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Comment by caseyy | Hacker News Reader

People ceasing to think because AI can "reason" sounds a lot like people ceasing to go outside and move because now jobs can be done from a computer screen, and so can tasks like grocery shopping, prescription filling, bill paying, services, clothing shopping, take-out food, and more. We lost something when we moved everything online - much of our physical health. I wonder if we won't lose much of our mental health if we outsource physical, on-the-spot thinking to the virtual world, too.

Though of course, there is the argument that using calculators didn't make us more mentally inept, so why would AI? But I'm not sure, this seems different.

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> using calculators didn't make us more mentally inept

We (collectively) did lose some skills, that we no longer value as much because we (individually) grew up after the loss happened.

Just like losing a large part of our orientation skills in the GPS era.

Or how happily-single urban people in their 40s don't feel like they've lost anything compared to eg. their grandparents living a married life with three generations living under the same roof, but if you'd taken that person from the past and showed them the option to switch, they would feel the loss.

It is totally possible that the average "2045 human" could be significantly mentally/emotionally atrophied in several ways, while not feeling like anything is missing.

That's a pretty narrow view, I think it depends more on culture.

I live somewhere where (not in North America) where grocery delivery is the norm, food delivery is the norm... online shopping is easy. This all frees up time that we spend outside, in parks, in lessons and study... because these are communal values.

We don't spend our free time in front of screens (though nothing wrong with that if you want it), again, because of culture.

Unfortunately, physical health is not beholden to culture. The sedentary lifestyle in the US and other countries has significantly impacted health outcomes for the population. There is much research on it, enough to not discuss it over and over.

After the Spanish blackout people said there was a silver lining in that it was so nice that people were forced to simultaneously disconnect.

For some of these things there's insidious network effects. If everyone else is doing it being an outlier of resistance is not rewarding. We need ways to collective decide to do things differently.

It’s always a responsibility of an individual. You can look at it the other way around: instead of going outside to do chores you can do them more efficiently online and use the saved time to enjoy higher quality time outside, e.g. in a park instead of a shopping centre.

AI is a powerful tool and it’s already changing the world but it’s still just a tool - the smarter you’re, the more efficiently you can use it. It might change our intelligence but I don’t think it will decrease it.

> It’s always a responsibility of an individual. You can look at it the other way around: instead of going outside to do chores you can do them more efficiently online and use the saved time to enjoy higher quality time outside, e.g. in a park instead of a shopping centre.

But we know this ideal version of events does not happen often, and large populations of people did in fact become a lot more sedentary as a result of not having to do physical activity in day-to-day life.

Technology shapes humanity. Cars preclude roads, roads shape cities, the shape of car-first cities has fundamentally changed how humans interact. The same is true for any technology to an extent.

Whether for better or worse that depends on one's own interpretation and the technology itself. On one extreme you have people who reject all technology after a certain point in time, with rare exceptions thoroughly considered (the Amish). On the other you have people who see technology as the goal, even if it comes at the expense of the genocide of the human race.

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