[arkensaw]

> 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]

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.

[latexr]

> 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.

[y0eswddl]

Only if you're less intelligent than the average. The problem with LLMs is that they will always fall to the average/mean/median of information.

And if the average person is orders of magnitude better than you at thinking, you're right... you should let the AI do it lol

[djaouen]

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

God forbid we should ever have to think lol

[toobulkeh]

Imagine if everyone got the opportunity to work on SOTA. What a world we would be.

Unfortunately that’s not where we’re headed.

[xtiansimon]

> “…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?

[metadope]

> a foundation I made for myself

Creative thinking requires an intent to be creative. Yes, it may be a delusion to imagine oneself as creative, one's thoughts to be original, but you have to begin with that idea if you're going to have any chance of actually advancing human knowledge. And the stronger wider higher you build your foundation-- your knowledge and familiarity with the works of humans before your time-- the better your chance of successful creativity, true originality, immortality.

Einstein thinks nothing of import without first consuming Newton and Galileo. While standing on their shoulders, he could begin to imagine another perspective, a creative reimaging of our physical universe. I'm fairly sure that for him, like for so many others, it began as a playful, creative thought stream, a What If juxtoposition between what was known and the mystery of unexplored ideas.

Your intent to create will make you creative. Entertain yourself and your thoughts, and share when you dare, and maybe we'll know if you're regurgitating or creating. But remember that you're the first judge and gatekeeper, and the first question is always, are you creative?

[arkensaw]

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

there it is

[palmotea]

> 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.

[spicyusername]

    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.

[palmotea]

> 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.

What world do you live in, where you get paid doing the things that are enjoyable to you, because they're enjoyable?

[immibis]

Humans draw, but humans have been edged out of the business of drawing long ago.

[jagoff]

>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.