read basic signs, refusing to learn basic skills, and all too eager to cast off the slightest bit of critical thinking to a black box they can subscribe to - be it replacing curating a content library with streaming services and algorithms, or swapping a life of hard-won expertise for a swarm of chatbots and an API bucket. As someone with the uniquely privileged POV to be able to ingest vast sums of technical data but struggle with social data, I look at my fellow Americans and genuinely fret for what the next few decades hold for a cohort that seemingly cannot effectively communicate which direction they’re going but is all too content to hitch their accountability to an LLM they pay for.
In that sense, thinking has already become a hobby to the masses, in that it’s entirely optional to exist in current society at large. Autopay apps manage your bills, finance apps keep you on budget, fitness apps tell you to keep running, social media apps tell you who your friends (and enemies) are, video apps tell you what to watch, music apps tell you what to listen to, and cars increasingly tell you not just where to go but also to let them get there for you. I would argue that in that context, thinking is a critically endangered hobby we sorely need to sow new seeds for, lest we risk losing it entirely; AI does not seem keen to do that.
Now to be fair, so much of this is hyperspecialization knowledge overflowing into daily life and making existence a sort of cognitohazard in and of itself. We skip through hundreds of pages of legal boilerplate because we’re not lawyers, and then complain about all the rights we willingly signed away because of the volume of said agreements. Non-technical people engaging with modern computing are either addicts or miserable, unaware that this was both entirely optional and also inevitable in a populace that didn’t think for itself. Finance has become so hyperspecialized that it’s impossible for the layman to tell of something is good or bad, or even why the number went up or down on their portfolio in a given time period. LLM boosters say their tools will solve this complexity nightmare, yet the tools themselves grow increasingly complex just to eke out single-point gains on hyperspecific problems.
Which brings me to the OP again, their highly uncritical claims that AI will bring about a new revolution of thought itself, and that somehow this tool will both restore thought to an elevated pedestal while also making it nearly impossible to meter (at least on American currency; let’s not think too hard about how developing countries might be able to afford it). I don’t see any of that, but for the same reasons the OP feels it’s somehow inevitable. The only difference I can readily figure is our opinions of our fellow humans: I view us as in dire straits and able to do far better than we give ourselves credit for, while they view us as replaceable with servile digital labor for the better.
No it won't.
Well, this is horrifying.
But a the conclusion is a nice one for people that will be able to pull it off.
For anyone like me who started reading science fictions as a kid, that story is a very old hat. So far, AI only seems to solve problems that you tell it to solve, and you have to carefully guide it to get results. So for now the claim seems exaggerated and still in the realm of science fiction.
By the way, there is another problem. For humans we have the saying "garbage in, garbage out." If you read a lot of trash, you will only come up with trash. If you give powerful tools to morons, they will not become geniuses. That's not just true for humans, it's also the case for AI. If you teach your AI trash, it's going to be some trashy AI. Since people do that all the time for various reasons, we're going to have a lot of artificial stupidity, too.
The future where nobody need to work or thinks is so close that capitalism is scared, trying to figure out how it will make a profit from that kind of life. The stakes are very high, and anyone who doesn’t want to lose will end on this path.
How many AI companies are debt free and make profit?
This is the we-don’t-need-BluRays-because-all-movies-are-on-Netflix phase.
Let’s wait until the market is settled
I don't understand your argument. Does anyone publish movies on BluRays now?
There are movies and shows you only get on BluRay and DVD because they are tax write offs and vanished from any streaming service.
My point is in the beginning it seemed like Netflix is all you need to watch all the movies you want for a decent price. Now the market is much more fragmented and the prices are much higher.
The same will happen with AI.
This is gonna blow your mind but—people still can get movies on DVD.
In the land of the braindead, the half-brained man is king.
I'm skeptical, because any scenario even close to this means if we are still around, we not only won't be thinking, we won't be capable of thinking. Use it, or lose it. Which is no life at all.
When thinking becomes a hobby/unimportant, all rules of society will be way different than what we have right now which is mainly making money to survive/get more luxury.
I think that people who believe that AI will diminish human thinking might be more likely to have their thinking diminished. I don't discount that the effect discussed is possible, and probably likely for many; however, I strongly believe it is ultimately a choice. For me AI shifts what I give attention to, and increasingly I am thinking at higher levels of abstraction.
In other news, research institute such as S&P, McKinsey and MIT that try to estimate when level 5 autonomous vehicles will be achieved, all agree it won't happen before 2040.
Hasn't it been for quite some time?
Simple example, close to home: the preponderance of proprietary products rather than freer ones, with people then mass complaining when they end up bitten by the downsides. But adopting the freer solutions requires taking it on as a hobby - it's not just a simple choice between A or B, but rather requires self-actualization to implement the freer solution as it pertains to your own life.
So we're really talking about the next step whereby it becomes even easier to just go with the flow of default options. Of course, "the flow" might not be ending up in such a successful place any more (ie no more copious white collar make work jobs in the healthcare denial industry, etc), and that's the real problem.
Spinellis also engages in doomerist reinforcement learning for humans now? This is exactly up Amodei's alley!
Thank, you, Diomidis! I'll remember your IOCCC contributions and shall join the AI-Jugend and report to my Untergruppenführer.
(Incidentally, the IOCCC is also suffering from AI psychosis now.)