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Notes -
Yes, I'll freely admit that I was startled by how quickly machine learning produced superhuman competence in very specific areas, so am NOT predicting that AI will stall out or only see marginal progress on any given 'real world' task. Especially once they start networking different specialized AIs together in ways that leverage their respective advantages.
Just observing that the complexities of the real world are something that humans are good at navigating whilst AIs have had trouble dealing with the various edge cases and exceptions that will inevitably arise.
Tasks that already involve manipulating digital data are inherently legible to the machine brain, whilst tasks that involve navigating an inherently complex external world are not (yet).
It is entirely possible that we might eventually have an AI that is absurdly good at manipulating digital data and producing profits which it can then spend on other pursuits, but finds unbounded physical tasks so difficult to model that it just pays humans to do that stuff rather than waste efforts developing robots that can match human capability.
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