The question presumes that most of us are "thinking" in the first place, when in actuality, most of us are just acting according to the patterns that have emerged from our encounters with the thoughts of others. We generally adopt them and/or try to hallucinate coherence when they conflict. Very few people actually "think". It's hard work and takes time. We neither have (take) the time nor are we particularly motivated to put in the work because the patterns we have learned from others are useful enough to achieve the low goals we set for ourselves.

IOW - modern AI is simply an extension of the lack of thinking that characterizes the modern life... It just does it faster and uses a hulluva lot more energy.

This is such a strange perspective to me. I wouldn't describe anybody I know in this way. Do you not engage in thoughtful conversation with the people you meet? Do you not know people who make art as a hobby? When techies propound such a dim view of humanity, I truly fear for our species. Nobody will shed a tear when your bodily resources are reallocated to paperclip production.

> the modern life

I don't think modernity caused any sort of degradation.

You said it yourself, "thinking is hard work". It's rational to save energy. This might even have incentivized the emergence of mimesis in humans, which is arguably the foundation of our ability to cooperate at large scale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimesis

Maybe a few of us do the hard work of thinking, and, if we figure out something novel and useful, huge numbers of people ape us uncritically. It's not an inspiring picture of humanity, but it's also not a reason to disparage anyone. More of a fact of life to be dealt with strategically.

> Very few people actually "think".

Unknowable. And a callous notion.

Have you ever read Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake? I think it's very applicable to the average human experience.

> and/or try to hallucinate coherence

It’s bad enough for rational reasoned discourse that we anthropomorphise LLMs, let’s please not then feed those words back into human discourse, further diluting their meaning. No one “hallucinates coherence”, hallucinations are by definition a perception which does not match reality.

> AI is simply an extension of

It may be an extension, but not “simply” as it also creates the problem where it didn’t exist. I’ve seen several reports (both on and offline) of people who used to engage in deep thinking (I’m talking scientists, postgrads, PhDs working at the edge of what we know) now worrying they are losing their ability to properly think due to their LLM use.

> It just does it faster and uses a hulluva lot more energy.

I hope we can agree that’s bad and that we should try to stop and even reverse it, not simply shrug our shoulders and go “ah well, we were already going to shit anyway, might as well fuck everything up faster”.

I agree with many points.

Even on Hacker News, when you see debates like 'X technology is good' or 'X technology is bad,' most of it seems to be about identity. And that identity often originates from the community they belong to.

The first identity usually starts with a community or the person who created it. Once the community forms, people under it often forget the original reasons and just accept it as their identity.

This is especially true for technology related issues, because the market share of a technology is directly tied to one's career, which makes it even more prone to becoming an identity issue.

I also do some 'thinking' in certain areas, but most of the time I don't. As my field gets deeper, it becomes harder to allocate cognitive resources to other areas. So in general, most people follow the crowd's opinion, but only maintain deep, thoughtful thinking, including 'taste,' in a few specific technical domains.

Everyone is always thinking, just many of us not about what we're doing! Sorry

if we were really thinking then llm wouldn't have been able to compress all knoweldge into few gbs.

everyone is just thinking about how to recall, remix and repeat.