[boothby]

This is such a strange perspective to me. I wouldn't describe anybody I know in this way. Do you not engage in thoughtful conversation with the people you meet? Do you not know people who make art as a hobby? When techies propound such a dim view of humanity, I truly fear for our species. Nobody will shed a tear when your bodily resources are reallocated to paperclip production.

[roncesvalles]

>This is such a strange perspective to me. I wouldn't describe anybody I know in this way.

Only a minority of jobs require the person to wrack their brains very hard. Most jobs just involve learning a routine and performing it on repeat.

The fear is that AI is also turning the jobs that required thinking into routine-on-repeat jobs (where the routine becomes I/O-ing things to an LLM).

I can totally see the job of a doctor (or more likely, NPs and PAs) devolving into just interviewing and visually examining a patient, feeding everything into an LLM, and doing what the LLM tells them. The next step is they wouldn't even be allowed to do anything else, for liability reasons. A world like this is right around the corner.

[ryandvm]

Man, I appreciate your optimism, but I don't know how you can spend even 5 minutes on Facebook looking at the absolutely bonkers shit one's own relatives and neighbors post and still come away thinking that most people are "thoughtful".

Are humans capable of profound creativity? Of course. Are they actually doing it? No, not very often.

[boothby]

I do not spend even 5 minutes on facebook. Aside from a comment or two per day on HN, the only human interactions I have on the internet are with coworkers, a of whom I regularly see in person.

If you find yourself consuming more than 5 minutes of content you don't find thoughtful per day, I would ask why. "Touch grass" seems to be the common advice to combat this.

[ryandvm]

Okay, and you're not wrong, but it sounds like you're filtering out most of the shit that humanity is producing and then lecturing folks that say LLMs are smarter than most people.

It's kind of like you hang out in a Buddhist monastery saying, "I don't know what you guys are talking about - people are so peace-loving!"

[boothby]

No, I'm interacting with people in person. I'd debate your claim that "most of the shit that humanity is producing" is internet-mediated, but your choice of noun renders that rather moot. Stop ingesting shit. There's a whole world out there.

[scotty79]

You are heavily self-selecting what part of humanity you interact in the real world as well. You pick your friends, places you live, places you frequent, times you choose to go out and so on.

I didn't know how wide the humanity variance is before I had to go to a government office to exchange identity card (as the old one expires after some years). In the queue, when I looked to my left and right I saw some of the most bizarre people I ever saw. Because they were picked fully randomly just by having their identity documents sort of "off by one" in relation to mine. Humans and their output, when taken representatively are at most tolerable.

[ryandvm]

I think we both agree that I need to spend less time in intellectual ghettos.

[Izkata]

I'm guessing they're referring to the unexpected finding that most people don't have an "inner voice" - they don't think in words. It at least partially influenced the NPC meme.

[drdaeman]

> most people don’t have an “inner voice”

Isn’t that just an incorrect interpretation of the descriptive experience sampling tests? The frequency of having inner monologue varies, but I don’t think it was shown that many people have anendophasia.

[nomadpenguin]

It's a genuinely fascist tendency. Only the elite few are "real people" who think. Everyone else is irrelevant, democracy is a failed experiment, wealth = worth, etc etc etc