alt Hacker NewsA couple of thoughts in agreement..
First, "cognitive labor" is a form of labor - it's different vs. creative work, even though both use your mind. If your math theorem can be written up in partnership with an LLM, wow! You can be done with that, and go do other great work. Cognitive labor is a form of labor. Let's talk about physical labor and leverage to understand how removing labor translates to time. On your farm you buy a tractor to replace your backhoe. If it is a hobby farm you get in the tractor and you're done super fast. Or, you can take that tractor, buy a bigger farm, and spend the same amount of time you'd have spent backhoeing, but in a far more leveraged way. You can trade removed labor for time in a way that suits you.
Second; the joyful moments we get from finding generalizable abstractions and nice solutions are an adaptation. Humans can climb infinitely high conceptual hierarchies - we'll never stop climbing, using the previous ones as tools to find the next. As we do, we gain joy with each discovery because. We get so much done with brains that run on 20 watts - are we tuned to receive a neurochemical reward for finding cognitive efficiency? If AI means more concepts are discovered the tower gets taller - and we find those joyful moments more often. If there are infinite moments to be found, why not go as fast as possible!
Third; everyone else is doing it, it's a baseline skill. Knowing how to work without AI is like knowing how to ride a horse. Useful and fun! Bedsides - only 150ish years ago horses were the only viable transport. Cars were new; toys for the rich. But cars got so good so fast that we eventually reconfigured whole cities. Your homework is to consider why and how horses got disrupted.
New divisions are emerging in the lump of roles humans had at work. AI takes away roles from your job and lets us do more with less. That's identical to every mechanization before it. It's killing some roles that make up your work, even as it creates new ones.
There's so much to be excited about. Fear is a rational response to change. But so is hope :)
> AI takes away work and lets us do more with less - just like every mechanization that came before!
No, it's not the same as mechanization. The fundamental difference, and why I find it illogical to argue either for "AI will open up tons of new work avenues" or "AI will kill all jobs" is that it all hinges on whether AI "caps out" at an intelligence level below humans (in at least some domains/capabilities), or if it is able to surpass human intelligence at all levels.
If the former is true, then yes, there will be a lot for humans to do. If the latter is true, then no, there will be no reasonable cognitive role for humans to play (beyond perhaps for some legal, "nostalgic" reasons or what not). So whether one decides to be optimistic or pessimistic really depends on if you think AI will stay at a level below humans. I really don't know, so I'm not "taking sides" in this debate.