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- Hacker News
- 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.
by plaidfuji - 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.
- > 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.
- 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?
- 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.
by sixo - 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.
by bmau5 - 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.
by lsy - >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.
by goda90