foo for thought

Every other month or so, my dad will refer to a quote I presumably said when I was just a kid. That quote was something like: “The greatest innovations in history are all just to make people lazier.” I think this is just an observation I had when looking at the world’s greatest inventions. Technology, for example, is literally just a way for us to do things in the comfort of our own home with our own devices without actually having to go into the world and interact with things. Electricity and lights are just a way for us to avoid having to light a fire. Air conditioning and heating systems are just so we don’t have to make a fire or create some cooling mechanism from scratch.

Especially in the modern day, it’s pretty blatantly obvious that technology favors the lazy. TikTok favors the people who doom scroll for hours. Instagram, Facebook, X, again, also favor people who doom scroll for hours. We’ve been getting lazier and lazier with every new invention. Every single thing that’s supposed to make our lives easier actually works and does make our life easier. We don’t even have to go to the store, buy ingredients, and make food anymore. We can just click a button on our phones, have a restaurant make it, then have a different party go there and pick it up and deliver it right to our door. Amazon has also taken great advantage of this. Who would want to go to a store and buy something when you can get the exact same thing on Amazon for the exact same price? It’s a no-brainer to most of America, and this is why Amazon is so successful.

At what point does too much laziness become a problem? At what point do we cross that threshold of laziness actually improving our lives? I’m assuming that the inclination to be lazy comes from evolutionary advantage. If you are safe and you have things convenient to you, then you don’t need to put yourself in danger. You don’t need to go out and hunt. You don’t need to go out and gather. You can just have those things brought to you. I would imagine in the Stone Age, this brought a sense of comfort. This brought a sense of safety. Safety from animals, safety from other tribes, integral to life.

However, for most of us, we don’t generally have to fear for our lives when we go grocery shopping. Everything is so commoditized and instant. We are at a point now where we can stare down at a sheet of glass in our pocket, tap it a couple of times, and get things summoned to us at our will. It honestly sounds like something from a science fiction novel. If you were to tell somebody a hundred years ago that we could get essentially any object, any food, at our doorstep by tapping on a sheet of glass, they would have thought we were beyond insane.

All of this leads me to our current state of technology. Because everything is on this sheet of glass, our phones, where do we go from here? How is there really a better way to use technology? How is there really a better way to get things faster, to do things more efficiently when we can not only get everything delivered at our doorstep but we don’t even have to go into work anymore? Remote jobs are very popular. I personally work one, and I really don’t think they are going anywhere.

This is why technology dominates the stock markets. The most valuable companies in the world are all to do with commoditizing life into these sheets of glass. And if you don’t have the sheet of glass, well then you’re stuck in the stone ages and don’t you wish that you could get a hamburger delivered right to your doorstep made fresh?

Although I can’t imagine this lasts for long, I can’t imagine that people are just going to keep shoveling money at these tech companies. Like, what do we have to pay for at this point? We already have laptops that last all day. We already have phones with cameras more powerful than our cameras. We already have tablets that can bring our wildest creative endeavors to life. I mean, seriously, what is there that these sheets of glass can do that they weren’t already able to do? As someone who has tried to make apps and software my whole life, I’m kind of running into a wall here because there’s not really anything we don’t have at this point that we can’t do on our sheet of glass.

So yeah, what’s next? A smaller sheet of glass, a thinner piece of glass, maybe a bigger piece of glass that can fold it on itself so that you can carry a tablet in your pocket. The value proposition seems increasingly weaker as we move on to the new age of technology: new phones, new tablets, new computers.

Our technology right now is extremely impressive, but also transistors physically cannot get that much more impressive. Before the age of quantum computing, there’s not really anything that we can do to make our technology better significantly. At least not to the point of boosting every single large tech company to the top of every single stock market. Spending a thousand dollars on a phone every other year is super cool when that phone gets twice as thin and the cameras get twice as good. But when the phone already feels like a piece of paper in your pocket and the cameras are already better than real cameras, what more do we have to upgrade to? You kind of see that this with iPhones already where it becomes increasingly less justifiable to buy the next iPhone. I don’t think this is just with iPhones. I think this is just with technology in general.

The reason I say all this, the reason I am pondering on the existence of innovation and technology is obviously because I’m interested in AI. I’m interested in it because I’ve always been impressed by the advancements that technology has brought to humanity. Things that we’ve never been able to imagine are now able to be done by essentially any human on earth. This to me is incredible. This to me is why I became a software engineer, why I have always wanted to build things my whole life, to bring this magic to life.

But now, things feel different. Not different in the sense that people don’t like new things. I think people always like new things. It’s always exciting to get a new device, to get the next iPhone, even when it doesn’t necessarily do anything different than your previous iPhone. Technology companies know this, and they are insistent on pushing these AIs over and over again to consumers. They’re insistent on shoving it in every product, in everything that we do, and touting it as the next biggest thing, the next great invention. When in reality, to most of us normal people, it doesn’t really do anything. I mean, sure, it’s a faster Google search. It can inspire me to do things that I wouldn’t already do. I personally use it as a tutor for other languages, but I don’t think it dramatically changes the way we use technology.

At least, not in a good way.

I’ve seen plenty of studies on AI making people dumber. And I find them absolutely fascinating. How can more information make us dumber? How can access to the world’s most powerful oracle make us less successful as people? I think this is a brand new psychological phenomenon. I don’t think we’ve ever seen this in history, at least not in this form. We have never as a human race made anything that even has the potential to surpass us as human beings. Of course we’ve always been scared of it, we’ve always made movies about it, but nothing has truly actually come to that scale. Not before AI.

But even before passing us as human beings, it just has the capability to somehow make us dumber. Why is that? Again, it doesn’t make any sense. Shouldn’t it just empower us to do bigger and better things? I think, although we haven’t seen this phenomenon play out exactly, you do kind of see it play out with people who grow up with a lot and have a lot given to them. A lot of times, they do less than people who don’t have much growing up. Having more actually makes people less resourceful. I mean, if you think about it, if you’re being raised given everything, you don’t value the dollar as much as somebody who doesn’t have any of them values it as. I’m not a psychologist, so I’m not exactly sure what this is called. But I do know it’s a very real phenomenon. It has something to do with relativity at least. People see things in a different way depending on how they were raised, on how they were raised, on how they were raised to experience this thing and variations of it.

So it makes sense that people in the world of AI don’t think as much. It’s because they don’t have to think as much. Why do all of the thinking when AI can do some of it, leaving you to do less of the thinking? So that means we’re now thinking less, which means we’re using our brain less, which means potentially we can’t use our brains as much.

As a software engineer, this feels a little bit hard to believe due to the complexity of our jobs. However, it’s pretty clear that in the latest iterations of these LLMs, the AI is getting really, really good at making software. So much so that I can literally delegate entire tasks to Claude Opus, and after a bit of proofchecking, confirm that it’s ready to ship. It almost makes me question my entire career. Like, why am I here? What am I even getting paid for if Claude Opus can just do everything?

I think there’s a good amount of stuff that you need to do outside of just having an LLM to actually derive value from it. I don’t think you can fly a plane without knowing how to be a pilot. I don’t think anyone would get in a plane unless the person behind the cockpit was a pilot. It doesn’t matter how much autopilot we have or how much new technology we have, I don’t think anybody would trust a normal person in the cockpit. Just like how I don’t think employers are going to fully trust our AI counterparts to carry out tasks to high precision. Because at the end of the day, they don’t have a family to feed. They’re not human, so they don’t really have any external motivation to get the job right.

With all of that said, I think there is an argument to say AI makes us lazier. At least, I have felt much lazier on my job. Little things that I’ve needed to poke through, stimulate my brain to figure out, are now just done by sitting in my chair and watching the LLM crank its gears. It’s pretty demoralizing, actually. It doesn’t really feel like I’m creating anything as much as I am delegating my tasks to some AI who can do it better, because it has more information. It can traverse through data much faster than the person could.

The future of LLMs and AI is us being lazier. The more we have to rely on these AIs to get stuff done for us, the less work we’re going to have to do. I would argue that we’re past a point where incremental improvements in transistor speed resulting in a substantial improvement in quality of life, because now we’re at a point where everything is convenient. We’re just trying to push it to a level that I don’t think benefits us as much as it is making us dumber.

It’s fascinating to see out the progression of AI. Something we’ve really never seen before as a human species. Regardless of what happens, I will be there to analyze the rubble, don’t worry.

Until next time,
Jared