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Comment by amarant | Hacker News Reader

I dunno. People worry we give up vital skills doing this. I question if they'll be vital in the future? If the LLM can genuinely solve the bug today, why wouldn't it be able to tomorrow?

One thing that seems fairly certain is that llms aren't going to get any worse. They'll probably keep getting better, but there is 0% chance they'll get worse.

If you can get away with not fixing the bug yourself today, the very idea of doing it yourself will be laughable tomorrow.

I try to learn the skills that the LLMs struggle with. Some of those skills will be made irrelevant too, probably when Mythos gets released to the public. But also some of them won't. Probably. The skills that Claude has a handle on today? Waste of space in my brain!

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thinking is vital. just like homework at school to improve your thinking. final output can be totally ignored .

one could argue that thinking itself would be not needed in future. But we are not there. I would love that future though. thinking is suffering. if ai can think for us then it would eliminate suffering.

What are we without thinking? What’s the point of our existence in that case? Just being a biological bag of soup consuming resources?

In fact, thinking is what makes humans interesting. What separates us from random bacteria if we don’t think anymore?

Your questions only make sense if you assume there's a "point" to existence.

I guess my point is if our future really is just Wall-E, sitting in hover chairs waiting for the bots to feed us our food slop while we watch TV I'd rather just die and get it over with TBH.

its the Faustian bargain we have to make to eliminate suffering

I don't see how that would be a good future... how is thinking suffering?

suffering comes from movement of thought. doesnt it?

'Suffering' is hyperbole. But one can't deny thinking is hard and painful. Otherwise we wouldn't have so many shortcuts for it.

But you can't successfully outsource all of "thinking" to a LLM today(or, likely, ever), so this is mostly a strawman.

Thinking isn't Boolean either. A LLM let's you not think about, say, rust lifetimes, as an example. You'll still need to think about other things.

I'm not abandoning all thinking, I just change what things I think about. Some things I delegate thinking about(like rust lifetime syntax, to stick with my example), which frees up time to think about other, more interesting things, like application design, or architecture!

whats the basis for your claim that its impossible in future.

Something that only thinks of the things thought before isn't much of a tinker now is it?

I believe almost nobody thinks original thoughts. I never have. At best I applied an idea from one area to another, which is something AI can do.

Moreover, most novel advancements seem like they come when society is ready for them - the nearly simultaneous discovery of calculus for example.

Pick any thought of yours you truly believe is novel and do a serious literature search on the topic and adjacent fields. Ask an AI to help you with the search if necessary :-)

Interesting though experiment, if you train an LLM with all available knowledge (cut-off date) before the day Einstein published/first time discussed the relativity theory, would an LLM be able to come up with that?

I think about that kind of thing a lot. For Special Relativity, maybe? I don't know the historical interactions between Einstein, Minkowski, and Lorentz, but my gut tells me the idea was ripe. For General Relativity, I'm less optimistic the current flavor of LLMs could make that leap.

There's so much I don't know though, and I'm certain we aren't the only two who think about it :-)

what about the famous go game move that ai came up with. move that baffled experts.

> thinking is suffering

then thinking is also joy and happiness :)

What does it feel like, to not be able to think? Is it conceivable? Oh, wait, I can't think when I can't so, I guess not.

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