Just reread your comment. Don't kill yourself!!! Help raise your niece or nephew or friends kids. You can pass on social inheritence! And you can work in a cube at Google and send half the money to kids charities.

Or dont have kids at all which is fine and max on the freedom to do whatever life. I think I agree decide if you want kids then if so have them early as possible but under proviso of a good relationship and no major issues like drugs/alcohol/violence etc.

Like I guess 5% of the population could actually do well at it given the time, practice and motivation. Might be 75% for programmers, granted. But companies dont want people who are unskilled.

Anyway yes the oil analogy is close but it is more like too many people are selling fools oil, and your oil is real and so you vouch for it. So oil is not fungible and the vouch means alot. But vouched and proven oil as a class is fungible. Almost everyone is fungible, you can find another Steve Jobs (they did, Apple is doing well after all) or PoTUS. Maybe entertainment is the exception e.g. Taylor but even then if the job is to sell music she is fairly fungible. Other singers do that too.

Cavaet for high scale sites and game servers. Maybe for image heavy sites too (but self hosting then adding a CDN seems like a low lock in and low cost option)

It cares if your smart. Hence leetcode etc. You need to be practiced for that.

It also helps to be connected to get your CV top of the pile.

Yes most of us are commodities. But in some ways we are not. Two engineers, same creds, one knows someone who works at the company for a warm positive intro. This is not fungible.

I.e. if takeoff is dangerous you dont do it. Making takeoff generslly easier. The option to not land doesnt exist (insert old joke about a good landing)! So landing may have harder problems like wind sheer, thunder storms, tailwind, visibility, and more incentive to take load off pilots with automation.

You are talking about the future. But if we are talking about the future the bitter lesson applies even more so. The super intelligence doesnt need a special programming language to be more productive. It can use Python for everything and write bug free correct code fast.