Thinking will become a hobby

Posted by pranitha_m 7 hours ago

Thinking will become a hobby(www.spinellis.gr)

198 points | 266 commentspage 4

js8 5 hours ago|

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.

willguest 3 hours ago||

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.

rockemsockem 1 hour ago||

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?

sethev 3 hours ago||

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.

kiriakosv 6 hours ago||

> 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.

yoyohello13 4 hours ago|

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.

teekert 6 hours ago||

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?

yoyohello13 6 hours ago|

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.

teekert 5 hours ago||

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?

jdswain 4 hours ago||

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.

odyssey7 6 hours ago||

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.

flexagoon 5 hours ago|

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.

odyssey7 3 hours ago||

I would agree that research as a career in the United States is exceptionally broken.

weezing 6 hours ago||

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

flowerlad 3 hours ago||

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

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

nkrisc 6 hours ago|||

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.

pizzafeelsright 4 hours ago|||

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.

sodapopcan 6 hours ago|||

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

istypwbasofotso 4 hours ago|||

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

sodapopcan 33 minutes ago||

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.

weezing 5 hours ago|||

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.

teekert 5 hours ago||

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.

dist-epoch 5 hours ago||

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

argee 4 hours ago||

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?

PowerElectronix 3 hours ago|

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".

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