this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
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I warn about AI. I don't care about AGI (yet) because we are far from it.
I'm worried about (in no particular order):
Nothing about this is small or cute.
I would be totally fine with something that I can supervise and that can run locally on my laptop without cooking it and doubling my energy bill. Also an economy where productivity gains benefit the workers, not the CEO. If I can do the same work in half the time, let me have the rest of the day off at full pay instead of doubling my workload and firing half your staff.
Hey! They also destroy communities by forcing them to pay for infrastructure upgrades while the companies get tax holidays in return for a bunch of jobs that only last 2 years during the construction phase and only add about 25-50 permanent jobs to the local economy long term.
Let's also not forget bringing back mothballed coal plants instead of building new ones.
Compared to AGI it is. We don't know how far away we are from creating it. We can only speculate.
The same way the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs are small and cute compared to a modern hydrogen bomb...
If we don't solve the AI problems we already have, there is no point speculating about AGI because our lives will be unbearable long before it arrives.
AGI talk seems for now to be merely hype to get investors.
LLMs seem likely to be dead end for any logical thought: https://www.forbes.com/sites/corneliawalther/2025/06/09/intelligence-illusion-what-apples-ai-study-reveals-about-reasoning/ This means at the end of the day you just get a sloppy illusion with no useful coherence as soon as it exceeds the complexity of a literal lazy copy&paste job: https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai-pilots-at-companies-failing-cfo/
There is currently no technological innovation to fix this. Instead, AI progress seems to be stalling: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/experts-concerned-ai-progress-wall
We could've never invented LLMs and I'd still be equally worried about AGI. I've been talking about it since 2016 or so - LLMs aren't the motivation for that worry, since nobody had even heard of them back then.
The timescale is also irrelevant here. I'm not less worried even if we're 500 years away from it. How close to Earth does the asteroid need to get before it's acceptable to start worrying about it?