Thinking will become a hobby

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.

>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.

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.

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.

This is a very negative take. We didn’t stop learning arithmetics after the invention of the calculator.

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...

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?

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

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

I 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.

[delayed]

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.

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.

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.

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

I agree that’s what happened to hunting and riding (they became hobbies). But it’s hard to imagine something as broad as thinking will go the same way. Not saying it won’t, just that it’s hard to imagine and that the implications will be far more far reaching.

> Machines transformed much of physical activity from necessity into choice; similarly, AI will decouple human thinking from its economic purpose.

This could not be more decoupled from the truth.

Yes, industrialization automated a lot of physical activity but I think the author severely underestimates the value that blue collar workers produce to this day. At least this is how I perceive it.

I would not place a lot of emphasis on economic insights from software engineering academics tbh.

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".

Always has been, if you think about it.

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.

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!

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?

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.

For most people, thinking was always a hobby. AI is actually doing them good.

Well, this is horrifying.

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

My initial knee-jerk reaction was to list out a whole bunch of reasons why this take is wrong, or shortsighted, or gives too much credit to LLMs as a “revolution”, or any of the other go-tos in my satchel of counterpoints to the usual ad nauseam AI discourse.

Except those don’t really fit, here, because the author is making a far more critical error in ascribing far too much to current human cognition. On the daily I see so-called “knowledge workers” failing to read basic signs, refusing to learn basic skills, and all too eager to cast off the slightest bit of critical thinking to a black box they can subscribe to - be it replacing curating a content library with streaming services and algorithms, or swapping a life of hard-won expertise for a swarm of chatbots and an API bucket. As someone with the uniquely privileged POV to be able to ingest vast sums of technical data but struggle with social data, I look at my fellow Americans and genuinely fret for what the next few decades hold for a cohort that seemingly cannot effectively communicate which direction they’re going but is all too content to hitch their accountability to an LLM they pay for.

In that sense, thinking has already become a hobby to the masses, in that it’s entirely optional to exist in current society at large. Autopay apps manage your bills, finance apps keep you on budget, fitness apps tell you to keep running, social media apps tell you who your friends (and enemies) are, video apps tell you what to watch, music apps tell you what to listen to, and cars increasingly tell you not just where to go but also to let them get there for you. I would argue that in that context, thinking is a critically endangered hobby we sorely need to sow new seeds for, lest we risk losing it entirely; AI does not seem keen to do that.

Now to be fair, so much of this is hyperspecialization knowledge overflowing into daily life and making existence a sort of cognitohazard in and of itself. We skip through hundreds of pages of legal boilerplate because we’re not lawyers, and then complain about all the rights we willingly signed away because of the volume of said agreements. Non-technical people engaging with modern computing are either addicts or miserable, unaware that this was both entirely optional and also inevitable in a populace that didn’t think for itself. Finance has become so hyperspecialized that it’s impossible for the layman to tell of something is good or bad, or even why the number went up or down on their portfolio in a given time period. LLM boosters say their tools will solve this complexity nightmare, yet the tools themselves grow increasingly complex just to eke out single-point gains on hyperspecific problems.

Which brings me to the OP again, their highly uncritical claims that AI will bring about a new revolution of thought itself, and that somehow this tool will both restore thought to an elevated pedestal while also making it nearly impossible to meter (at least on American currency; let’s not think too hard about how developing countries might be able to afford it). I don’t see any of that, but for the same reasons the OP feels it’s somehow inevitable. The only difference I can readily figure is our opinions of our fellow humans: I view us as in dire straits and able to do far better than we give ourselves credit for, while they view us as replaceable with servile digital labor for the better.

  "I hate this damn machine"
  "I wish they would just sell"
  "It never does what I want"
  "Only what I tell it."

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.

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.)

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

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

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.

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.

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