Loquebantur

Who will know to ask the right questions?

You imply "worth" being equal to some known economic value.

You even imply, economic value was determined correctly in advance for arbitrarily long future intervals. And the applicability was known in advance to begin with.

Obviously, you're completely wrong.

Applying simplistic models to real life incurs a penalty. The affected scale multiplies with that penalty. When dealing with things affecting humanity as a whole, that makes careless over-generalizations a serious hazard.

Would any PhD guarantee your understanding? You appear to fall for an argument from authority there.

A PhD is merely intended to show your ability to do research-level science. It doesn't show you know independently what to research, let alone why.

You confuse your ability to solve riddles competition-style with the answer to why you should do that in the first place.

You clearly live in a world you don't understand.

Those competitions get set up because some people understand the importance of mathematical knowledge and want their names attached to advances in it, even if they can't do the work themselves.

Clearly, it would be far better to make the public understand how the world, and society in particular, actually works. Only, those with the money profit from that not happening.

You're entirely wrong.

Competitions are a way to motivate people. What do you believe, why they get set up in the first place? Because rich people have fun seeing you run in circles?

Competition for tenure and publishing metrics has been detrimental to science in general.

Your idea of life being about grabbing whatever comes your way and consuming it first says a lot about you, but not about life.

What do you suppose happens in a society where the constituents of that society "have nothing to contribute"? Your habit of over-simplification will come to bite you.

No, it's not.

The point isn't some people not understanding whatever stuff with limited effects, it's no people understanding anything important.

Mathematics is about describing fundamental reality, so you can change it. When corporations own it exclusively, they can do whatever they want with it.

Just like with mathematicians, is it all really just about people losing a random, replaceable job and what they enjoyed about it?

Being able to program means in particular, you can read those programs and understand what they do.

What happens when you don't understand them anymore?

Living in a reality where everything is a black box, doing its thing as if by magic, leaves you in a position devoid of control. The objects upholding your life are incomprehensible to you, you cannot change them or even only reliably exchange them with alternatives.

Some costs are too large to be absorbed even by society as a whole. Can you privatize rational thought?

Mathematics goes into Physics, into Chemistry, molecular Biology and so on. It "goes" there by mathematicians talking with people there and exchanging ideas about what and how to model it.

Imagine all that getting privatized, walled into a corporate garden, accessible via payment only, similar to academic journals. Thought on demand.

How long does a society like that last?

Mathematics isn't about "winning competitions".

Mathematics is humanity's current best approximation to a universal language, capable of expressing conscious thought precisely.

It's a "programming language for the human brain" that lets you describe reality exactly and thereby make predictions about it.

Without people (humans) knowing and understanding it, society is incapable of grasping reality in any meaningful way, unable to shape it in order to achieve a better tomorrow.

Most never realize that, because society is compartmentalized to the point of people never witnessing how it actually works under the hood. "Experts" do things for you that you never heard of, but that your very life depends upon.

While the majority of people thus lives a kind of "simulated" reality, the mechanisms underpinning that cushioned fantasy land aren't infallible. You cannot uphold an economy nor even a social structure without understanding and modeling it to a sufficient degree.

What the vast majority employs as "rational thought" isn't sufficient.

What would such a world look like?

Mathematics represents the rational skeleton that upholds and stabilizes our vague, formless but far more common belief-based thinking.

Without it, losing it from neglect, we would collapse back into a pre-rational state of fantastical, wishful thinking.

Pretty much exemplified by large parts of US society already, but there is no bottom otherwise keeping society from collapse.

It's easy to insulate a robot.

The difficulty with human abilities in vision, locomotion and particularly coordination and manipulation is due to their arithmetic complexity being high. Modern deep learning solves that, LLMs provide the "interface" for planned action.

From the outside, this process of "solving" perhaps looks like "robots stumble around haplessly". But it's just the same as with mathematicians in the intellectual realm: when the level of ability surpasses that of humans, it appears as a "sudden event" to outsiders, having occurred far faster than anticipated.

There are no "safe havens".

"Robotic" isn't new, human-level ability in manipulation is.

The same goes for self-driving cars. It's a exponential, hockey-stick curve that at some point crosses the level of human ability. There is nothing "linear" about it and your suggestion of parallels to former experience is wildly misguided.

People fail to notice, most jobs are less complicated than math and programming. The "obstacles" there are of the kind of "we always did it this way", but that's no real "moat"?

The bubble regarding the big AI firms may well collapse, but the assumption, that was somehow improving the situation is far-fetched.

People automated out of a job will either compete with those in other jobs or be dependent on support. Either way, salaries will fall across the board and prices rise. At an ever accelerating pace.

You doubt it based on what?

Civilizational collapse occurs when society runs afoul of its basic contract and cannot provide its foundational services anymore. That can mean starvation, it also is given e.g. in the situation of elites running low on trust. Leading to social unrest spinning out of control, or former allies refusing to play along with political shenanigans.

In order to evade catastrophic civilizational collapse, you need viable and timely avenues for course-correction or adaptation. Those are presently being blocked by the very elites profiting from the system they bleed dry.

Earth is finite. Scale matters.

Present levels of environmental degradation due to human actions far exceed Earth's capacity to self-heal.

People struggle with judging that, after all, at best you get a bunch of numbers and the claim, they would show this (or not). Without actual scientific background, what are you supposed to do?

Human society is based on trust. You depend on "experts" on a given subject to give truthful accounts of things. When you don't have that, society breaks down sooner or later: nobody adapts anymore to reality.

That's where we're at.

Escapism can be a useful tool for managing individual stress levels.

On the level of society, it's a catastrophic maladaptation.

The problem for normal people is to discern between "fearmongering" and honest warnings by competent people who actually know and understand the situation.