American society increasingly mistakes intelligence for human worth

This is not a problem. Anti-intellectualism is the problem. Our culture encourages people not to be smart. In a sentiment captured by Marco Rubio when he said it is better to be a welder than a philosopher, we teach young people that non-intellectual pursuits are more noble (so long as they make money). We teach men that it is more manly to work with your hands. We teach women that service-sector jobs, or jobs that require more social acumen are more womanly. We teach people the false-dichotomy of left-right-brain dominance, making it easy believe that one is simply unequipped for logic and quantitative mental work. We teach black youth that their role models should be athletes and pop-stars, not people successful in STEM-fields (personal experience). Our popular culture characterizes smart people as weird, eccentric, and disconnected from the rest of humanity -- those tropes are obvious in the article's examples of "Big Bang" and Sherlock Holmes.

When my wife learned coding, all her old college girlfriends were amazed that she turned out to be so "smart". She was shocked, as she never saw herself as particularly smart (though she is), successfully learning to code is just a function of putting in the practice. It became apparent that her friends were socialized to believe that this coding was the exclusive domain of this mythical class of brainy people.

Sure some people are naturally smarter, thus it is relatively easier for them to do mentally laborious work. However, If the economy increasing favors people who can carry a heavier mental workload, then the first step to preparing citizens for participating in that economy is overcoming our culture's resistant strain of anti-intellectualism.

Average living standards are falling despite the general impression given by politicians and journalists. This is also true in Europe.

The West isn't doing as well as advertised and this traces back to the early 70s. Attrition has been going on for decades.

If you find this incomprehensible then you've got to understand if you are in SV or a major city that you're in the Core of the system, it is the Peripheral that first runs into difficulties when a down cycle appears.

Take countries such as Venezuela, South Africa. These are places on the edge of our economic system and they are blowing up. It is easy to ignore this because they were always, from our perspective, borked. In fact they used to be doing much better in the past.

The key point to grok is that many of our 'stats' about the world are incorrect. Interest rates are not really at zero percent. The economic system is fracturing and traditional models/tools don't work anymore. This is what it looks like when a complex system is in danger of falling to pieces. Larry Summers is borrowing from the same technological stagnation playbook as Peter Thiel. Oil prices halve without meaningful changes in economic growth. Hmmmm. Maybe something is up.

tldr; This is Bat Bear Country!

Robert Sternberg wrote on intelligence, its evolutionary role and his theory of "successful intelligence" is well established nowadays.

Latest definition by AI researchers is summed up as: "Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments"

People keep promoting basic income as the solution to automation instead of focusing on intelligence augmentation. We have a growing population incapable of creating anything worth of value, useless, unnecessary, with no economic value other than the body they have.

We will soon reach a point where their body is the only commodity they have. Not for its labor capacity but for its utility (blood, plasma, organ transfer, clinical trial guinea pigs, surrogates etc.).

When we have a population whose mind is incapble of creating anything of economic value, even slavery wouldn't be economically viable.

Realizing that the poor often turn to crime out of necessity/stupidity and the cost of imprisoning may be higher than simply handing them over the money, I too support basic income. However, don't think for a second that the existential crisis of feeling completely useless can be solved by a basic income to afford necessities, entertainment and wait for low cost living environment to kill them with disease and climate change.

I truly believe one reason people don't work on climate change is they want to use it as an excuse to deal with the poor in the future. After all, there is no moral dilemma when it is a natural disaster as opposed to genocide.

Capitalism is not for the poor. Products are built for people who can afford them. If there was an economic opportunity in serving the poor, everyone would be competing for that market.

Frankly, I'm really conflicted on this subject. On one hand, I fully agree with you and understand human nature is selfish and I often take a nihilistic worldview. On the other hand, we are an intelligent species capable of transcending our nature. I still don't see any use for supporting billions of people who can't produce or contribute anything other than basic human compassion (which is difficult to extend to billions)

With climate change and the flood of future immigrants (immigrating to survive) with little economic value, the growing isolation of individuals from society, the destruction of community and religion, political polarization; I don't know, I feel like it's going to be brutal.

Who knows, maybe I'm wrong and technology, abundance will uplift everybody? Wishful, hopeful thinking?