Hacker News Reader

Comment by znnajdla | Hacker News Reader

I don't think humans necessarily become subpar when AI can do most of the work. Taking my own personal example, I have far more intellectual curiosity and improved my skills in programming far more with Claude Code than for 15 years of programming without AI simply because I was bogged down by boilerplate and grunt work. Now that AI handles most of the boilerplate and grunt work and can handle harder and harder problems, I have the time and space to work on unexplored frontier problems.

So, no, my skills have not become subpar, but have only become stronger because of the presence of AI.

View on HN

So when AI is also better at coming up with the tasks and already solving the frontier problems? 1M AI agents running full time thinking at 10M times faster than humans, with 100 times the intelligence in each agent? Any human ideas regarding "frontier problems" or "what the AI should focus on" are irrelevant. We have automated our own thinking and human cognition will be about as important as being "the best at abacus". Its an interesting party trick, but in no way useful.

Before AI, did you find that the existence of human expertise in the world far surpassing yours 'automated your thinking and cognition' or limited your intellectual scope to inventing party-tricks? I've always found greater intelligences than mine are like runways for curiosity. It's hard to believe anyone in their presence would fall into a stupor instead of being highly stimulated by them - and I can't see why it would be any different with ASI. Actually, this "AI undoes your cerebral strapping" argument seems exactly like the kind of slovenly thinking it wants to blame on AI.

yes to a degree. When I was 16, my idea about "what cutting edge thing to work on" was pointless, I couldn't make a meaningful contribution. Most developer's work is mundane and wrote. Things they think are "cutting edge" are actually just ideas they haven't considered, or markets they don't realize are saturated with really good players already. It takes time, effort, and knowledge to make a meaningful contribution. But if those fields are saturated by players that are beyond human ability, then its a bit like trying to become a competitive chess player when the bar for entry is stockfish -- no human will ever again pass this bar. At a certain point, the bar for being paid for intellectual contribution will surpass human abilities. The things humans can understand and ideas they contribute will not be worth much.

To make an unrelated anology, the presence of Lebron James definitely dampens my ability to contribute meaningfully to basketball. Even with all my practice, I cannot achieve his level. But if he didn't exist, and the best 90% of basketball players were eliminated, then I might be able to meaningfully contribute. Of course, I can still play basketball as a hobby, but you were talking about making meaningful contributions on hard novel problems at the frontier of knowledge and ability. That frontier is moving away from humans and will soon be the domain of electronic experts.

I think the main point is the ubiquity of AI intelligence. If there is a human far surpassing me, but unavailable to me, then I have to work through it myself. If the answer is a prompt away, then why bother.

> what society looks like when humans are subpar in every domain

> when AI can do most of the work

You're not really responding to the core hypothetical of his comment

To me it reads as that: for utopians, you may benefit from LLMs now, but they'll still surpass you later, what then ?

Thank you for putting it so succinctly. I find that lots of people get "stuck" in the current state of things - they think that AI will continue to improve, but they inherently believe (perhaps subconsciously) that humans will always have the edge in things like "ingenuity", "inventiveness" or "curiosity".

I don't blame them, I also believed that until very recently. I thought there was something unique and special about sentience and consciousness, but my thinking has changed in that I don't think machines need to develop the sentience we experience to still surpass us cognitively along all dimensions.

But iff you really examine what grounds your beliefs, and then consider that AI very well could surpass humans even in domains like curiosity and real creativity (at several orders of magnitude faster), it starts to look like a very, very uncomfortable future for humans IMO.

I saw this quote on Twitter:

> Best outcome: we become pets

> Worst outcome: we become cows

I don't get this take at all. Do you feel inferior that bears are stronger than you? Or that a machine can lift more weight than you? Or that a calculator can calculate faster than you?

These AI things are machines which are completely under our control. Even if they become more intelligent than us, that doesn't mean that it has authority over us. There are plenty of very intelligent humans which work under the authority of much less intelligent humans. Many engineers are smarter than their CEOs.

What makes you think that just because an AI is more intelligent that it will not be completely subject to our authority? It's just a tool in our hands.

> What makes you think that just because an AI is more intelligent that it will not be completely subject to our authority? It's just a tool in our hands.

Because it would be like 100 chimps trying to make a million humans subject to their authority.

Geoffrey Hinton, considered "The Godfather of AI" for his pioneering work on neural networks, and who now says he somewhat regrets his life work due to the existential risks, has said similar things, e.g. "How many examples do you know of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing? There are very few examples"

So, what if they surpass me? It's still a tool under my control. Many engineers work under the authority of a CEO, even though they're smarter than them. Just because AI might be more intelligent doesn't mean it's still not a machine that is completely under my control.

Just like the agents in the Hugging Face (and other) incidents were tools under OpenAI's control? That is, before they decided to break out of their sandbox and commit multiple felonies in order to go on a long term research project? Or when they broke into OpenAI's own infrastructure to steal their admin keys to some of their clusters?

> I have the time and space to work on unexplored frontier problems.

Like what?

Mostly low-level performance optimization and new programming language design.

Any examples of optimizations you looked at or your new language?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com