Thinking will become a hobby
- ID
- 34867
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 13 Oct 2026, 12:54 AM
- Fetched
- 13 Oct 2026, 10:48 PM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20261008/?li261008
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 6.0
- Created
- 13 Oct 2026, 10:49 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_ml_learnerssaas_startup_founders
What happened
In an October 2026 blog post, Diomidis Spinellis argues that AI will take over most cognitive work, citing three drivers — better performance, lower cost, and around-the-clock availability — plus trillions of dollars in projected data-centre investment through 2030. His concrete examples are ChatGPT's early failure to count the a's in his surname (it said two) and a recent OpenAI internal model that reportedly solved many hundreds of previously open math problems, a claim the post does not link or source. He predicts thinking will become a leisure pursuit, like hunting after domestication or calligraphy after typography, and expects governments to try regulation and taxation; the Hacker News thread drew 311 points and 427 comments.
Why it matters
This is an opinion essay with no pricing figures, benchmarks, or linked sources behind its two factual anchors, so it should not be used to justify a cost model or a headcount plan — the claim that successive model generations give 'superior performance at lower cost' is asserted, not measured. The useful move is to test it against your own numbers: pull what you actually pay per unit of work on the current model generation versus the one you shipped a year ago, and see whether the curve the post describes shows up in your bill. The post contains no Malaysia or Southeast Asia content, so any local relevance is indirect.
Discussion angle
Ask everyone to name one task they personally handed to an AI in the past year and one they deliberately kept — then check whether that split lines up with Spinellis's three drivers (performance, cost, availability) or with something he doesn't mention, like liability, trust, or client expectations.