throwaway0123_5

It might end up as a U-shape, I think the parent's assessment of the world's bottom 10% may be accurate.

Billionaires will be (are, I suppose?) enthusiastic about a world in which labor has little leverage.

Labor that will have its leverage and standard of living threatened by AI (white-collar labor for now, plausibly blue-collar soon as robotics improve) will be much less happy. Current university students seem very concerned about the effects of AI on their job prospects, and I'd wager most current tech workers and other tuned-in white collar workers are similarly much less confident in their ability to maintain their standard of living indefinitely into the future than they were five years ago.

But white- and blue-collar labor and university students (at least in developed countries) are not anywhere near the world's bottom 10%. If you're in abject poverty with little hope of escaping it, "hand everything over to the AI" may sound like an appealing option, even if the chance of that being the outcome is small. Maybe the AI will be more magnanimous and decide to raise the floor for everyone.

Beyond scientific knowledge, being there would (much more quickly) yield quite a lot of (higher quality) knowledge about "how to navigate and do things in the Grand Canyon."

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.

> There's so much natural wonder in the world in and around your home.

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.

> only worth so much.

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've been to a few natural wonders (including the Grand Canyon) that I saw in advance on video. At least for me it isn't close at all. Even if audiovisual elements could be near-perfectly reproduced by video (imo not even close with modern tech, no screen is capturing the brilliance of sunlight), you aren't capturing the temperature, the feel of wind or rain, the smell of the plants around you, etc.

Some parts are pretty annoying to read... the paragraph beginning in "Our mission is straightforward:" has many lines with just 2-3 words, massive font, and tons of unused whitespace to the right. Changing the page/browser zoom doesn't seem to help much either.

What percentage of people work at a startup though? Not just new/small business, which could include restaurants, local services, etc., but tech/science startups that would meaningfully benefit from AI.

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.

Agreed, a LOT of UBI advocates gloss over the "B" in UBI. If AI increases human productivity overall, the only morally acceptable outcomes (imo) are that everyone's standard of living increases (or at least is the same without having to work) and wealth inequality decreases (if AI is doing ~all the work, there really isn't any sensible justification for some people having significantly more wealth than others). Frankly anything else seems like a recipe for massive social instability.

> others are in denial about whose living standards are actually going to be uplifted.

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.

> suddenly then there came to be a lot of talk of 'prompt engineering' as a skill.

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?

I agree somewhat, but for the most part the signal is that you can succeed in some kind of knowledge work. If AI replaces ~all knowledge work, that signal isn't actually going to be valuable I think. While I don't find it certain that AI will do that, it seems increasingly plausible with every model release. In that world, I don't think very many people are pursuing degrees.

> The net effect of this appears to be that we'll see far fewer, but far more elite math Phd's, potentially discouraging many young people from the field.

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.

I agree with the general premise with respect to current SOTA, but for making nice plots that I would've never otherwise made or learned how to make (to the same standard), easily 100x.