[preg_match]

I think the biggest realization to me of this whole thing is that most people don't want to turn off their brains. I think we, very naively, thought that some hypothetical life of zero-thought pure-leisure was not only achievable, but desirable.

And it's just... not. People want to be challenged, they want to read human material, they want to listen to human music. Sure those like crappy Spotify fake artists might make some coin for Spotify. But are people going out to those non-existent tours, or are they instead listening to Confessions II and praying nightly that Madonna tours again?

And, Madonna, if you're reading this: please go on tour. Please.

[phatskat]

Right? It feels akin to people who oppose social welfare and things like UBI because “people just don’t want to work.” The reality seems more like “people want to work, they mostly want to have a say in what that work is.” How many people working service jobs didn’t have access to higher ed, or couldn’t afford a guitar, or accidentally wound up taking care of a family before they could research algae, etc etc.

Personally, I’d be knitting and crocheting things for other people with most of my day if I didn’t have to worry about money, or I’d help my neighbor with the website she wants for her business venture, or I’d teach kids how to code. These are things I’d like to do, that I can’t readily do while having the overhead of a full time job unless I run myself ragged and tbh, I’d rather not.

[neetle]

I think the sentiment comes from people that just don’t find pleasure from working/mastery. The incentives have changed so much with llm-enabled development, but not which ones people respond to.

I miss the code mines

[phatskat]

I’m still in the mines but I don’t know for how long. Part of my performance evaluation for the year will include a section on using AI, so I’ll be biting the bullet and using copilot for glorified autocomplete like I did when it was still in beta.

I’m also perusing for shops that aren’t necessarily “anti-ai”, but where lack of using it isn’t seen as a negative

[sph]

People say they want to get challenged.

> most people don't want to turn off their brains

Biologically, life is an effort-minimizing machine. Our brains have a whole system of habit-forming to minimize the enormous amount of energy it takes to think.

Whatever people say, give them a way to think less, and they will necessarily prefer it unless they literally are a Buddhist monk, seeking to be aware over every action and thought.

[Starman_Jones]

Our brains also have evolved rewards for performing life-continuing behaviors, and then evolved to rewarding proxy behaviors, instead of the actual life-continuing behavior. This is perfectly in line with what you are saying, but now we are rewarded for spotting enemy snipers in CODBLOPS, rather than spotting lions/snakes/crocodiles.

We have gotten very good at hacking this reward function. It has reached a point where a thinking-minimization engine will pay a significant amount of resources to, say, Paradox Studios to do what is effectively the opposite of not thinking.

[preg_match]

They want to be challenged in such a way that they perceive to be enriching to their life. The reason people use AI at work and don't blink, but then won't listen to AI artists on Spotify, is that they see one as enriching, and the other as menial.

Optimizing the menial is the end-goal, optimizing fun and humanity and expression is not desirable. It's just not, and we're seeing that over and over again.

[fabianholzer]

> I think we, very naively, thought that some hypothetical life of zero-thought pure-leisure was not only achievable, but desirable.

May I recommend Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" to you?

[dtj1123]

May I recommend "Look to Windward" to you?

[maxerickson]

How did you get that impression?