> As AI edges humans out of the business of thinking, I think we need to be wary of losing something essential about being human

If AI edges humans out of the business of thinking, then we're all in deep shit, because it doesn't think, it just regurgitates previous human thinking. With no humans thinking, no advances in code will be possible. It will only be possible to write things which are derivatives of prior work

(cue someone arguing with me that everything humans do is a derivative of prior work)

▲ adlpz 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Agreed, conceptually.

BUT. For 99% of tasks I'm totally certain there's people out there that are orders of magnitude better at them than me.

If the AI can regurgitate their thinking, my output is better.

Humans may need to think to advance the state of the art.

Humans may not need to think to just... do stuff.

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latexr 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> For 99% of tasks I'm totally certain there's people out there that are orders of magnitude better at them than me.

And LLMs slurped some of those together with the output of thousands of people who’d do the task worse, and you have no way of forcing it to be the good one every time.

> If the AI can regurgitate their thinking, my output is better.

But it can’t. Not definitively and consistently, so that hypothetical is about as meaningful as “if I had a magic wand to end world hunger, I’d use it”.

> Humans may not need to think to just... do stuff.

If you don’t think to do regular things, you won’t be able to think to do advanced things. It’s akin to any muscle; you don’t use it, it atrophies.

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djaouen 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Humans may not need to think to just... do stuff.

God forbid we should ever have to think lol

	▲	alchemism 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Very Zen of you to say

▲ xtiansimon 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> “…regurgitates previous human thinking.”

I was thinking about this after watching YouTube short verticals for about 2 hours last night: ~2min clips from different TV series, movies, SNL skits, music insider clips (Robert Trujillo auditions for Metallica, 2003. LOL). My friends and I often relate in regurgitated human sound bites. Which is fine when I’m sitting with friends driving to a concert. Just wasting time.

I’m thinking about this time suck, and my continual return/revisiting to my favorite hard topics in philosophy over and over. It’s certainly what we humans do. If I think deeply and critically about something, it’s from the perspective of a foundation I made for myself from reading and writing, or it was initialized by a professor and coursework.

Isn’t it all regurgitated thinking all the way down?

▲ spicyusername 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

    If AI edges humans out of the business of thinking

This will never happen because the business of thinking is enjoyable and the humans whose thinking matters most will continue to be intrinsically motivated to do it.

	▲	immibis 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Humans draw, but humans have been edged out of the business of drawing long ago.

▲ palmotea an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> If AI edges humans out of the business of thinking, then we're all in deep shit

Also because we live under capitalism, and you need something people need you to do to be allowed to live.

For a century+, "thinking" was the task that was supposed to be left to humans, as physical labor was automated. If "AI edges humans out of the business of thinking" what's left for humans, especially those who still need to work for a living because they don't have massive piles of money.

▲ jagoff 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>With no humans thinking, no advances in code will be possible.

What? Coding is like the one thing that RL can do without any further human input because there is a testable provable ground truth; run the code.