> People fail to notice, most jobs are less complicated than math and programming.

It is known since the 80s as the Moravec paradox that coginition is not the hard part in robotics.

Automation is coming for manual jobs that are repetitive in a controlled environment, like warehouse logistics. But automation for jobs that require fine hand dexterity, constant adaption to new environments and human interactions (trades, healthcare, etc.) is not on the horizon.

I've been hearing this for years now, and it's not my experience so my conclusion is that it's only true for a subset of software engineering that is overly represented on internet forums like here. I imagine if you work in the tech industry on a software product the latest capabilities are game changing. But for the majority like me who work in non tech industries where code was never the hard part of projects to begin with there has been little evolution in the job in one year. Sonnet 4.5 one year ago could already write the code. Most of the job is working out with other humans on the client/business side. To progress beyond that not only would AI need to have a human level cognitive/world model to understand all the dynamics, but also have access to all the information that only people have in their head, as what is written and in specs is only a tiny part of how a business works day to day in reality.

Not saying there is no disruption. Just giving the perspective that in software outside the tech industry there is no vertical acceleration happening, much less in day to day operations outside of software. The tech industry is a big part of the economy, but not all.

Despite this I agree with your last paragraph, computationally a GPU rendering a video game or doing inference is similar so I don't think consciousness emerges from the order of mathematical operations like some magical formula. And as said above LLMs capabilities vastly surpass those of other animals than humans that appear to be conscious and don't even have language.

So in fact I think it's the opposite, LLMs are actually proving consciousness doesn't emerge from computation. I find it very interesting philosophically because it challenges what historically was considered special about humans, that high level consciousness is a prerequisite for reasoning and language abilities. But kind of obvious in retrospect when doing mindfulness and being able to be conscious without thoughts.

Edit: also regarding the moral/discipline thing, to many people me included the larger issue is absolutely not this, it’s obviously a good thing if people can improve their health. It’s that we are unhappy that the answer to food designed to be addictive and that is poisoning people is having to research a drug and having the whole population take it to protect themselves. I have a hard time celebrating such a waste of resource and a supposed market "innovation" hiding yet another government failure at regulation. When people were poisoning themselves with lead pipes, the answer was not having the whole population take a drug to manage the effects of lead poisoning. Even if there was absolutely 0 side effect I would be happy for the individuals losing weight, but unhappy with the larger picture.

Also tangentially many Europeans seem to be confusing insulation with inertia, saying their house is correctly insulated against the heat when in fact it’s just a stone building that is taking more time to heat up. At the extreme you have European churches buildings that are very badly insulated but stay cold most of summer because of all the stone mass.

One thing Europeans have yet to realize is that good insulation only works when the nights are cold enough to evacuate the heat before it reaches the inside, and that during a strong heatwave there is no adaptation possible, AC is needed.