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.
kubb [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I really wish that machines could just take over at some point and we could be free of the pointless jobs we have.
There are two problems with this: machines can’t do that right now, despite everyone trying to make them, and somehow we humans are amazingly capable of inventing new and new jobs to do, because we somehow hate leisure.
Already almost a century ago Bertrand Russel observed in the Praise of Idleness that we have the capacity to greatly relieve ourselves from the burden of jobs, if not fully then enough to create the space to do excellent, intrinsically motivated things.
Alas, this never happens. We always have to invent some other job. And what’s the point of super AI (please forgive me for using this vague and misleading term, I’m doing so sarcastically) if it can’t even give us a minute more of time with our kids, or tinkering on our personal projects?
motorest [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> I really wish that machines could just take over at some point and we could be free of the pointless jobs we have.
I would take it a step further and question why is everyone assuming that people have to work, whatever the work might be.
Of course the genetic answer is to pay the bills, but what if you didn't had to worry about paying them? How would your life change if you didn't had a mortgage or rent to pay? Would you still spend hours commiting to and back from the office? Would you stick with your current job? What would change in your life?
Once I came across a group of construction workers that were working on a construction site. Half a dozen of them were spending their days wearing fluorescent vests and holding hand-held stop signs on a crosswalk of a low-traffic road. There were more construction workers on that crosswalk than people actually crossing the road. They were there five days per week, from early morning to evening. What a colossal waste of time. I wondered how soul-crushing that would be. Is that how people expect to spend the bulk of their days?
onion2k [3 hidden]5 mins ago
we somehow hate leisure
We don't hate leisure. Everyone loves their leisure. What we hate is each other. Unless people are able to accept someone else getting a free ride (even when they're not getting one themselves), some form of ever-increasingly pointless work will be required, because that's how we define whether or not someone has 'earned' their leisure.
heavyset_go [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> I really wish that machines could just take over at some point and we could be free of the pointless jobs we have.
This is already the case for shareholders, and will still be the case in the future as long as automation remains privatized.
The rest of us will need to find a way to eat without working a pointless job. We aren't getting a slice of the automation pie.
chii [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> Alas, this never happens.
it never happens because the amount of energy we can collect and consume is still insufficient. We have not reached post-scarcity, not even close in fact.
And i don't see a superior AI being capable of giving us post-scarcity, at least, not within this life time, nor the next. Perhaps in 100 years, that would be possible, if you'd want to be optimistic.
rini17 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
If AI can outrun hedonic treadmill that would be vast achievement. Even more so if nature isn't destroyed in the process.
zwnow [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I really don't want that. The rich will find a way to force us into jobs we dont want. I'd rather develop software than cleaning toilets to be honest...
masklinn [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> we humans are amazingly capable of inventing new and new jobs to do, because we somehow hate leisure.
We don’t. We do generally crave meaning, the only people who hate leisure are the owner class, and they hate leisure for other people. Employees are not out there clamouring for 80h weeks or having to piss in bottles on your 12h shift. Some do like that (sometimes to an unhealthy extent) but that’s a very different consideration.
voidspark [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> I really wish that machines could just take over at some point and we could be free of the pointless jobs we have.
Who will own the machines that feed you?
If you aren't contributing anything, why would they care to give you more than the absolute bare minimum to survive?
iNic [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It did happen and continues to happen!!! The average time worked per week has halved over th past 70 years (more so in Europe than the US, but that is also why the US is richer)
iNic [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It's not just jobs but also chores used to take up significantly more time!
spencerflem [3 hidden]5 mins ago
David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs argues semis convincingly that 40% or so of jobs in the USA don't really have to be done - by the workers own admission.
Certainly if we wanted to, so much of the advertising, scamming, copying other companies, etc. could be done away with without affecting life very much.
We don't even need to wait for AI.
Conversely, even with AI I suspect we will still be expected to work, if anything harder because our labor is relatively less useful
cruzcampo [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The problem with this idea is that in a capitalist system, the machines taking over all the jobs means wealth fully concentrating in the capitalist class while taking away all power from labor. In other words, misery for the 99%.
We need a systemic change before we can allow this to happen.
thundergolfer [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Russell was an aristocrat and enjoyed excellent schooling, and thus knew how freedom and idleness could produce excellence. He was a socialist because he realized that non-aristocrats generally had no shot at his kind of life without it.
Call me when AI will be able to shortlist 3 jobs I can get and then 2 affordable real estates nearby every job location.
oldge [3 hidden]5 mins ago
After twenty years building out products in Silicon Valley I have come to the point where I have lost the plot. None of the projects at my last company seemed interesting, none of the projects I see other companies seem interesting. All AI, no substance.
So I’ll just sit at home and build robots till something interesting does pop up or my robots gain sentience and decide I’m the problem.
thefz [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> Now that machines can think for us
They don't
maschine [3 hidden]5 mins ago
TL/DR. AI summary:
In the article "Why Even Try if You Have A.I.?" from The New Yorker (published April 29, 2025), Joshua Rothman explores the implications of relying on increasingly powerful artificial intelligence (AI) and the potential consequences for human effort and engagement. As AI capabilities grow, there’s a temptation to delegate tasks to it, which could lead to a diminished sense of purpose and agency. Rothman argues that over-reliance on AI risks atrophying human mental and creative capacities, much like physical muscles weaken without use. He draws parallels to how automation has already reduced certain physical demands, leaving people effective yet weaker in some contexts.
The article contrasts two types of repetitive effort: one aimed at perfecting a task (e.g., optimizing a go-kart racing line) and another that involves exploratory, iterative processes (e.g., revising creative work). The latter, Rothman suggests, fosters discovery and deepens inner resources, which AI cannot replicate in the same human-centric way. He warns that outsourcing intellectual challenges to AI might neglect the development of mental resilience, patience, and nuanced problem-solving skills gained through struggle.
Using the gym as a metaphor, Rothman notes that while AI can act as an “intellectual gym” for some, it may leave certain mental “muscles” untrained, particularly those tied to emotional and practical complexities. He emphasizes the value of effortful, human-driven exploration over AI’s efficiency, suggesting that what we lose by ceding tasks to AI is the growth that comes from grappling with challenges ourselves. The piece ultimately advocates for balancing AI’s utility with the preservation of human striving to maintain a rich, engaged existence.
cruzcampo [3 hidden]5 mins ago
AI does feel like it sucks the joy out of any human creative endavour by replacing it with effortless, good enough slop.
Why try to engage in the arts when you won't be able to make a living as illustrator or musician because AI slop is good enough to feed the capital machine?
Why try to engage in engineering quality software when the power structure has decided that you better be using AI for it?
Why do anything that makes us think or exhibit any human qualities when it's not the most cost effective way in our lovely capitalist AI dystopia?
All that's going to be left for humans is going to be shitty manual labor that nobody wants to do - sweatshops coming back to the US again soon thanks to the Trump tarrifs! All the intellectually or creatively stimulating work is going away, sacrificed to the machine at the altar of mammon.
b800h [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Chess has been mastered by computers long ago, and yet people still play it.
roenxi [3 hidden]5 mins ago
If anyone has been going in to art for the commercial opportunities then someone needs to sit them down and explain how bad a strategy that is. Art is a recreational activity that happens to involve money sometimes. Besides, I don't care how good the AI is it can't make a $100 million equivalent to Blue Poles. People are clearly paying for the connection with the human artist rather than the quality of the art.
> Why try to engage in engineering quality software when the power structure has decided that you better be using AI for it?
Why engage in engineering quality software? The reasons haven't changed because AI exists. AI just adds new ways of achieving high quality software outcomes.
I don't mind admitting that I spent a lot of my childhood really annoyed at all the people who seemed to just be smarter than me and there was no clear way to catch up. It is a lot less fair than physical fitness where I could at least train more. Levelling that playing field somewhat is long overdue and - for most people - going to be quite a welcome change.
Our capitalist overlords don't want us to write quality software anymore. They want cheap, disposable AI slop.
lclc [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The dream of many (if not most) people here on Hacker News has always seemed to eventually leave tech and work with their hands. AI will just get us there sooner for many professions.
azangru [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> Why try to engage in the arts ... Why try to engage in engineering quality software
Try applying your questions to other areas. Why engage in the study of philosophy, or history, or ancient languages, when barely anything of use ever comes out of it? For that matter, why engage in the study of the sciences, when you are statistically very unlikely to make a significant contribution. Why engage in the sports, if you almost certainly won't become an Olympic champion, and quite likely not even a professional sportsman? Why work in geriatrics or palliative care when your patients will keep dying?..
There are things that we do for fun, or for personal fulfilment, or just because...
> Why do anything that makes us think or exhibit any human qualities when it's not the most cost effective way in our lovely capitalist AI dystopia? ... All that's going to be left for humans is going to be shitty manual labor that nobody wants to do
Well, there you go then. The reason for doing something that 'makes us think' etc. is because this is much more desirable for the doer than 'shitty manual labor that nobody wants to do'.
cruzcampo [3 hidden]5 mins ago
That's all fine and dandy, but in our capitalist system, we have to do something monetizable to be able to survive, unless we were lucky enough to be born into wealth. AI is taking away all enjoyable avenues to do so.
"Why try to engage in the arts if you won't make money" is perhaps the most capitalist dystopian statement I've read the whole year.
I sing with my friends regularly. I'm not expecting to ever get paid a dime.
MrScruff [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Precisely. The percentage of people making a living from their creative pursuit is vanishingly small.
cruzcampo [3 hidden]5 mins ago
We should be looking to move that number up, not down.
cruzcampo [3 hidden]5 mins ago
That is the capitalist dystopia we live in. I don't like it either. If we lived in a post-capitalist society, AI wouldn't be the threat it is.
snakeboy [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> Why try to engage in the arts when you won't be able to make a living as illustrator or musician because AI slop is good enough to feed the capital machine?
Maybe this is an uncommon view on HN, but personally I engage in the arts to scratch that itch of creative expression and emotional release, not with the goal to eventually monetize it. Even without AI, my poetry would never realistically be "good enough" to make it into a career, but that doesn't make it any less fulfilling for me.
cruzcampo [3 hidden]5 mins ago
In our capitalist system, we have to do something monetizable to be able to survive, unless we were lucky enough to be born into wealth. AI is taking away all enjoyable avenues to do so.
HN.zip
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.
There are two problems with this: machines can’t do that right now, despite everyone trying to make them, and somehow we humans are amazingly capable of inventing new and new jobs to do, because we somehow hate leisure.
Already almost a century ago Bertrand Russel observed in the Praise of Idleness that we have the capacity to greatly relieve ourselves from the burden of jobs, if not fully then enough to create the space to do excellent, intrinsically motivated things.
Alas, this never happens. We always have to invent some other job. And what’s the point of super AI (please forgive me for using this vague and misleading term, I’m doing so sarcastically) if it can’t even give us a minute more of time with our kids, or tinkering on our personal projects?
I would take it a step further and question why is everyone assuming that people have to work, whatever the work might be.
Of course the genetic answer is to pay the bills, but what if you didn't had to worry about paying them? How would your life change if you didn't had a mortgage or rent to pay? Would you still spend hours commiting to and back from the office? Would you stick with your current job? What would change in your life?
Once I came across a group of construction workers that were working on a construction site. Half a dozen of them were spending their days wearing fluorescent vests and holding hand-held stop signs on a crosswalk of a low-traffic road. There were more construction workers on that crosswalk than people actually crossing the road. They were there five days per week, from early morning to evening. What a colossal waste of time. I wondered how soul-crushing that would be. Is that how people expect to spend the bulk of their days?
We don't hate leisure. Everyone loves their leisure. What we hate is each other. Unless people are able to accept someone else getting a free ride (even when they're not getting one themselves), some form of ever-increasingly pointless work will be required, because that's how we define whether or not someone has 'earned' their leisure.
This is already the case for shareholders, and will still be the case in the future as long as automation remains privatized.
The rest of us will need to find a way to eat without working a pointless job. We aren't getting a slice of the automation pie.
it never happens because the amount of energy we can collect and consume is still insufficient. We have not reached post-scarcity, not even close in fact.
And i don't see a superior AI being capable of giving us post-scarcity, at least, not within this life time, nor the next. Perhaps in 100 years, that would be possible, if you'd want to be optimistic.
We don’t. We do generally crave meaning, the only people who hate leisure are the owner class, and they hate leisure for other people. Employees are not out there clamouring for 80h weeks or having to piss in bottles on your 12h shift. Some do like that (sometimes to an unhealthy extent) but that’s a very different consideration.
Who will own the machines that feed you?
If you aren't contributing anything, why would they care to give you more than the absolute bare minimum to survive?
Certainly if we wanted to, so much of the advertising, scamming, copying other companies, etc. could be done away with without affecting life very much.
We don't even need to wait for AI.
Conversely, even with AI I suspect we will still be expected to work, if anything harder because our labor is relatively less useful
We need a systemic change before we can allow this to happen.
So I’ll just sit at home and build robots till something interesting does pop up or my robots gain sentience and decide I’m the problem.
They don't
In the article "Why Even Try if You Have A.I.?" from The New Yorker (published April 29, 2025), Joshua Rothman explores the implications of relying on increasingly powerful artificial intelligence (AI) and the potential consequences for human effort and engagement. As AI capabilities grow, there’s a temptation to delegate tasks to it, which could lead to a diminished sense of purpose and agency. Rothman argues that over-reliance on AI risks atrophying human mental and creative capacities, much like physical muscles weaken without use. He draws parallels to how automation has already reduced certain physical demands, leaving people effective yet weaker in some contexts.
The article contrasts two types of repetitive effort: one aimed at perfecting a task (e.g., optimizing a go-kart racing line) and another that involves exploratory, iterative processes (e.g., revising creative work). The latter, Rothman suggests, fosters discovery and deepens inner resources, which AI cannot replicate in the same human-centric way. He warns that outsourcing intellectual challenges to AI might neglect the development of mental resilience, patience, and nuanced problem-solving skills gained through struggle.
Using the gym as a metaphor, Rothman notes that while AI can act as an “intellectual gym” for some, it may leave certain mental “muscles” untrained, particularly those tied to emotional and practical complexities. He emphasizes the value of effortful, human-driven exploration over AI’s efficiency, suggesting that what we lose by ceding tasks to AI is the growth that comes from grappling with challenges ourselves. The piece ultimately advocates for balancing AI’s utility with the preservation of human striving to maintain a rich, engaged existence.
Why try to engage in the arts when you won't be able to make a living as illustrator or musician because AI slop is good enough to feed the capital machine?
Why try to engage in engineering quality software when the power structure has decided that you better be using AI for it?
Why do anything that makes us think or exhibit any human qualities when it's not the most cost effective way in our lovely capitalist AI dystopia?
All that's going to be left for humans is going to be shitty manual labor that nobody wants to do - sweatshops coming back to the US again soon thanks to the Trump tarrifs! All the intellectually or creatively stimulating work is going away, sacrificed to the machine at the altar of mammon.
> Why try to engage in engineering quality software when the power structure has decided that you better be using AI for it?
Why engage in engineering quality software? The reasons haven't changed because AI exists. AI just adds new ways of achieving high quality software outcomes.
I don't mind admitting that I spent a lot of my childhood really annoyed at all the people who seemed to just be smarter than me and there was no clear way to catch up. It is a lot less fair than physical fitness where I could at least train more. Levelling that playing field somewhat is long overdue and - for most people - going to be quite a welcome change.
Our capitalist overlords don't want us to write quality software anymore. They want cheap, disposable AI slop.
Try applying your questions to other areas. Why engage in the study of philosophy, or history, or ancient languages, when barely anything of use ever comes out of it? For that matter, why engage in the study of the sciences, when you are statistically very unlikely to make a significant contribution. Why engage in the sports, if you almost certainly won't become an Olympic champion, and quite likely not even a professional sportsman? Why work in geriatrics or palliative care when your patients will keep dying?..
There are things that we do for fun, or for personal fulfilment, or just because...
> Why do anything that makes us think or exhibit any human qualities when it's not the most cost effective way in our lovely capitalist AI dystopia? ... All that's going to be left for humans is going to be shitty manual labor that nobody wants to do
Well, there you go then. The reason for doing something that 'makes us think' etc. is because this is much more desirable for the doer than 'shitty manual labor that nobody wants to do'.
I sing with my friends regularly. I'm not expecting to ever get paid a dime.
Maybe this is an uncommon view on HN, but personally I engage in the arts to scratch that itch of creative expression and emotional release, not with the goal to eventually monetize it. Even without AI, my poetry would never realistically be "good enough" to make it into a career, but that doesn't make it any less fulfilling for me.