I guess my counterpoint is bluntly - no-one will not be using the tool at their day-job.

It requires so much extra discipline to think for yourself and not use it, you will be forced to use it in your job or be seen as a Luddite and your ability to think for yourself in the domain will diminish over time - your domain thinking muscle will gradually atrophy from lack of use.

Why would any of us bother thinking hard, when there is no financial incentive to doing so ?

Your analogy fails with shovels and excavators .. because General synthetic intelligence is not a single purpose narrow 'tool'. near-future AI is equivalent to an alien intelligent species competing for resources, or equivalent to a cheaper smarter non-human 'outsource worker'.

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lf88 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I am actively trying not to use it at my day-job, and I am a (mainly) computational physicist. My mother tongue is not English, I live in a country where the language is neither my mother tongue nor English, and I still don't use AI for writing emails or other documents. It is going OK so far. However, if significantly more powerful AI is developed, I think that we'll have much more serious problems than using or not-using AI in our job.

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sheepolog 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not sure why you say the analogy fails just because general AI has more applications than excavators. A tool is still a tool, regardless of how much human effort it replaces.

"Calculator" used to be a job title. Now it's a machine. In the same way, "construction worker" may one day be a machine. "Software engineer" may one day be a machine. "Engineer" in general may one day be a machine. This forum seems to think that if humans are not required to think hard about existing problem domains, something terrible will happen.

At the end of the AI revolution, thinking may become something like physical exercise -- something we do because it's fun, and keeps us healthy and attractive, not because it's required.

To be clear, I do think that AI poses a potential risk to humanity. But imo "we won't have to think as hard" is not a risk; it's a benefit.

	▲	massysett 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		People already do a lot of thinking for fun. They read novels, they write software, they do crossword puzzles, they play chess. My experience at home and work is the more “thinking” these tools do, the more it frees me up to think about something else, usually something harder. The mention of exercise brought this to mind: https://youtu.be/O6SEXp3-lo8?is=jJ55WL3ZvFoG6G8u
	▲	jgord 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		yes ... I do think that if humans stop thinking hard about existing problem domains .. they will lose that ability. From which it then follows that _all_ technology and science become magical incantations dictated by a black-box oracle, whom everyone trusts and no one understands. That could happen in a couple of decades.
	▲	techblueberry 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If people don’t use muscle power for work, and people don’t think for work, what are people going to fi? Maybe the new scarce resource will be meaning, and we’ll kill each other for that