alt Hacker NewsThinking will become a hobby
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>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 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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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!
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?
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...
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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".
> 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.
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?
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.
There are many different types of thinking. Judgement is one that humans will need to retain.
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?
I wish LLM never existed. At this point I wish smartphones didn't either.
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".
This is not a revolution. People are not overthrowing power. It's an enslavement.
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.
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.
We'll just ask the AI how to "live a fulfilling and satisfying life" , problem solved and stress averted.
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.
No it won't.
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."
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.
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.
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
In the land of the braindead, the half-brained man is king.
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.
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.