Thinking Will Become a Hobby
This article argues that AI is rapidly outperforming humans in cognitive tasks, suggesting that deep human thinking may soon become a niche hobby rather than a professional requirement. The author cites falling costs, increased availability, and superior performance as the primary drivers of this shift.
Why it matters
The piece reflects a growing societal anxiety regarding the displacement of human labor and intellectual agency by autonomous AI systems.
These lines are very difficult for me to write because I feel like digging my own grave. AI systems are improving by leaps and bounds. From the early 2022 fumbling release of ChatGPT, which couldn’t correctly count the number of a’s in my name (it claimed two), we reached OpenAI’s release of math papers where an internal AI model solved many hundreds of previously open math problems. Aside from philosophical arguments, practical claims regarding the superiority of human thought, on grounds such as hallucinations or bias, increasingly appear to me like rearguard defence. For the bulk of today’s cognitive work, the writing’s on the wall: AI will take over.
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