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Comment by jgord | Hacker News Reader

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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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.

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.

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

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

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.

"technology and science become magical incantations dictated by a black-box oracle, whom everyone trusts and no one understands"

I don't see why this would be a terrible thing.

This is what humanity has done for thousands of years. We do things manually for a long time, then invent an efficient way to automate it, and the skills to do things manually are gradually lost.

A car is a magic black box that we trust to move us around. A smartphone is a magic black box that we trust to connect to the rest of the world. AI is just the latest invention in a long line of magic black boxes that we trust. If you'd prefer to live your life without a car or smartphone or AI, it is perfectly acceptable to do so, and there are communities of people who do that.

I think I'm detecting a concern that "if we don't understand how it works, it could start doing dangerous things". To that I would say: even if something is a magic black box, we can still improve it and make it safer. To invent an airbag, you don't need to understand how a car works.

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

Do you really think so? What a depressing view and simply, for many people I'll bet, totally wrong. But that's just my view. I'm working hard on something at the moment and, sure there's a financial incentive but it's the thought of a successful resolution of the project that is the deeper incentive.

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