Thinking will become a hobby (spinellis.gr)

I think the solution is in education. Do not teach people about the things that are useful right now. Teach people to value the things that make their lives better.

I'm ok with thinking as a hobby. That's doing it because you value it. If there are not enough people doing it, the problem is that they don't value it or don't know how to value it.

what are you gonna do, be an AI bro for 50 years telling me "just one more year bro"?

I'm already 30, I'm not gonna live till 80 reading unbearable ai bro comments.

Side note, but here in Australia smaller stores are starting to preference cash again due to high card fees that legally cannot be (directly) passed into the customer.

> Steadily improving cheap quality you get for the most products

Have you proof read what you wrote? With your lack of specificity for the word "thinking", you're casting a rather broad argument; there is a troubling implications between your words.

* Trust what you're told, consume what you're sold; Do as you're bid, do as you're told.

* Don't question the script, don't step out of line; keep your "snowflake thinking" benign.

* The market knows best, so don't second-guess; Our Ford will provide, just consume and say yes.

Fooooord!^[1]

- [1] Brave New World; by Aldous Huxley

Technology, like AI, is a force multiplier. A lever.

It's not "technology did this or that", humans did using technology.

Selling stuff to people without them understanding the consequences is a technology, too.

Society does indeed evolve over time, but it's only in 8th grade history surveys that it can be presented so simply as you take for granted above.

Yet Ikea, H&M, etc are thriving. COVID was supposed to be the deathknell for brick and mortar retail but I'm fairly sure it's bounced back. Buying a lot of stuff will just always be better in person.

Since you're so certain of this impact "AI" will have, what "skills" do you "predict" are required on the human end of this?

I have to admit that's a rhetorical question to demonstrate the absurdity of your stance. Don't make my eyes roll out of my head by insisting that "AI is indeed an absurd change, but we must acknowledge... (blah blah)" or whatever and double down.

We've had years of these silly takes and we're all fed up with the mass-plagiarism machine. It's not science fiction. It's a big lookup table for sale and wrapped in lies, and no it's not equivalent to other computation by definition. I'm sure you could run some people out of business that way, but not all. When the job is done did we really achieve "AI", or just ruin the economy by taking advantage of the feeble minded?

Any politician has a massive opportunity here to enforce the law. It's only a question if they'll keep pretending to be blinded by the science.

It's good to reduce pain, but not to kill everything. At least not in one fatal fell swoop.

Stats like this get thrown around a lot but it's worth considering that the ABSOLUTE numbers might not actually change that much over time.

With agriculture specifically, we can make some rough estimates that, before mechanization (say, 1760-1800 period), there was maybe 10^9 people on Earth and they were all employed in agriculture. So ~10^9 farm-workers.

As of 2024, FAO estimates of global agricultural workforce put the total at about 892 million; call it ~9x10^8. [1]

So, more precise (but perhaps not much more accurate) to say that mechanization put 10% of farm workers out of a job, not 99%.

Now, it certainly IS true that mechanization allows (or forces, depending on your perspective) 90% of the population of Earth to do something other than farming, which is the real point you were making - Technology DOES have a way of disrupting what we've been doing for generations.

[1] https://www.fao.org/statistics/highlights-archive/highlights...

At least in the US, there are roughly the same number of bank branches today as 20 years ago. And I think you would have to compare to hundreds of years ago to find anything like a 99% decline in farm laborers.

I don't believe this is true. High street banks are still common. 99% closed means we previously had 100 times as many, which would be absurdly high. It's probably closer to 50% closed.

A lot of people that I know would strongly prefer to go to some brik and mortar shop. The problem is: most of items that I buy on the internet (e.g. on Amazon) are simply not easily available in a shop in my town (and I am not living in a small town).

For example:

- lots of obscure scientific books that are written in German or even English (I live in Germany)

- similarly: lots of rather niche belletristic books (think into the direction: some obscure novel recommendation on HN) often in various foreign languages

N.B. It is true that an important reason why Amazon became big among early computer enthusiasts in Germany in the 90s is that it was one of the few ways for easily getting computer science textbooks delivered from the USA - though with long delivery times.

- 3D printing supplies (why doesn't there exist a brick an mortar store for this?)

- very niche indie games (they are by now basically all sold on Steam, GOG, Epic Store or itch.io)

- very specific parts for Maker projects

- ...

So, the situation is not that people necessarily want to buy on the internet or specifically Amazon, but rather that there exists barely any way to get what they want in a brick and mortar store in even large cities.

Bearing the burden of a civilization-wide illness such as obesity and diabetes is such a cost. But, hey, at least a large amount of the country is designed in a way that mandates commute via cars and makes "adding to one's lifestyle simply for the purpose of wellness" even more inconvenient.

Zero. Regrets. Outside of the rare errand where I need serious cargo capacity, or visiting family, cars are only for fun now.

As a non-"car person" once agreed with me: "Yep, I hate COMMUTING in a car. But I love DRIVING."

And unlike those in Jamestown, who could just ignore the robots and continue working the land to survive, we will be forced to allow the robots to take over our roles.

Think: those in authority figures, for church or politics. Or science or chemistry. And especially in their own health, which should always remain part art. A few nerds on the internet, like us in hacker news, are still remaining open to question and apply our hard thinking to tough problems. But most people: they've resigned and bought the belief they are not qualified to think about hard problems.

These are not necessarily unintelligent people, but they haven't developed the skills necessary to critically analyze textual information. My opinion is that without those skills it is not possible to meaningfully engage in a democratic system.

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp

Like global warming?

I can't tell if you're joking. There is a group of people who think because they thought something was cool or because it appeared in science fiction, this means it's inevitable. Some of these people are sometimes considered influential thinkers that we should all base the future on. (If you don't, you're behind!)

Meanwhile LLMs still don't do really very much, and the only improvement path is "throw more compute at a larger corpus".

U dont get why folks repeat this shit ad nausea, its technically not possible and no amount of progress will change that. Enjoy your meatbag form with finite durability, its ok as it is

For reference, teleportation has the same problem.

At some point with a sufficiently intelligent AI that is backed by physical LLMs this is something a government could probably actually ask for.

I agree with you on some things like roofing and cutting hair and electrical work and plumbing, etc. but I think physical LLMs are going to surprise us just as much as regular LLMs have. It’s not going to be some sort of gradual improvement. It’s just going to feel very human all of a sudden when they have enough data to train everything on. Think of it this way, LLMs work as long as they have enough training data. Automating everything is just a matter of getting enough training data for that particular field.

The post may sound ridiculous, but I genuinely don’t think it is.

I was in a Wal-Mart last week and the front end lead I was talking to looked at her company phone and said that she had to come right back.

The store system cameras spotted something on the floor and messaged her, as the closest employee to the thing, to go pick it up.

I was astounded.

Yeah, I can't pick up red hot ingots and punch them into complicated shapes, but there are dozens of other features I'm not willing to part with.

Look at how fucking dumb common folks are ie with voting pedophile in repeatedly to most powerful power position globally, how amoral almost all elites are, people are predominantly selfish to the core even when situation is ok, much less otherwise. Next global war in some terrible form or some butlerian totalitarian slavery is way more likely than some hippie kumbaya paradise. I wish very much it could happen, but chance is exactly 0.

Why would they when the machines can undercut anything while offering higher quality

We're seeing the cost of code drop dramatically and are facing the same problem in building new companies across most disciplines of, "what's a problem painful enough that someone will pay us to solve it?".

I suppose if we get to a massive enough scale we can effectively model every atom's interaction and human on earth's reaction to any stimulus but I think we're still some time off from that :)

I think that's whats happening with some of yall, seeing tokens every day in the screen then thinking you're just an llm as well.

But yeah, thankfully on that front I am not at the experiment stage yet:D I think I need more money for that.. so far.. just a whole lot of books.

Yes. I think that being useful is a fundamental (and often understated) requirement of a happy fulfilling life.