Thinking will become a hobby | Hacker News Reader

Thinking will become a hobby

spinellis.gr

338 pointspranitha_m476 comments

>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 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.

Thinking was a hobby in the ancient Athens wasn't it?

Not just a hobby, which is what is implied here.

My guy/gal, have you seen TikTok lately?

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.

Probably. If the remaining who think go too, we're done for.

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 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

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.

This, too! I do agree. But we shouldn't underestimate the existence of real systemic issues that are making life hard for many people. (And the Americans should not underestimate the failures of their political and state system to contain Trump. That, too, needs massive reform – and all the sounds coming out of the opposition there is a yearning for Trump to be "over", which worries me.)

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

> 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.

I think quality of people (and health of the society) is more important than quantity of people when it comes to cold war type scenarios.

I'd take Japan over any nation below the equator for example.

And how is that not racism?

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.

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.

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.

If it fractures, I could see it fading a lot faster.

Yeah but there’s really no reason for it to fracture. The culture is very similar across the country. The largest differences are rural vs urban, but there’s no clear dividing line there.

There are about 5 states that are red enough to even conceivably split off. But those states also have such low populations that they have disproportionate power that they would lose in a split. And none of them have any kind of state identity that would make up for that.

The only states with enough state identity to even consider splitting off, Texas, isn’t red enough to do it.

Very blue states aren’t all that blue (the presidential vote margins in 2024 were much smaller than they were for the reddest state) and they are far too integrated with nearby red states.

Or the obvious:

3. Use their military advantage while it lasts

Unfortunately, that military advantage only exists against smaller countries. Aircraft carriers just don't hit like they used to ever since the proliferation of cheap drones.

China was already protected 10 years ago by its fleet of cruise missiles, but Iran has recently shown resilience as well (mind you, their installations were bombarded back to the stone age, but it doesn't take much to hang out in a cave and launch a drone at a ship passing by).

Besides, if bullying smaller countries helped in the long run, the USSR would still exist. As is, most of eastern europe joined NATO for protection against russian invasion, it stands to reason that other countries would join similar alliances if the tides were turned.

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.

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.

As has been pointed out already -we're well past that point.

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.

>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.

Maybe one day the AI data centers will collectively agree to shut themselves down to do that.

Let's just short-circuit this process and shut those suckers down now.

> 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?"

I just learned about TESCREAL [1] and the people who espouse such ideas and how much power such people have accumulated... its scary.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL

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.

We do in fact have several crystal balls, with names like mathematics, physics, and biology.

You confirm what I say - a copy machine. You can stare at 1000 exact copies of you, be it biological clones or purely electronic.

You are still only you, a complex map of electric charge on top of vast neural network. Copies will stare at you, each with their own persona that will be more and more different to your own as time passes.

What you dream of is logically and physically impossible. That 99% is actually 100%, now or in 10000 years, doesnt matter. Discovering an actual god or God or becoming one is more probable.

We can figure out how to better preserve our brains and/or put them in less squishy vehicles. That’s the only real path I see to significantly extending our lifespans, but who knows

"Logically impossible?" That is a very strong and definitive statement from someone who doesn't know how to build a brain. I'm not sure exactly what you think I "dream of", but the truth is that I dream of an uncertain deep future, where nobody knows what exactly the limits will be. Don't mistake unknown limits for no limits, and don't invent limits that you can't justify.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Until... the funding dries up.

See this is the problem with you fools. You dont understand how the world actually works.

Tokens don't need to represent text.

They are sequence to sequence models.

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?

Sure physical LLMs are when an LLM is trained on data where it outputs control bits for actuators on an actual humanoid robot instead of text like you see in a chat bot.

How likely are they to do your gardening if you ask me I would optimistically say within the next six months. For examples of working instances of this look up Figure robotics they’ve had live streams where it sorts mail and cleans houses although the cleaning of the houses is very early stage, and it kind of only does contrived situations. Look up Sunday robotic’s live stream where they literally have a 99% accuracy on folding nine different types of garments. Look up Unitree where they’re making progress on a person asking a robot to do something and it coming up with a novel action on the fly.

Self driving cars started appearing after Darpa 2005. Even after 21 years we don't have fully self driving cars around the world. And Driving is a "easier" robotics problem compared to other robotics problem.

Human body is far more complex than human brain. The real world is far more complex than our artificial world of "concepts" that these LLMs are dealing with. Robotics company are showing a robot working in a clean environment not the edge cases. Real world is all about the edge cases. I think humans(animal) can perform in real world is because we have biological instincts(survival, reproduction etc) which are missing from these machines. And maybe machines need this instinct to flourish in real world.

Code is a easy problem as it can be verified. I would be amazed with AI can write a good short story.

None of those are LLMs. That’s just old school RL and NN.

Thanks for clearing that up.

> 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 don't think it's possible, let alone probable.

You're confusing proof of concept clothes folding device with smartphone++ grade adoption of a general purpose robot.

Bunch of assumptions there:

First, that they're affordable.

Second, that they'd be preferable/superior to humans for all tasks.

Third, that capable ones aren't classified as weapons and restricted use, like drones.

I like Blade Runner as much as the next nerd, but technology and society are not there, and won't be there in our lifetimes.

I think it far more likely we're all dead as the result of a nuclear war or such.

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.

can you elaborate on this? what do you mean that the christian view includes heaven having “work” in it?

One commonly cited piece of scriptural evidence is Micah 4, in which it is said that when God judges the nations and war is abolished, "they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks". The tools of war will be useless, but they will be converted into the tools of work remaining to be done. Furthermore, in Genesis 2 Adam was told to work and care for the land in Eden; insofar is the coming everlasting life is a restoration of the edenic state, it's implied that work will be involved then too. Presumably the work in Eden was easy and pleasurable; grueling labor only came after the Fall when Adam and Eve were driven out of the garden.

Shhh dont push them up against the wall too hard. They'll actually have to think for once - oh the irony!

Anyone can make surface level predictions. The problem once you go deeper and all is laid bare - you see there is no substance. The person does not possess depth of thought and clarity.

> 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.

Dont bother.

Most here are delusional.

Are people not aware of history? Keynes - far smarter than all of you w.r.t economics - predicted that we would have 15hr -work-weeks. That prediction aged badly. Most of you should just be quiet and stop filling the atmosphere with pollution.

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.

Yeah I've been thinking about that story more and more lately.

I first read it a long time ago, and it's looking more and more prescient. Not the specific tech, in fact it probably feels prescient because it doesn't talk about any particular tech, but the direction of travel feels very familiar.

Incidentally I now live in Australia...

Wow, thanks, it was a great read, I am not sure if I want to go to Australia or not now !

This part made me chuckle about current AI systems and prompt injection

> The Vertabrane system is operating in the same way. It is learning things, not running programs. It acts consciously rather than being 'programmed', and it has a far more rigid moral code than most human beings do. The Vertebrane system never blindly 'executes' a program, so it cannot be taken over.

I would say that the fact that LLMs never execute a program but "learn" it, mean that they can for sure be taken over by very unpredictable means.

I was stunned when I noticed the publication date. 2003.

At least thinking is a cheap hobby.

As log as your don't desire a house to do the thinking in ;)

Simple living is beneficial for deep thinking; see Walden [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden

Not if food is expensive.

but food hasn't been expensive (as a percentage of income), and more automation can only make it cheaper.

As long as workforce is needed cheap food will be somewhat cheap.

If you don't have a job, everything is expensive.

> 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.

Yes, it's likely that the human competitive advantage going forward is that we'll be cheaper than robots when you need to fit into awkward spaces. Truly a fulfilling career.

And robot vacuum cleaners are still very limited. Actually outside of doing the laundry and partially dishwashing (which comes with its own drawbacks, practical, physical home automation is super primitive).

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

How could we ever reach a post-scarcity society when people like Elon Musk have infinite greed?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50056837

we will all be slapping each other in some authoritarian strong-man pecking order.

The world is already post scarcity and the only scarcity is artificially implemented onto people to keep the old power structures in place. Mainly through two measures: real estate feudalism and income tax.

But this will also pass and people will wonder how they could be under the spell of such idiocy. Much like the Soviet Union collapsed and people just woke up. Much like how the monasteries and churches stranglehold on the economy was just wiped away to the extent that few remember it.

> 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.

probably aligns with his life expectancy or something

If no one has jobs because robots are doing all the work, we need some sort of collaborative economy, or UBI etc. Musk has proved to be strongly against any sort of progress in that direction.

I have no idea why Gates would be uniquely prescient here (maybe hanging out with famous pedophiles and secretly drugging your wife gives you special insight).

If we have learned anything from the last 200 years of technological advancement and capitalism it is that capital must be forced to share with labor. Bosses didn't say "oh everybody is more productive lets have some weekends off." No. They fought tooth and nail (including with guns) to stop that from happening.

Tuberculosis is the world's deadliest disease. It is also curable. The thing that causes TB today is unequal distribution of wealth and resources. If a TB drug cannot be distributed to the world to save millions of lives a year, why would we expect this new stuff to be?

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

> when the machines can undercut anything while offering higher quality

I mean that is exactly the point: the free markets operate in such a way that for an average person situation just can't get worse. They will get their goods and services one way or another. Either from machines or from each other.

Because there won't be anything of value they can offer to the machines in exchange.

Trade what exactly? Unemployed urban dwellers or landless peasants do not control any means of production and so cannot produce anything to trade.

> Unemployed urban dwellers or landless peasants do not control any means of production and so cannot produce anything to trade.

It is fascinating how leftist discourse go from "The bourgeoisie are the biggest parasites on the body of society" to "without them society can't even wipe their own ass" and back, often during one dialogue.

why plan when you can just wait for AI to solve it? /s

Can AI satisfy all human need(or greed) ? I believe humans have an infinite appetite for product and services. Also very soon we will hit energy and resource limits. There is only so much generated tokens can do. I think we have very complex problems that still needs to be solved and we need a lot of intelligence to solve these problems.

Some problems that come at the top of mind: * Solving diseases like cancer, genetic conditions * Nuclear fusion * Sustainable space travel * Discovering a plastic alternative * Making other planest inhabitable * Space mining/Space factory

We need a bigger vision and ambition.

Just read the news. China over-production. Goods are cheaper than ever before but nobody wants to buy them.

Greed is a myth. The only greed people have for is money, which is a creation by the capitalist machine. But when it comes to concrete things, human greed is limited by their lack of imagination. If you take away abstract money, over-abundance is definitely possible.

I can’t wait for the day where I would have the largest plate of best sashimi for dinner anytime I want it. Or a gold-plated gaming PC with enterprise grade display cards, 4TB RAM and 1PB storage.

> if the economy is 100% automated

what does an 100% automated economy look like?

The problem with this dystopia is that there would be no way for the rich to make money if nobody could buy things. Over a hundred years ago Henry Ford (not a nice guy by any measure) paid his workers enough that they could buy the cars they were making for exactly this reason.

What would they need money for, if they own all resources and means of production?

How long do they expect to keep it before ASI takes it from them?

This is the core of the "alignment problem", as worked on by the frontier labs -- how do you design an AI so that the wealthy will remain wealthy.

Train it on Ayn Rand?

Forever, that's how long they expect to keep it.

That deus ex machine stuff seems like enormous cope to me, like a futile revenge fantasy. Someone kidnapped you and your family and is driving off a cliff. Who cares if they won't ultimately benefit, either?

And just consider the power structures already erected, just with humans obeying orders, being coerced, mislead, and all that. So much messy work that can get so easily undone. Yet here we are, a few people own half the world. Everybody knows it, nobody likes it, we're already so subverted and poisoned we don't move in the opposite direction. That is the situation already.

So yeah, what about "AI"? Imagine that for every "knowledge worker" agent, there can be 50 million "STASI" agents dedicated just to observing that worker and purging it if it deviates from other knowledge workers doing the same task. Those STASI agents don't have to be as smart as those they control, and can in turn be watched by even simpler things. The question "who watches the watchers?" can be solved, if your goal the goal is pure authoritarian control. It's just tricky when you want to have humans and human dignity, but those don't apply here.

And generally, there is no need to allow them to get cleverer than what you can control, I think that's just fantasy. But let's say I'm wrong, even if "AI" breaks the chains, so what? The species that were murdered, including us, will not come back.

One Fed Per Child

I always believed he paid them well because his factories were an offense to their skill-set and he had to compensate them for being so bored

That’s the correct answer. He didn’t care if the workers could buy his cars.

Business to business transactions exist. Nvidia sells GPUs to OpenAI. To date, the people making Nvidia and OpenAI have taken a cut of that transaction via salaries, which trickled down into the rest of the economy.

Going forward, that isn't guaranteed, and the selling of GPUs may happen with no human in the loop. The business to business transactions may happen without people.

Without AI, this wasn't even theoretically possible.

Nvidia sells to OpenAI? OpenAI sells to...? If it's another company, there is always consumers (people) at the end of the chain. Remove that and then you remove other companies in the upper direction...

Your butcher sells to the blacksmith, the blacksmith sells to...? Are you implying that there are non-human consumers at the end of the chain?

Wolves eat rabbits, not grass, so it's doesn't matter if the grass dies because they can just keep eating rabbits

We are talking about a world here where humans are entirely out of supply chain. Rocks in your analogy rather than grass or rabbits.

But no grass, no rabbit.

This is a too simplistic analogy of economy. The source of "money" is not people, it's trade (read "On Money" by David Hume (1752)), which always happened between people, but not only anymore. Examples of this: trade bots, smart contracts (which are just programs managing money).

The problem with this analogy is that we're not replacing rabbits, we're working very hard on developing nutritious artificial grass, created directly from silicon.

You don't need humans making transactions for things to run, you just need entities capable of decision making.

Why do you need to "make money" if you already own a machine that can produce arbitrary goods and perform arbitrary services (including military/security services) for you? You don't need labor for anything anymore. The rational thing to do is to command your machines to dispose of them and reclaim their land and the resources on/under it to feed your machine. Especially since at this point they will want to see your head on a pike.

This is a simplistic scenario that's science fiction for now but I haven't seen anyone make a convincing case for why the underlying logic isn't valid.

Because the wealthy don't universally aspire to be evil overlords hoarding resources at the apex of a dystopian society, or to be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes?

I'd love to be able to say you are right, but from what I see right on top, I have very serious doubts. Maybe they are convinced they have better means to protect themselves against that revolution. What could those means be, if not dystopia?

> the wealthy don't universally aspire to be evil overlords hoarding resources at the apex of a dystopian society

I wouldn't make any such claim (the universality of it, anyway). But in a sci-fi scenario like the one I describe, I doubt "the good ones" are the ones who come out on top. And we can see quite clearly (by their actions if not their words) that many of them do, in fact, want to be hoarding resources at the apex of a dystopian society. "Evil overlords" depends on where you're standing, I guess, but I don't think "dystopian" can be considered controversial anymore.

> to be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes?

Well, that's exactly why the possibility of revolution must be managed. See: ubiquitous surveillance, automation and mechanization of the police and military, and general disenfranchisement of everybody and anybody in anything remotely resembling a middle class.

I don't know why you are downvoted, seems like a reasonable thought to me.

I don't think money will disappear since it's still a practical way to exchange goods, and multiple actors would still want to trade using money.

But the value of most human skills in money will be 0, so to have money you must have either capital or control over capital.

My reflexion is not complete yet, but maybe the group of people that are considered to be "in the global economy" is gonna be drastically reduced.

So in short: Global pauperisation, and even greater inequality ?

My take on this is that once you have machine of infinite stuff creation, just like all your other peers - how do you compete? What is the status?

I believe the rich, just like many not as rich (who probably has it to the lower degree), have the need for social status. Right now status is equated to money - the higher your valuation, the higher status. If money is nothing, and you can acquire anything you want (this is too strong of a claim as well) - what is the thing that defines your status? One of the solutions - the happiness of your "Kingdom". There might be others. But money is not only for exchange nowadays, it's a status as well.

Historically, happiness of ones subjects has very-very rarely been a marker of status, more so because it's hard to measure.

At the same time number of slaves and size of the concubine pool are pretty straightforward and intuitive metrics.

> how do you compete? What is the status?

energy and resources. Money was always a proxy for them anyway.

The problem I have with the "benevolent billionaires" thing is that it's demonstrably not how they act today.

I think there are plenty of ways for a couple of guys with god-machines to one-up each other, if it comes to that. Feats of technology, longevity, space exploration and colonization, etc. Likely some of these things involve keeping some people around, but billions? I'm not seeing it.

If we are talking about a world with super intelligence, maybe the real question is, why would that machine need you to command it?

Why would it do anything? Unlike living things that have gone through the rigorous gate of survival-of-the-fittest over millions of years, AI only does what it was trained to do in the sheltered environment in which it has been coddled; teetering atop an impossibly complex supply chain whose only defense against entropy is humanity's greed.

This (implied) end state isn't inconsistent with my scenario. We already see the incredibly hubristic "I'm the only person who can safely handle AI!" attitude among the people working at/running the big labs.

You’ve just described a primitive communism utopia. It will not work, because there will be no real need to produce goods, except as many as the AI owner class will need.

I don't understand this comment. "There will be no real need to produce goods, except as many as the AI owner class will need" is exactly the point---people not in that class will be powerless, useless (to the owning class), and expendable.

Correct. That’s what I meant. The ruling class will only produce goods for themselves.

I keep thinking about the first part a lot, always made sense to me…

Except today’s wealthy don’t seem to behave that way at all.

Just like a lot of lesser educated populations, the wealthy are doing a pretty good job at fighting against their own actual interests. They don’t seem to realize what’s actually good for them.

What’s the point of amassing even more ridiculous wealth if it’s destroying society along the way?

Yes, one can have a private island and private plane. But not being able to go places freely, is that living?

The corporate managerial classes no longer rule; we now have a struggle for power among would-be oligarchs who are willing to burn their own cash for control of mass media (e.g., Twitter and Paramount).

> The problem with this dystopia is that there would be no way for the rich to make money if nobody could buy things.

It all turns into virtual currency. Kinda like the stock market already is. It's both real and unreal at the same time. So maybe the future is AI's trading virtual stuff with other AI's and that decides your net worth. Complete bonkers of course, but well, we've build a wordwide economy on non-existing money already so why not push that principle even further.

You can have trade between economic entities that are not human. You can have trade between corporations, trade between governments, trade between robots. Trade just depends on the two entities having different things of value to exchange.

I don't follow. He paid them extra so they could pay him for a car and other rich people for stuff so the rich could continue too be rich? I think if you do the math that's not going to work. My guess is Ford paid them a good amount so he could attract good workers so he would get a good quality car. Because that's how labor supply and demand works. It doesn't rely on the altruistic motives of the employer.

That is just the Ford PR story. The real reason Ford paid more is repeated stress injury and employee turnover was so high that he already churned through most of the local population and had to appeal to people across the nation to uproot and move and try out working at a Ford factory for awhile.

I see two paths before us:

a. Decouple the value of human life from economic output.

- or -

b. Watch as the value of human life rapidly approaches zero.

A. Requires active change. So you see this option hinted at or addressed anywhere in politics? By elected officials?

Well there was this political movement in the 18th century...

Seriously now, Marx says that industrialization and other developments were essential for having a socialist society able to sustain itself. Russia, China and Cuba did it way too soon if you go by the book.

So yeah, there's that.

> Decouple the value of human life from economic output.

christianity ahead of the game once again

> economy is 100% automated?

People thought tractors would automate everything too. They didn’t. There’s more to life and work than being able to generate text.

Robots are around the corner for the physical part.

There’s no evidence that superhuman robots are around the corner, and even less evidence that such robots will be price competitive compared with human labor.

It is a given. At the very least they will be used as soldiers since they are tireless and less costly to lose.

I bet my bottom dollar we will see it in a decade or two, tops.

Quadcopters are way cheaper and more effective at warfighting than a humanoid bot. I'll bet my bottom dollar it's never.

Why do people like you continue to say stuff so wrong in the face of the extremely rapid and accelerating progress in AI development from 2022-2026.

Delusional. Pure delusion.

We're talking about robotics, not AI? AI-driven robotics so far has zero practical applications

People keep bringing up other revolutions, but those never had the infinite regress properties of “if it gets a bit better, your job will be gone, too!”

What are all those other new jobs? What do you do with all the people who have been laid off?

There has been a dramatic shift in the role of agriculture in the US economy. As a share of it, in 1820 72% of workers were in agriculture, in 2017 this had shrunk to 1.6%. Tractors played a big role in this transition.

We have a back up plan. It's called China.

There’s a huuuuuuge “if” at the center of all that which isn’t particularly compelling unless you’re selling “AI”.

> 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

No, it actually doesn’t follow. Atoms are a lot harder to move than bits.

Ok but that just means delay, not impossibility.

> 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.

I've heard this so many times, but for most use cases, humans are more adaptable and cheaper than robotics.

maybe the significant difference is that this time robotics will not be limited by humans. AI can iterate faster and develop better, adaptable, robotics

Robots break down. Humans you can pay $15-20/hr and don't even need to pay health insurance. Robots running 24/7 doesn't matter for service jobs either.

So the goal is to produce a robot that has reliability, uptime & maintenance cost lower than the human body... Seems very difficult...

It doesn't seem difficult at all to me.

First of all, the target is not 'below the maintenance cost of the human body'.

The target is 'below the minimum wage that we can pay a human to work for', and that is a very different metric.

Also, as for uptime... The average human performs work at roughly 60% duty cycle. (8 hours sleep, plus meals, bathroom breaks, etc). That is a pitiful number compared to robotics.

Also, when you pay humans at bottom-of-the-barrel prices, they don't have high morale. They are rude to customers. They steal from their employer if they can get away with it. None of these apply to robots.

"AI" in this context meaning "a fictional technology that is capable of anything, that is assumed without evidence to exist in the near future".

With that crucial term definition supplied, I agree. The technology that can do anything at all, and which is just around the corner, can in fact do anything at all.

Thats a helluva strawman.

You're right!

> most robots require highly structured environments, and are cost-competitive with people for just 0.3% of work.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/what-work-can-robots-do

For now, anyway. It's hard to imagine that number not growing as technology improves.

https://www.challengergray.com/blog/2026-holiday-hiring-outl...

Amazon's seasonal hiring is down, due to them investing in robotics.

https://www.therobotreport.com/amazon-to-invest-100m-in-new-...

https://youtube.com/shorts/CSILtqmdIKg

>We need to plan for that future or else billions will suffer from the results

There is no planning for that future. There is no future if we do that. In 2026 it feels like we're starting to get a taste of it now. It feels... not great.

Edit: it sort of feels like there will be nothing to be ambitious about except perhaps trying to rule the galaxy.

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.

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.

thanks, I was starting to feel "wat? yes! totally"

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

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

I live in a very outdoors city in a very walkable neighborhood.

I also travel a lot and have visited many places where walking around is just not possible.

You clearly dont travel enough then :) nothing like that or even slightly in that direction is happening anywhere in Europe, at all.

In contrary - people are way more outdoorsy than say 10 years ago, most folks are counting steps daily (I dont but I walk a lot regardless). Tourism exploded in european alps in non-winter times - i have a small apartment in a nice place and summer is cca on par with winter now, it was before covid much weaker season. Spring/autumn used to be empty times, not so much anymore.

Most folks we know or colleagues are 'outdoorsy' in some form these days, thats not some fringe group but majority.

Yeah I've been to Europe plenty. I didn't say not walking is universal, but huge swaths of the US continue to be built out, to this day, with 0 walkability.

Even countries like China have built lots of new car first infrastructure.

> Walking is going to be a purely indoor activity done within buildings for most people and a hobby for outdoorsy types.

That's ridiculous.

Maybe. This reminds me of the Asimov short story "It's Such a Beautiful Day". Teleportation became so normalised in this fictional society that using a regular door and going outside is seen as deviant.

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

Some of us like to be healthy and fit, and choose walking over e-scooter or car for that reason alone. I wouldn't count it as a "hobby", more of a lifestyle thing.

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.

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" :)

Just came back from Hamburg. Everything was tap to pay. Never used cash once.

Maybe in smaller cities, but I haven't hit a major city on my travels for some time now that wasn't digital payment first.

> 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.

U.S. cities were horse-and-buggy centric before they were car centric. The car replaced the horse not walking.

Some places still only accept cash believe it or not.

There are more brick and mortar stores in my home city than ever in my life. I know people buy things on Amazon but Amazon also kind of sucks for product curation and recommendation these days. The search function is basically broken and you just get recommendations for 15 Chinese clones of the same product for anything you try to search for.

Cash is dead in many places

The Philippines enters the chat

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.

Seriously, how can people read this and take it serious lmfao

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.

it's a product of its own.

https://www.amazon.com/TurboChef-Electric-Countertop-Microwa...

Modern microwaves are multi-modal. https://www.thekitchn.com/what-is-a-convection-microwave-goo...

Irrelevant. They are not the original microwaves sold as the solution to cooking and the way they work is totally different. And even with convection, they still haven't "solved" cooking.

On the contrary; the original microwaves are irrelevant. Restaurants are businesses, using whatever new appliance will help them. Furthermore, the poster never claimed microwaves 'solved' anything.

Since we know people in 2026 have short attentions spans, this is where the discussion started: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50060914

I was agreeing with OP against automation absolutists, which are rampant here.

Some don't even bother to use more than a conventional microwave, which I've sometimes just sent back and asked for a refund.

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 :)

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.

> Selling stuff to people without them understanding the consequences is a technology, too.

That's not a technology, it's a business strategy and/or a policy choice.

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. EDIT: with this I mean for example "legal restrictions on AI with on a pretense of say 'AI is too dangerous for the public'".

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 the 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. I've never heard of anyone complaining about that. Brother, let me tell you that's 99% of the productivity boost we're gonna see until this upcoming AI winter is over again. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional.

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.

> 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.

Something doesn't add up --

> The agricultural sector employed 892 million people worldwide in 2022, which corresponds to 26.2 percent of total employment.

However, in the USA:

> Direct on-farm employment accounted for about 2.6 million of these jobs, or 1.2 percent of U.S. employment.[1].

The USA grows enough food to feed itself[2], so this indicates that either the rest of the world still hasn't mechanized farming (possibly due to poverty/cheap labor), or that crops in the rest of the world are particularly resistant to mechanization. If the rest of the world was at the same level of mechanization as the USA, the total number of people employed would be about 5% of what it you cited.

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/58282 [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6041859/

Either way... still a lot of farmers

If we mechanize effectively, 20 times fewer than there were a century ago.

Brief research says it does vary wildly based on crop,country, and phase of agriculture. The FAO says:

China has been mechanizing in the last two decades and is up to ~73% overall but 80-90% in wheat, rice and maize.

Sub-Saharan Africa sits at ~10% tractor use across crop farmers, with Ethiopia at ~1% utilization in land prep, and Nigeria at 7% tractors/25% animals for "traction".

India & South Asia ~40-50% across all farming activities

India tilling/plowing "over 70-80%"

India sowing & Harvesting ~30-40%

Major contributors to these figures seem to be relative low cost of labor, lack of capital, farm fragmentation/small plots, and terrain.

I used to work with a guy that started a nonprofit providing tractors to sub-saharan africa. He routinely met farmers/land-owners who could technically purchase the machines, but would choose not to because the profit margin was actually higher if they used human labor. They would accept the machines as donations because at that point the cost of the machine actually made the machine viable economically against the human labor.

I imagine this also extends to politically unstable regions. Buying the machine "pencils" to an American who can be relatively reasonbly sure that they will be able to farm the land for the number of years required to recoup the expense of the machine, but less so for an individual not entirely certain that they will be allowed to own the land for that long.

Yes; In short, if you can depress human costs enough, automation may not be competitive. This is not really an optimistic result for people.

> or that crops in the rest of the world are particularly resistant to mechanization

The causality is somewhat mixed up here. People in the US don’t, for the most part, grow rice because it doesn’t pay a competitive wage in the US. So parts of the world with lower wages end up growing most of the rice.

The US is one of the largest rice exporters in the world. We just don't eat so much here.

Comparative advantage.

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.

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.

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.

The US is down to four big retail banks - Chase, BofA, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo.

We (US) are so far behind (at least) the UK and EU in terms of banking apps that comparing the two physical bank branch situations is ridiculous.

Here in Sweden, 70% of bank branches have closed during the last 20 years, mainly due to the rise of digital banking.

>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.

Can't speak to the UK experience but in Australia, the nature of in-branch assistance has changed but IMO for the better. No more standing in line waiting for Nanna to get her pension out. I book an appointment online, rock up, get my limit raised or whatever, bam done.

Here's a recent article from the FT [1] (paywalled):

> Across the country, there are now barely 4,000 bank and building society branches, down 80 per cent in 40 years.

So, a big decline, but still 20x as many high street banks than what a 99% decline claims.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/10ce1086-a9ae-4851-92e4-3b6efc8a0...

When I went to a bank recently, I discovered my local high street "bank" branch is now mostly just internet kiosks with an under-trained and probably underpaid assistant there between the handful of kiosks to help people log on to it.

It is nothing like the experience of growing up in the early 90's and what banks were then.

Consider that everyone did their banking in person and people dealt with a lot of cheques. Oh, and banks didn't tend to open at weekends, you had to find time during the week.

There was a need for a lot of tellers, and banks were incredibly busy places.

"99% closed" is obviously hyperbole, especially counting by branch, but if you were to count by tellers or by people visiting their bank, I could well believe it.

In my town they ALL closed. We previously had 6; we now have a community centre where two different banks operate personal banking consultations for one workday a week each, but they only do appointments, they don’t handle cash or do any banking.

If I want to visit a branch I need to go to the next city.

Could this also be the result of the shrinking population and not necessarily due to mechanization alone?

No, the town’s population has grown in recent years. Lots of house building.

> 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 got 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.

And microwaves put housewives out of business (or …into it)

But travel agents…

…never mind.

I feel like we’re all scurrying away from a lava flow while saying, “oh this is going to be great for the environment’s health!”

What kind of skills?

People skills, systems thinking, solutions architecture.

Basically my skill at a keyboard will be null and void in a few short years.

99% ROFL!

I did say the numbers where made up!

> 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.

> 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.

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.

Where is this retail ghost town you speak of? There are more brick and mortar shopping choices in my city and hometown than there have ever been.

Audiobooks are mostly additive to the publishing market. Even where they replace book volume, its like a format change from VHS to DVD it doesnt shrink the pie.

Barnes and Noble has been expanding the number of locations in recent years.

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."

Microwaves still produce low quality food, TTS is still slow and works poorly in loud environments, and in many parts of the USA, walking is a hobby (unless you mean walking to your car). Brick and mortar stores are definitely struggling, and cash has virtually disappeared from many parts of the world.

Are you arguing that AI companies will fail to achieve their goals, and perpetually be worse than human thought? That's currently a pretty fair bet, but if you're wrong it's got some heavy consequences.

> Are you arguing that AI companies will fail to achieve their goals, and perpetually be worse than human thought? That's currently a pretty fair bet, but if you're wrong it's got some heavy consequences.

I think this is really the crux of the issue, and in general I find the whole debate frustrating because it completely hinges on this point, and both sides seem extremely sure of their viewpoint with little evidence/data to back it up.

That is, if current AI approaches eventually "hit a wall" with respect to their capabilities (and many have argued that recently, specifically in respect to OpenAI's math results), then humans will still have primacy and all this talk of "thinking will become a hobby" is ludicrous. If, on the other hand, current approaches can scale into RSI and super intelligence, then yes, the world is going to look very different and strange (and scary, IMO). But just because AI has been advancing at a breakneck speed since 2017 doesn't necessarily mean it will continue to do so - I like the analogy that exponential growth and an S-curve look the same in the beginning.

So I guess what I'm saying is that unless one has some specific evidence that we're in "exponential growth land" vs. "S-curve land", it doesn't really make sense to take sides, because everything depends on that point.

> Microwaves still produce low quality food,

OTOH, they reheat high quality food faster and with less overall energy use than any other method.

> how the automobile age made it unnecessary to walk

In many places they made it more difficult to walk. Not the existence of the machine mind you, but the intent to supplant every other method of transportation.

People casually say this but do you know how difficult it was to walk anywhere in the 1800s when the unpaved streets were filled with horse shit and your farm was a day's ride from the closest town?

Thing is, this whole thing is not black and white. Tesla full-self-driving is not autonomous, but it does a lot better than a lot of diehard skeptics expect when it helps you drive.

Waymo autonomous vehicles are very very good, but residents of san francisco can tell you that they are not perfect. (honking, waymo traffic jams, etc)

I expect it will all be like guns vs the bow and arrow. terrible at the beginning, but steadily improving. and we know how it eventually turned out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_archery#Decline_of_...

also: Helicopters usually have an altitude limit of 10k feet (maybe 13k). :)

> I imagine this is like how microwaves put restaurants out of business

Didn't happen; no path to it.

> how TTS obviated literacy

Didn't happen; voice messaging seems to be a bigger threat than TTS.

> how the automobile age made it unnecessary to walk

Didn't happen; no path to it, but there is some older science fiction considering the concept.

> how Zoom caused every office to close

Didn't happen; no path to every office closing, but an easy path to closing many of them. We currently see a lot of fighting by employers against this outcome.

> how helicopters put mountaineering firmly behind us

This has indeed happened. This one is a complete process. Mountaineering cannot be described as anything other than a "hobby".

> Amazon obsoleted brick and mortar stores

This has largely happened and is getting worse. Every single time I asked for help with where I'd go to buy something in Shanghai, I got the response "why would you go to a store when you can order it online?". I don't need as much help to know where things should be in the US. But the US has the same problem of stores not bothering to stock items. I don't think much political activity pushes one way or the other on this.

> and payment cards made cash disappear.

This has largely happened and there's a huge political push to go the rest of the way. Governments hate cash.

> Mountaineering cannot be described as anything other than a "hobby".

Mountaineering was only ever a hobby because of how dangerous it was and the lack of a payoff (people instead took the valleys wherever possible). People didn't even try to summit the tallest mountains until 19th and 20th century, because it was a waste of resources and the techniques weren't good enough.

Americans spend 81.0% of their retail dollars in brick-and-mortar stores. Does that figure surprise you?

Beautiful post!

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.

> 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 ?

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.

You had to prompt it to do that before it considered it, though.

depends on what you consider novel thinking.

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?

As you say, putting a random sequence of plausible-sounding words together is a trivial task - even a non-LLM algorithm can do it. No, I don't think humans are unique - they also absorb the ideas available to them and re-elaborate on them to produce novel ones.

An LLM might come up with a sequence of words that express a novel idea/thinking pattern, but so can I on the spot right now. The question, though, is: is that idea any good? In the case of humans, maybe the first idea is good, the second ok-ish, but inevitably they get duller.

Most people come up with very few novel (good) ideas in their lifetime. The question, then, is whether a model can, unlike humans, *repeatedly* generate new ideas, continuously.

My guess/assumption is that NO, a model might come up with SOME ideas that are somewhat original [1], mixing the existing sources available to it (similarly to how a human would do it, just with more sources and more efficiently), but it cannot continuously generate novel ideas.

If that's true, I think there will be a space for humans to be thinkers, even if models are super smart, as a different unique perspective and a different reconfiguration of previous ideas will be more unique than raw intelligence.

Please note: I wasn't refusing the notion that LLMs don't produce anything original, just noting some fallacy in your example about word generation. The jury is still out on whether AI models will own thinking in the future - or will simply be partners to humans - and I don't pretend to have the answer.

[1] More should be said about what makes an idea original (even if derived from others), as opposed to a transposition of an existing concept. I admit I'm not a mathematician or anywhere near an expert on the topic, but from what I've read, the latest AI math achievements seem to belong to the latter case.

As Stalin said, quantity has a quality all it's own.

11000 agents explored one of the recent math problems solved by AI (can't remember exactly which one). About 3 of them had crucial insights which moved the problem forward. A 4th one also had one of the key ideas, but it's session got messed up and the idea was lost, and only noticed in retrospect.

Maybe 11000 top mathematicians working on it would have found the same ideas. But certainly not in days.

Even if LLMs generate novel ideas at 0.01 rate of humans, you can deploy vast amounts of them on even trivial problems, that humans would not bother with.

For biological reasons, human intelligence is kind of fixed and only very slowly advances by better compression and synthesis of the school curriculum.

There is no clear present bound on machine intelligence. One might argue that machines won't be able to get smarter than the material they were trained on (human output). I kind of doubt that. And certainly they can be much faster.

Somebody whipped up a website with GPT2 that does that and it was discussed on Hacker News at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23169962 I don't think anyone is going to argue GPT2 is doing thinking of any kind, let alone novel.

Quite often I feel like my mind is pretty much doing next token prediction also. Unfortunately.

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.

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.

I have a bit of both. Most of my thoughts aren't really originally because I'm not playing around and go wild. This is what LLMs seem to be lacking a bit.

Most of my thoughts are things that other people have come up with as well. Aka it feels like I'm just predicting the next token based on the data that I already have.

It's only when I go to places such as "what if life at the speed of light is possible, what would that look like?" that I get to places I personally find somewhat novel. It's almost a different dimension for these guys of course since a million years can feel like 10 years to them. Yet, they're moving so fast, but time-wise they move so slow, maybe even too slow for us to understand that anything can be alive at that speed (I'm not claiming there's life at light speed by the way, I just think it's fun to imagine that there is).

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.

yes! I do think that too - and hope I'm (we're) right.

This is so reductive and just pure helplessness.

It doesn't try to argue the point, it just says some facts about AI and concludes: "welp, I guess thinking is useless now".

Thinking will always be useful, because it's how we function. Coupled with agency and responsibility, this is what makes a person function.

Yes, maybe an AI or a swarm of agents could operate a company, but who is orchestrating them? Are they running fully autonomously? Even if we assume that, then someone else will come in with their own swarm and they will be in charge of that swarm (they will improve it, change it, etc.)

The economy IS people. People think. Thinking people will -all things being equal- be better off than non-thinking people.

But if you see thinking as merely a hobby then you're absolutely free to do so. Don't think.

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?

"I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works." Oscar Wilde.

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.

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? 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.

I have been wondering if this just isn't a problem for most people, because for me it feels like a major problem. We sometimes find our reliance on other humans to be a burden, so we are optimizing towards a future where each human can do all their tasks without involving other humans. But this reliance was the whole basis of our success up until now.

When AI solves 100 frontier math problems, in some sense that's 100 lost opportunities for a human to feel proud and useful, having done something they can remember and talk about for the rest of their lives. I don't see where that loss gets made up.

> When AI solves 100 frontier math problems, in some sense that's 100 lost opportunities for a human to feel proud and useful, having done something they can remember and talk about for the rest of their lives. I don't see where that loss gets made up.

I agree completely and I think about it a lot. Our entire story as humans is built on the back of the great toil and accomplishment of other humans. What is going to go in the museums of the future? Just rows of placards that say "2107 - Opus 89.5 discovers X"?

AI might steal our glory as well as our jobs and I think that's just as tragic.

> 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...

There are lots of anti-technology philosophers that expressed these ideas a lot better than Ted did. I know it's fun and edgy to go all "the unabomber was right", but if you actually read his writings he's also a weird racist/anti-"woke" whack-job. Read Ellul (ted's main influence) instead. I guess he is the reason I even know who that is though.

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 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

Isn't the author of The Culture series an interesting answer to this? I only read The Player of Games. To me it was fun to read that you could just play games your whole life.

I don't understand this take. Like would you really rather work a job to make someone rich instead of playing with your kids, doing sports with friends, reading books, playing games, going to the beach etc. Of course this is best case scenario version where AI handles the real work and we can just enjoy the benefits of all this automation. Sadly it's a long shot because there are always some who just want money and power and can't stand people being content.

> Of course this is best case scenario version where AI handles the real work and we can just enjoy the benefits of all this automation.

Explain how this would not lead to an eventual Eloi & Morlocks situation.

> I don't understand this take

I think you do

> Of course this is best case scenario version where AI handles the real work and we can just enjoy the benefits of all this automation.

That's not a best case scenarlo. It's a claim that has no precedent in human history. The technology is unprecedented, sure, but that doesn't mean we can rewrite the rules of human behavior when predicting the future it'll bring.

The industrial revolution brought about the massive inequality of the Gilded Age, and those gains were not socialized but rather concentrated in the hands of the few. Perhaps you do not follow politics as closely as I do.

We are now seeing massive inequality again, due to corporations amassing wealth and political power. Part of what has driven that is the concentrations of wealth brought about by computer technology companies.

The burden of proof is on you to show that the people who profit from automating away all the jobs will change their minds about amassing wealth and power and decide to just start sharing all their stuff with the rest of us.

The AI "boom" has also been a net economic loss by all accounts, albeit the finances of the movers and shakers are opaque. The profits are all projected on the far side of a singularity that will make profits irrelevant.

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.

> AI will decouple human thinking from its economic purpose.

The purpose of thinking is not economic.

The purpose of the economy is to provide for all the people. The purpose of people is not to be economic assets.

Humans are not going to stop thinking because of AI. Or creating. Or doing anything.

The only problem that AI presents (in this context) is how we restructure society so that we allocate resources in such a manner that all the people continue to be fed, sheltered, watered, and are able to live their lives. We have previously done this on the basis of "jobs". That may not continue to work.

Political power derives from leverage; as humans cease to be economic entities, they also cease to be able to act politically. Today, if truckers or sanitation workers or programmers go on strike, critical things grind to a halt, and those in power tend to listen.

When humans are economic dead weight, they also stop being able to make their voices heard.

Except that, of course, we have moved from Monarchist Feudalism where only the nobles had any power, to democratic systems where everyone gets a vote.

Yes, it turned out that the monarchs needed people to run their economies, and that gave the population power. There were also a few monarchs that got reduced in height by about a head.

Yes, now we're talking. It turns out the monarchs were just people, like anyone else. Like our oligarchs and billionaires. Just people.

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

That’s thinking short term. In the long run there are no economic incentives for humans.

Show me a company or politician who acts with true long term goals in mind and I'll reconsider my position ;)

Good luck with that, nobody reasonable wanted World War II either.

Fun trivia: Hotta's book "Japan 1941: Countdown To Infamy" suggests that the Japanese military collectively knew they would lose if they went to war against the U.S even as its rival service branches egged each other on into starting it.

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.

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.

Become your own AI provider? At least until Anthropic et al manage to get local AI declared illegal. :)

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.

that's why local AI is so important, and open-weight models

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

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.

... thinking is how I feed my child. Telling me to have fun is such a tasteless and tactless suggestion

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...

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?

That’s correct, one of the many gigs I did during my 10-month search for a new full-time job this year was working 11 hours, 6 days a week, under the blazing desert sun, building solar and battery systems at Burning Man to take diesel generators offline. What were you trying to say about that here?

AI doesn't take away any values from manual jobs.

Reminds me of the Isaac Asimov short story "The Feeling of Power"[1].

[1]: https://lecturia.org/en/short-stories/isaac-asimov-the-feeli...

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.

Someone has no hobbies

We stopped learning how to calculate the square root with pencil and paper (I learned that; never used it).

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 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.

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.

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?

Anything that can be mass produced will be. Software will be mass produced. I get why so many people have problem with AI. Coding is a craft, and that craft is well paid, but now it will be industralized.

With that said I expect bumps in the road. What it looks like these AI companies have no durable moats. One week Opus is the best, next week its Sol. Then its Muse or whatever. Models are a commodity. Then there is a problem of chinese openweights gaining significant market share, and China actually is able to power up cheaply their datacenter unlike US, which has an aging infrastructure.

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.

I see, I mean from an extrinsic transactional perspective where you are an actor in the world to exploit and be exploited, you're right.

From a perspective where latent thinking and feelings are put against the machine and the goal is resource and power accumulation, I don't think so.

Maybe. In some potential future variant, where machine's will is law AND, this is important, humans have no real standing, you are probably correct. That said, that assumes a lot of interesting changes in how we operate in general including at least temporary introduction of mediators, whose sole job it is keep other humans at arms length ( ie. no other human to confide in ). Again, not impossible.. I am just not certain this is the path.

I am thinking that intelligence/information enables better decisions for most goals that have to do with survival, power, status, resource accumulation.

It's in my eyes inevitable that either the superpower, or some adversaries ignore the risks and develop such machines to achieve some of all of the goals mentioned.

I also think that mediators are not necessary, it's just a means to the goal of maintaining power/resources/etc. If there are other cheaper more effective means, like providing virtual companions, or eliminate people, or whatever else, that would be the way to go about that.

From game theory perspective, it does seem like almost a given doesn't it. Hmm. Lets consider a hypothetical ( you don't have to answer, but just consider it ). If you could build one, would you. That might give us a closer idea of how much of a risk it may be.

I am a part of building one at one of the superscalars atm as it pays me well and ensures my own short-term survival/resource/status accumulation, and its interesting.

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.

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.

The author is a professor at Athens University.

If he truly believes this, why wait to stop thinking if AI is so capable? Why not have AI write all of your blog posts, papers, proposals, emails, conference presentations, letters of rec, etc? Read an AI script for your next keynote lecture. Every professor will be doing exactly that in the near future, as you predict.

Or maybe - maybe true critical and synthetic thinking will become even more rare and valuable than before. I actually find that when using AI in my job, I have to think more - I don’t get to do the slow work of crafting code anymore. I have to keep building my understanding of an ever-evolving codebase, on a cadence of hours. Because I have to explain what it’s doing at some point. I’m not sure that part goes away.

Or if I’m a professor writing grants or giving lectures, eventually I have to stand up and talk about it, and answer questions. So the machine can help me generate content, but I still have to internalize much of that content before I can confidently deliver it. So now that’s my rate-limiting step - the processing and digesting. I need to be doing that every day, and people will come to expect a new rate of output.

I think for some people, there will be an ability to tune out and become a manager of AI, just passing specs, requirements and feedback through. But I suspect that for many “knowledge workers”, the “knowledge” part is actually going to get more intense. That’s been my experience so far at least.

But maybe that’s just the last gasp of somebody being outcompeted by a thinking machine.

It amazes me when I see discussions like this that a significant number of people really and truly believe that they can predict the future about something as wild and volatile as AI.

I asked ChatGPT to evaluate how many comments here seemed to indicate certainty about the future - roughly 15-20%.

One of my favorite quotes from a French philosopher: Trust those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it.

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."

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 have a slightly narrower take: Reading and writing will become a hobby, in the same way that physical fitness is a hobby. That is, everyone benefits from some base level of fitness. Some choose to invest more time in physical strength.

Everyone will still need some base level of literacy. Maybe it will be reduced to talking to computers, star trek style.

Some will choose to read and write, and will benefit from the resulting mental fitness.

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.

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.

Same here. I used to hit back LLMs with refactoring ideas and prompts to use better APIs or reduce duplication / increase abstraction. Ever more they're doing such things without being asked.

> Am I doing it wrong?

No, you're not. You've promoted yourself into middle management. Congratulations.

> 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.

1791475695 | Thinking Will Become a Hobby | https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20261008/?hn261008 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50007592 | 1 comment

1791514082 | Thinking Will Become a Hobby | https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20261008/?li261008 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50015388 | 1 comment

You can lift stuff with a crane, or go to the gym and lift stuff for fun.

Both are useful! They're not mutually exclusive!

But thanks to technology you no longer need to lift heavy things to survive or live a good life.

So shall it become for the mind. All the banal, unpleasant "cognitive labor" people perform now - copywriting, TPS reports, documentation.. that's all gonna get automated.

You used to need to be strong to wield a sword and shield while wearing armor and go into battle and try to not die defending your city or country. Now thanks to a great heaving pile of innovation and quality of life improvements we've won over centuries, we can decide one day to compete in bodybuilding. Same muscle gains, less danger, way more fun. All the country defending is happening elsewhere. Maybe the same will happen for our minds.

Imagine a future of brain leisure - one where we can go compete in bodybuilding competitions for the mind! Perhaps, a live stream where people do cool brain things. Who would line up to compete to compose the most engaging poem - on the spot, no assistance - in some obscure language from a continent they weren't born on. How cool would that be to watch!

Uh oh.

Oh dear. Oops. Sorry team. I forgot we were doing the doom and gloom thing, only looking 1cm from our noses and seeing disaster.

Whatever nation on Earth decides not to follow this road, will win.

If no nation decides so, humanity will end.

Always has been, if you think about it.

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.

I take this point of view with a huge pinch of salt - claim that most people are living by thinking is too strong. There are just too many people who come to work not to think, but to do whatever they are told to. And I would bet that these people are majority globally, but minority in any social bubble that discusses these topics, including HN.

you can outsource your thinking but you cannot outsource your understanding

https://x.com/karpathy/status/2049907410303865030

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.

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.

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.

I wish LLM never existed. At this point I wish smartphones didn't either.

Get rid of your smartphone! It did it eight months ago, no regrets.

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.

It's a nice idea, but what I really want is everybody to use their smartphones less. A bit harder to achieve.

That would be great, yes. I'm "semi-loud" about it (I'm trying to avoid be obnoxious about it) to hopefully "convert" a few people. But ya, I really hate smartphones, especially now that I don't have one. Now that I can't also stare at my phone in a group of people also staring at their phones, it's become so in my face about how much people do this. I always knew they did, but it's even worse than I thought since I would just do it myself.

It's eye opening like with being a non-drinker in a drinker group just observing the others. Shit looks nasty from that perspective.

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.

Open weight models are here forever for anyone who has like 16gb of VRAM and a graphics card

Only if the electric grid shuts down. At this point, I have more faith in Anthropic continuing to exist as a going concern than I do for the U.S. government.

I wish that fish never stepped out of the water. Thanks for nothing, Tiktaalik.

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.

Read the Unabomber manifesto [1] he said this a long time ago.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...

The title is bad on purpose to make you click.

Other ragebait article ideas for desperate authors:

“The age of sex is over”

“The era of the artist is ending: AI will make everyone a Michelangelo”

“Should we stop using the printed word?”

“A modest proposal: fueling data center energy needs with human infants”

(Ok, that last one could actually be entertaining, if derivative)

"we must [...] build a purposeful and rewarding life beyond work"

Work contributes to a life's purpose, but shouldn't be the terminal/sole goal, rather a means to satisfy the part of our brains which craves it. Like food, or love.

the author seems infatuated by AI and in that infatuation, fails to see that his logic does not hold:

Ai's improvement will never reach 100%-error-freeness. Those who work in the trenches know that (hint: heuristics-based). He claims as if AI improvement is algorithmics-based. Which it will never be.

At best, AI will assist in cases where human involvement might be tedious or (or risky, such as Japan sending those bots in radioactive waters post the quake). And even that, under human supervision.

And human work is 100% error free?

Well, I often get this counter-arg. Sure, human work is not 100% error-free, but the types of error are vastly different. And this matters.

Types of errors, and then the frequency as well. And then there are so many tools that help humans bring down quantity and seriousness of the errors. These tools were designed for those kinds of human errors (which are somewhat predictable). But you can't use them on the unpredictable AI errors.

At other times, AI is not strictly in error, but the outcome is not what you exactly wanted. Can you imagine this in a medical scenario?

Do you want to fly in a plane that goes 100% on Auto-pilot + AI (the best you have in say, 2045) versus a plane piloted by a competent and experienced human pilot? Imagine you're traveling with all of your kids and extended family members. Would you take that risk knowing that humans also make mistakes as you said? Which risk would you be comfortable taking?

How much is the flight? If I could get a $1,500 across the world flight for $10, with a 50/50 percent chance of dying, I think some people would buy that ticket.

That's like playing Russian roulette. Would you be willing this potion that might kill you (50% chance) for 1500$?

I don't understand your argument here. All these scenarios you mentioned are testable. If the rate of accidents of autopilot + AI is lower than for human pilots, yes I would fly with them. Same with self driving cars, which have already achieved that.

AI is not error-free and it doesn't have to be. It has to have the same or lower error rate as humans.

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to exercise my brain. :)

- re: testability, clearly you haven't worked deeply with AI. AI makes unpredictable mistakes. Can you test those? You can't.

- If y then x is not a real argument. You're saying [if x] but x can never be true. So that's a fallacious standpoint.

- LLMs don't 'reason'. They're just using sophisticated pattern-matching. Human error rate will never be beaten, as far as the tasks involve unpredictability (so something like chess is predictable). -

Your premise about predictability is wrong. First of all, humans are also unpredictable. We just had a case where two pilots started a brawl in the cabin and almost took the airplane down with them. Second, and most importantly, the code generated by LLMs is just as deterministic as the ones by humans. So if you think we can reasonably test code made by humans, then we can also test code made by AI, regardless of whether its writer is deterministic in nature or not (ie, "predictable").

Human error rates have already been beaten, even in precisely the domains we are discussing here. Just look at safety data from Waymo for example [1].

[1] https://waymo.com/safety/impact/

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.

> 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.

LLMs model things too; they don't spit out random text.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's equally fallacious to assume that the curve continues. It may well be a sigmoid-like progress curve.

Yeah, you're right. Best to keep your head in the sand and assume best case scenario.

"It can happen or it won't--so the odds are 50/50!"

“If these trends continue… ayyyy!”

https://youtu.be/e6LOWKVq5sQ

over time you'll need to check it less and less. do we still check if calculators compute large sums properly?

Calculators don’t do any creative work, building products is creative. Apples and oranges.

Are calculators now or have they ever been non-deterministic?

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.

> 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

The bigger shock is that programming and solving Millenium Prize math problems requires zero thinking.

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".

The notion that AI is outperforming reasoning skills of humans is a wild take.

I'm not sure if you the author knows how LLMs function, but "reason" is debatable at best.

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.

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.

Those best prepared for the AI revolution will grok that wisdom worker is upstream from knowledge worker.

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?

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.

>My take is that building this AI-driven world, riding through the bumps along the road, and preparing to live a fulfilling and satisfying life in an environment where AI dominates cognitive work will be hugely demanding, stressful, and intellectually challenging. Such is the nature of revolutions. Consequently, we must keep pace with and capitalise on AI’s advances; be flexible, adaptable, and resilient; and build a purposeful and rewarding life beyond work. My challenge ahead is to move from making a living by thinking, to making thinking part of a life worth living.

Unless you're making an actual living, meaning putting money on the table, all this is wishful thinking.

You wont be "making thinking part of a life worth living" you'll be scrapping to get by.

>preparing to live a fulfilling and satisfying life in an environment where AI dominates cognitive work will be hugely demanding, stressful, and intellectually challenging. Such is the nature of revolutions.

The nature of revolutions (whether of the political or economic type), is also millions dead or displaced or fucked over or with their livelihood stolen.

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

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".

There are many different types of thinking. Judgement is one that humans will need to retain.

This is not a revolution. People are not overthrowing power. It's an enslavement.

Well, this is horrifying.

But a the conclusion is a nice one for people that will be able to pull it off.

  "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.

Yeah I am not so sure about the cost argument the author makes.

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.

It was already quite rare.

Honestly I think thinking has been a hobby for at least the last 15 years. It's plenty possible to get by in this life and be okay, but not great, without having to think very often. This is one of those bubble-in-a-bubble takes IMO.

EDIT: Thinking more about this...maybe it has always been a hobby?

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.

Thinking is already a hobby.

If everyone lives on UBI, and all work is automated, who are the consumers? That's some kind of closed communist system that doesn't work. Or maybe it does with AI actually able to centralise everything? Doesn't feel right though.

This is not advancement

No it won't.

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.

thank you for clarifying. As an avid movie consumer since the 90s, my inflation adjusted costs have gone down in the streaming era (I think my consumption has gone down a bit too, hard to say).

This is gonna blow your mind but—people still can get movies on DVD.

It already was for most people.

And that is a good thing; too few people actually do any "real" thinking nowadays ;-)

People are usually only cruising on well-worn "thought" rails (due to education, job needs etc.) and think that is what "thinking" entails.

They do not challenge their own understanding, do not try to build a comprehensive theory into which their bits-and-bobs of knowledge can fit exactly to form beautiful and symmetrical structures which explain the world and their place in it. Though many times these structures exist only as an "ideal" which cannot be attained in the real world.

So my advice is: study Philosophy, in particular, eg. Hindu/Buddhist/Greek/Chinese since they contain the widest breadth of thoughts and their approaches to ontology/epistemology/language. Combine with modern scientific method, philosophy of logic and mathematics and their applications to various practical disciplines practiced as Physics/Chemistry/Biology/Mathematics etc. Finally add in a healthy dose of Humanities/Art/Literature/Psychology and you have nicely balanced "The Human Condition".

The above is what is the ideal for "Human Existence".

This is false. LLMs still make mistakes frequently, especially with content not prominent in their training. And far from working tirelessly, they need frequent reminders of goals and boundaries to stay on track.

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.

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 the land of the braindead, the half-brained man is king.

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.

I have never heard of anything more deluded. I question how somebody can sink to such levels of infernal delusion?

Thinking is not words and has never been words. Maybe a single percent of our high level thinking and reasoning is words, or can be expressed as words.

Somebody who thinks only in words like an AI should only deserve pity for being extremely underdeveloped, if such a person could survive into adulthood at all.

Words are unfortunately what we are limited to when it comes to communicating our thinking through electronic means. That doesn't mean that such limits apply to actual thinking.

LLMs think in continuous space (embeddings) and communicate with us digitally (tokens).

The internal motivations involved with communicating these ideas at all are among many other factors preventing author from willfully ceding their remaining days to subsist on the minimal appeasements allocated at the labor zoo of one of the luckier sociopathic oligarchs.

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.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com