If I'm going to hire a guide, I'm going to hire the guy who spent a week hiking it instead of the guy who spent a week reading about it or watching videos about it.

Sure, no doubt. But I don't really think "video of my local state park + imagining the parts that aren't conveyed over video" is particularly close to the real thing either.

Worth... quite a lot imo.

First, in the slightly objective sense of "What is this place like in real life, under X conditions." But, more subjectively, watching a video of a glacier and imagining the wind/rain/cold doesn't even approach 5% of the intensity and awe of climbing up a mountain yourself to see a seemingly endless expanse of ice, struggling to stand steady because of the wind, shivering because of the cold and rain. And finally, in the financial sense, a lot of people routinely spend many thousands of dollars and days-weeks of their time to experience natural wonders in real life.

I'd bet you could 10x the number and still be in low single digit percentages of the US workforce. And it seems pretty likely that AI-enabled startups will also employ less people per-startup.

If AI causes a white-collar jobs apocalypse, I don't think startups are picking up the slack, although it'll plausibly cushion the blow somewhat for top-performing tech workers.

I don't know if it is fair to say they're in denial. For my part, I don't expect life to get much better for regular people (especially short term), but that doesn't mean we shouldn't work to try to make it happen.

I would've thought pretty much the exact opposite. "Prompt engineering" was somewhat important in 2023/2024 when the models were much weaker, it doesn't seem at all necessary anymore (unless just "clearly stating your requirements" counts as prompt engineering). Most of the discussion I've seen seems consistent with this?

It seems plausible that the value of education will go down for the vast majority of fields and as a result less people will be getting degrees of all types.

Not a good outcome I think for humanity to be less educated, even if people are provided for when they can't get jobs... things like mathematical and scientific literacy, as well as history knowledge (which even STEM majors often receive via undergraduate degree breadth requirements), etc. I would expect strongly result in more informed and harder to deceive citizens.

Your examples seem to be of humans educating themselves so as to contribute to the world intellectually, but the promise of AI (and what most frontier lab employees seem to be saying) is that it will soon eclipse human intellect in almost all ways. If such a world is what we end up with, I don't see humans meaningfully contributing to "groundbreaking research" and a golden age for humanity seems to be mostly contingent on whether or not we take political actions to ensure that AI benefits everyone.

Absent political intervention, I think we agree here.

> Therefore, if we ensure everyone controls AIs, the power differences will not become so staggering as to be irreversible.

This part isn't clear to me though, but I'm open to being convinced (and frankly, would like to be convinced?). Right now most people (indirectly, via money) trade their labor for access to essentials like food/housing. If we can't do that, and everyone has access to roughly equivalent AI capabilities, how do I monetize my own access to SOTA AI? It only seems possible if you already have a lot of physical capital that the AI can manage as a business.

I guess if the endgame is instead very good non-AGI AI that doesn't entirely obviate human labor, your scenario makes a lot more sense to me. But not in the case of total replacement. In that scenario it seems like ownership over physical capital (land, data centers, energy, factories, robots, etc.) would become the only remaining source of power.

On a side note, somewhat optimistically, I think "absent political intervention" is carrying a lot of weight. Unemployment during the Great Depression peaked at <25% (iirc) and incited a lot of political change that advantaged much of the working class. AGI would be capable of inducing much higher unemployment and it would start (is starting?) with the relatively more political powerful white-collar segment of the working class.

Why is unlimited access to SOTA AI less likely to put us here? If AI obviates the need for human labor, how does having GPT-5 Sol help me get food or shelter any more than GPT-3.5 would?

You now (at least for some categories) have to receive endorsement from someone who has multiple recent papers on arxiv in the same (or adjacent) category.

I don't think the problem is as bad as a naive reading of this article suggests. I'm highly skeptical that anywhere near 65% of recent CS papers that I've read (mostly systems papers) are substantially AI-written. I threw some recent papers I've read into the system and they come back as 0-7%.

I'm skeptical that avoidance of "relying on the quick fixes" generalizes to software developers as a whole :)

I'm not colorblind and I was depending on the textual context implying Sol was better than Terra. I had to zoom in quite far to actually differentiate between the colors.

If they insist on terrible colors would it be so hard to differentiate by marker shape or line dashing too?