this post was submitted on 10 Oct 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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Ok but then why call it AI?
We don't have to dream about a distant future to find a thing that can do math for us. It's called a computer, and if it's in our home, it might even be a personal computer. In fact, we have them smaller and faster, and they have fancy designs and can communicate to the world but it turns out they got a small chip inside that does a bunch of arithmetic binary operations and then a lot of them also have a chip inside them that can quickly operate on huge matrices of values. We call those cpus and gpus respectively.
What I'm saying is, if it's just a threshold of different values, we were capable of making such a machine already, even before AI. And if it's an interpretative opinion, it turns out AI is notoriously bad at those.
So the only thing an AI actually helps with is to do something when we don't know how. But the issue was never how. Now there's something to be said about the predictability of death but there's an insane amount of compounding factors that contribute to this. An AI could maybe be trained on a subset of factors but the truth is, we don't have good input and output data, that's why AI won't help us here.
I'm not saying this to be pedantic, I'm making a point: even IF we decide that actually ethically it's fine for a machine to decide when someone has to die - which is quite a big leap - even then an AI won't be better than a human, so there's no point. And there's no way to make this look good, no way to sell this to the broader populus. I just don't see any way where this scenario is possible, let alone probable.
And I think that's important, because it's very easy to slide down this slippery slope, interpolate a time series forecast in our head and essentially conclude "it's going downhill so the future must be what our average dystopia predicted" and I don't think that's right or even helpful. There's quite a few things we should improve and our world is on the brink of a bigger societal change again, but change is never just bad. Change is an opportunity to improve the things that are important to us. And to do this, we need all the brilliant minds that see those issues to imagine those improvements, so we should make sure we know what needs to be done when we finally get the chance.