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In a way, AI is harder on nerds than it is on anyone else.
It is interesting to see, now that it is ingrained into the personal and professional lives of vast numbers of ‘normal’ people, how mundanely it slots into the daily existence of the average person. I don’t mean that critically, I mean that the average person (especially globally but probably also in the rich world) probably already believed there were ‘computers’ who were ‘smarter than them’. ChatGPT isn’t so different from, say, Jarvis in Iron Man (or countless other AIs in fiction), and the median 90-100IQ person may even have believed in 2007 that technology like that actually existed “for rich people” or at least didn’t seem much more advanced than what they had.
Most people do not seek or find intellectual satisfaction in their work. Intellectual achievement is not central to their identity. This is true even for many people with decent-IQ white collar jobs. They may be concerned (like many of us) with things like technological unemployment, but the fact that an AI might do everything intellectually that they can faster and better doesn’t cause them much consternation. A tool that builds their website from a prompt is a tool, like a microwave or a computer. To a lot of users of LLMs, the lines between human and AI aren’t really blurring together so much as irrelevant; the things most people seek from others, like physical intimacy, family and children, good food and mirth, are not intellectual.
This is much more emotionally healthy than the nerd’s response. A version of the Princeton story is now increasingly common on ‘intellectual’ forums and in spaces online as more and more intelligent people realize the social and cultural implications of mass automation that go beyond the coming economic challenge. Someone whose identity is built around being a member of their local community, a religious organization, a small sports team, their spouse and children, a small group of friends with whom they go drinking a couple of times a month, a calendar of festivals and birthdays, will fare much better than someone who has spent a lifetime cultivating an identity built around an intellect that is no longer useful to anyone, least of all themselves.
I was thinking recently that I’m proud of what I’ve done in my short career, but that smart-ish people in their mid/late twenties to perhaps mid/late forties are in the worst position with regards to the impact of AI on our personal identities. Those much older than us have lived and experienced full careers at a time when their work was useful and important, when they had value. Those much younger will either never work or, if they’re say 20 or 22 now, work for only a handful of years before AI can do all intellectual labor - and have in any case already had three years of LLMs for their own career funeral planning. But in this age range, baited to complete the long, painful, tiresome and often menial slog that characterizes the first decade of a white collar career, we have the double humiliation of never getting further than that and of having wasted so much of our lives preparing for this future that isn’t going to happen.
There may be a bit too much romanticization of "salt-of-the-earth normies" going on here. Last I checked, the social atomization trend (friendship- and sex-recession) is just happening across the board, while many (most?) career-intelligentsia derive satisfaction both from their work and from those other things. It's not that one is a substitute for the other.
It seems that you acknowledge this ("This is true even for many people with decent-IQ white collar jobs"), but then you posit "someone who has spent a lifetime cultivating an identity built around an intellect that is no longer useful to anyone, least of all themselves". Who are these people, exactly?
Redditors. The irony is that their intellect was never that impressive anyway.
But seriously, there really is an entire cohort of people who were in the top five percent of their high school and college because they could sit still and gulp down boring bullshit who think they are somehow intellectually superior to the plebs they disdain. Usually it’s not actually the really smart people making big strides in science and tech.
You do realize how unconvincing it is to cite the top 5% of students as not really being all that useful? Do those people have any purpose in their existence in your eyes? Regardless of any unwarranted sense of self-worth, if they're doomed, then what hope is there for anyone?
When I worked at Google, about 5% of applicants got through the phone screen. A lot of them weren't all that useful.
Welcome to the black pill.
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