Diomidis Spinellis predicts that AI will take over much of paid intellectual work, leaving thinking increasingly as a hobby. His analogy is horse riding after motorization: an activity can retain its meaning while losing its economic necessity. This is an argument about where AI is taking work, not a demonstration that the destination is inevitable.

His case rests on three claimed advantages:

  • Performance: improving models will handle an expanding range of intellectual tasks.
  • Cost: cheaper, more capable systems will make replacing or augmenting workers attractive.
  • Availability: AI can operate around the clock and fill gaps in labor supply.

The essay’s useful distinction is between making a living by thinking and finding value in thought itself. Its proposed response—adapt to AI and build a purposeful life beyond work—leaves a substantial gap: how people would support that life if their labor stopped paying.

The 223-comment thread on Hacker News adds concrete experiences with AI dependence and counterexamples to the idea that assistance means less thinking.

What the thread adds

  • elvis10ten — a coding dependency exposed by an exhausted AI budget: “I felt stuck. I didn’t know what the AI had done so far or how to continue.”
  • teekert — a contrasting experience, with a fallback when the service stops: “I understand what I made” and “I just start studying the codebase, planning work for later, ordering thoughts by writing DESIGN.md, adding jobs to the kanban.”
  • pilooch — a counterexample to intellectual disengagement: “I feel using these tools make me think a lot actually.” On research and coding questions, “the answers are so dense that I sometimes need hours to get around why this or that”.
  • lsy — dissent about the historical analogy: “No doubt that like any of the examples above, some displacement of resources and effort will happen. But that doesn’t indicate that something as central as “thinking” (lol) will fade into the past.”

The unanswered question: who can afford the hobby?

Two commenters raise the same livelihood problem. goda90 asks, “Who is going to be having hobbies if the economy is 100% automated?” mbgerring, replying to an optimistic comment, objects that “most people need to work to eat.” The article advises preparing for meaningful leisure but does not explain how displaced workers would pay for it.

HN handles are pseudonymous, and HN publishes no per-comment scores. The retrieved ordering is HN’s own ranking; these usefulness-selected excerpts are a slice of the thread, not a consensus.