Earlier quoted context omitted.
We were perhaps a bit too enamored with the idea that it was intellect that made us unique, and thus knowledge workers would be the last to be replaced. Pouring our brains out by the Petabytes for neural networks to pick them up made the economics just work for an AI industrial revolution to start from there.
No, we were enamored with the idea that intelligence was well distributed between people, as if following Descartes' massive incipit "Good sense must be the best distributed thing in the world, given that nobody seems to be asking for more". Inability to recognize intelligence is and will be devastating.
It's a pop-culture quote from a movie that was no masterpiece, I know, but "I, Robot" presented in two sentences an argument for having more sober expectations on what machine intelligence could be capable of, and of our own
> Detective Del Spooner: "Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a… canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?"
> Sonny: "Can you?"
We're discrediting the capabilities of current machine learning models for being unable of producing the thoughts that many, many people are unable to either.
Alright, so the models are not at the level that us HN philosopher kings hold ourselves to be, and they won't be Senior Architects of distributed systems or what have you very soon, but what does it say about Average Joe, slightly-above-Average Joe, and their economic prospects? Specially since in the West and much of the developing world, we were taking solace in the idea that a service economy comprised of knowledge workers would provide plenty of opportunities on a political and economic landscape where manufacture was gone, or had never arrived.