Is there good historical data on some measure of strength across representative populations over time in the modern era? I'm doubtful.

We do know that the introduction of agriculture diminished strength:

"Bone mass was around 20% higher in the foragers - the equivalent to what an average person would lose after three months of weightlessness in space.

After ruling out diet differences and changes in body size as possible causes, researchers have concluded that reductions in physical activity are the root cause of degradation in human bone strength across millennia."

cam.ac.uk/research/news/hunter-gatherer-past-shows-our-fragile-bones-result-from-physical-inactivity-since-invention-of

I don't doubt that's an unregretted side-effect for political leaders in China.

But the major motivation is to accelerate diffusion within their own massive economy in the pursuit of an across the board productivity boost in the face of an aging population.

But trying to maintain this distinction leads to insuperable difficulties. Our conceptual framework for understanding the world are always value-laden. There is no "view from nowhere", no historically unconditioned set of values or concepts. Your framing, in which "values" are external to "intelligence" and must be imposed on it (on pain of intelligence being "value-neutral"), leads inevitably to the dead end of "AI Alignment", "superintelligence", etc. Which is a kind of pseudo-theology.

"We humans better [be] refocusing our energy on our core values/principles, given most of our skills are becoming irrelevant."

In light of the untenability of a strong fact/value or intelligence/ethics distinction, I would suggest this alternative advice: humans should focus on critical appropriation and extension of the received wisdom, whether that comes to us directly from human beings or indirectly through an LLM. Perhaps this is compatible with the spirit of your original suggestion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48832370#48837175

You can see the wage brackets in our collective bargaining agreement here: https://tinyurl.com/dmucontract

Happy to answer questions about how it all works - there are only about ~6000 dev/product/design/qa employees in the U.S., so there is very little first hand experience to go around.

Among other things that my coworkers and I secured by bargaining collectively are:

- Guaranteed remote work.

- Guaranteed forty hour work week, with compensatory time within two weeks if management asks us to work overtime.

- Not on call 24/7/365. Everyone is in a defined rotation, and you are guaranteed three hours off just for being on call for a week, and a whole day if you receive a call. I believe that partly because of this policy, after hours incidents are extremely infrequent now.

- Guaranteed floor on wage increases every year.

- Just cause for discipline. People still get terminated if they don't do the work, but if you want it (and almost everyone does) there is an elected coworker in your corner to guide you through a PIP and make sure standards are enforced evenly. You can't suddenly be terminated for no reason. - Extra time off each year through self-directed times between sprints and quarterly increments.

- Right to review all code done by outside contractors if you're going to have to maintain it in the future.

https://joeyh.name/offgrid/

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5530733/bls-jobs-report...

https://www.comptia.org/en-us/resources/research/tech-jobs-r...

I'm no expert in European religious history, but it is an interest of mine and I've read a fair bit more than the typical American about it.

I am certain that every church father and major theologian from antiquity to the early modern period would have condemned without reservation the very idea of building a machine to answer theological questions. Possible exceptions, like Ramon Llull, prove the rule.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Llull

Given the prevalence of stories about Djinn and Golems in Islamic and Jewish literature, it feels safe to say they would have looked askance at this idea as well.

I think the trouble, economically speaking, is that while it will be possible from a purely technical standpoint to unbundle a job performed by a human into separate tasks, many of which can be "done" by agents, the new process will not present a cost savings overall once the entire lifecycle of the task is taken into account. The economist David Autor has written about these challenges extensively, and his theory accords with my experiences.

For any practical application, you are only interested in finite set of concrete identities, so anything beyond that is surplus to requirements, surely?