I'd say that by purging stuff from the brain we are losing thinking itself. Thinking is manipulating ideas and concepts in your head, assembling and linking. The fewer things there is, the more primitive the result. You cannot juggle without object to juggle, connecting the dots result in trivial patterns when you have just a couple of dots.
It just becomes more abstracted but the thinking is still there. And who is to say we aren’t going to keep reading books, delving into hobbies, or watching movies. All those concepts will then be mixed into the our brains and who knows what new things we will think of to extract out and desire to build with AI.
I think we'll continue to read books and stuff. But many books/movies will probably have devolved into AI slop (not that this hasn't been a trend for the last few decades to a lot of film buffs).
But hobbies like woodworking or instrument seem immune to slop... But people can be creative with what they can sloppify
It's true for all automation we do get more comfort. We build systems so that we humans have as little struggle as possible, not realising that struggle is the only reason for existence. By eliminating it, we are erasing ourselves from this world.
Automation is also for reducing drudgery - the work that prevents us from meaningful struggle by taking up resources that can be better applied elsewhere. Not all struggle (or pain) is created equal.
I wouldn’t count on reduced drudgery. The assembly line automated many movements needed for manufacturing. But which work involved more drudgery—-craftsman-style car production or standing on an assembly line at Ford?
With any new technology, subsequent drudgery depends on the technology, its concomitant economics, and the imagination of the people using it.
The craftsman didn't move to the assembly line.
This kind of argument flies in the face of the fact that plenty of inherited rich people seem to lead very happy lives. Of course, they do find things to struggle with, but it's much more pleasant to struggle to score 72 at the golf course or to outbid a rival for a piece of contemporary art than to struggle for basic needs.
I don’t share your idea of a happy life.
I can live a happy life without struggling for basic needs and without playing golf all day long. If you strip off every obligation from life, then you exist, not live.
Facing challenges and overcoming obstacles, friends and family is what makes me happy. When you’re rich, most people only care about your money, not the person you are. And I think that’s exactly what a happy life is about.
I guess to each their own. But in the little free time I have as a non-rich version, I like to face low-stakes challenges I myself choose, e.g. in my case those currently mostly are learning Chinese and learning to play a musical instrument. Those still provide obstacles, difficulties, the feeling of progress and moments of success/failure, but I can do them at my own pace and with no serious consequences if I fail.
I can imagine I could be perfectly happy with a life full of challenges of that kind, instead of being forced to work at given scheduled times which often imply I spend less time with my son than I would like, including days I don't feel like it, and including boring tasks (I love my job, but like almost every job, it also has its paperwork, pointless meetings, etc.), knowing I depend on that work to live.
In short, I think we all do need the challenge, the struggle, the successes and the failures, otherwise life would just be boring and pointless. But I don't think we (or at least I) need the obligation component and the high stakes.
What you mention about the rich attracting people focused on money rings true, but it would be moot if AI led us all to lead lives more similar to the rich, which was the point here. (Of course, there's also the issue of whether there is widespread or unequal access to AI, but that's another story...).
It's fairly easy to be submarine rich, and fly completely below the radar. Just brush off questions about your work with vagueness. If you're not flashy, nobody will suspect you're rich
"struggle is the only reason for existence"
That is a bold and frankly unsupportable claim.
Humans don’t tend towards idle quiescence.
We seem to be insatiable inquisitive.
Curiosity doth struggle many cats.
Being inquisitive doesn't equate to loving, or needing, struggle in my brain. Also, struggle differs for many people. Running a half marathon was a struggle for me, but I can't compare it to a family who is struggling to pay bills.
If we take Maslows hierarchy of needs, me running a half marathon is self actualization. Something I'm privileged to be able to do. A family struggling to put food on the table is still on the Lower tier of the pyramid.
Yes, I tend to agree.
A lot of paraimony between your statement and Socrates' comments on the transition to writing.
Interestingly, he placed a lot of importance on memory... where you emphasize manipulation of concepts.
I’ve grown to appreciate this aspect of standard examination as I’ve gotten older. Everyone wants to say “oh, you can just look it up now”, but how can you come up with higher level thinking, when you don’t have the fundamentals in your mind?
To use math as an example, you can always look up formulas. But after more than 1 "layer" of looking up, that quickly becomes impossible. Like, when I had to learn to calculate derivatives and primitives, I could look those things up. But when I got to linear algebra, I couldn't progress until I deeply internalized derivatives and primitives, because looking up formula A only for it to contain unknown formula B just becomes a mess.
I "purge" - or better yet choose not to retain - the data.
BUT, BUT! I keep the index.
My favourite quote from Donald Rumsfeld (a very bad human being, but this is still good)
> Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.
What I optimise for is to have as many "known unknowns" as possible. I know a concept, process or a tool exists, but don't understand it or know how to do it. But because I know it exists, I won't start inventing it again from scratch when I need it.
Like if one needs to do some esoteric task, they might start figuring it out from scratch. But because the index in my brain contains a link ("known unknown") to a tool/process that makes that specific thing a LOT easier, I can start looking into it more.
Or I might need to do something common like plumbing or some electrical work at home. Do I know how to do that? No. But I Know A Guy I can call, again externalising the knowledge. Either they come over and help me do it or talk me through the process of adjusting the thermostat in my shower faucet (you need to use WAY more force than I was comfortable with without an expert on the phone btw... there are no hidden screws, you just rip the bits off :D)
> I'd say that by purging stuff from the brain we are losing thinking itself
The idea that there will be less to think about seems a bit short-sighted. Humans are very good at moving to higher levels of abstraction, often with more complexity to deal with, not less.
We will never fundamentally get rid of thinking; it's coupled to navigation of 3D reality we live
And we don't need words to think; cognitive problem solving and language processing are separate processes [1]
We will shift the problems we need to think about. Same as always; humanity isn't really solving building stone pyramids. Did we stop thinking? No just thought about a different todo list.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/you-dont-need-wor...
We also never run out of fuel. There will always be some energy left here and there to tap into.
Fuck thinking!
If I am free as “rational I,” then the rational in me, or reason, is free; and this freedom of reason, or freedom of the thought, was the ideal of the Christian world from of old. They wanted to make thinking – and, as aforesaid, faith is also thinking, as thinking is faith – free; the thinkers, the believers as well as the rational, were to be free; for the rest freedom was impossible. But the freedom of thinkers is the “freedom of the children of God,” and at the same time the most merciless – hierarchy or dominion of the thought; for Isuccumb to the thought. If thoughts are free, I am their slave; I have no power over them, and am dominated by them. But I want to have the thought, want to be full of thoughts, but at the same time I want to be thoughtless, and, instead of freedom of thought, I preserve for myself thoughtlessness. If the point is to have myself understood and to make communications, then assuredly I can make use only of human means, which are at my command because I am at the same time man. And really I have thoughts only as man; as I, I am at the same time thoughtless. He who cannot get rid of a thought is so far only man, is a thrall of language, this human institution, this treasury of human thoughts. Language or “the word” tyrannizes hardest over us, because it brings up against us a whole army of fixed ideas. Just observe yourself in the act of reflection, right now, and you will find how you make progress only by becoming thoughtless and speechless every moment. You are not thoughtless and speechless merely in (say) sleep, but even in the deepest reflection; yes, precisely then most so. And only by this thoughtlessness, this unrecognized “freedom of thought” or freedom from the thought, are you your own. Only from it do you arrive at putting language to use as your property. If thinking is not my thinking, it is merely a spun-out thought; it is slave work, or the work of a “servant obeying at the word.” For not a thought, but I, am the beginning for my thinking, and therefore I am its goal too, even as its whole course is only a course of my self-enjoyment; for absolute or free thinking, on the other hand, thinking itself is the beginning, and it plagues itself with propounding this beginning as the extremest “abstraction” (such as being). This very abstraction, or this thought, is then spun out further
- The ego and its own, Max Stirner