AI looks like it will commoditise intellectual excellence. It is hard to see how that would end up making the world more mediocre.

It'd be like the ancient Romans speculating that cars will make us less fit and therefore cities will be less impressive because we can't lift as much. That isn't at all how it played out, we just build cities with machines too and need a lot less workers in construction.

There are… many people who think that cities are worse off because of cars. Maybe not for the same reasons, but still.

I'm one of them. Taxpayers generally subsidise roads and as you might expect that means we have far too many of them.

If you want to say AI have reached intellectual Excellence because we have a few that have peaked in specific topics I would argue that those are so custom and bespoke that they are primarily a reflection on their human creators. Things like Champions and specific games or solutions to specific hard algorithms are not generally repurposable, and all of the general AI we have are a little bit dumb and when they work well they produce results that are generally mid. On occasionally we can get a few things we can sneak by and say they're better but that's hardly a commodity that's people sifting through large piles of mid for gems.

There are a lot of ways if it did reach intellectual excellence that we could argue that it would make Humanity more mediocre, I'm not sure I buy such arguments but there are lots of them and I can't say they're all categorically wrong.

> It'd be like the ancient Romans speculating that cars will make us less fit and therefore cities will be less impressive because we can't lift as much. That isn't at all how it played out

Isn’t this exactly how it played out?

No, obviously not. Modern construction is leagues outside what the Romans could ever hope to achieve. Something like the Burj Khalifa would be the subject of myth and legend to them.

We move orders of magnitude more cargo and material than them because fitness isn't the limiting factor on how much work gets done. They didn't understand that having humans doing all that labour is a mistake and the correct approach is to use machines.

I don't know, Dubai is...bigger, but I'd say it's vastly more mediocre city than Rome. To your original point, making things easier to make probably does exert downward pressure on quality in the aesthetic/artistic sense. Dubai might have taller buildings and better sewage system[0], but it will never have the soul of a place like Rome.

[0] Given the floods I saw recently, I'm not even sure this is even true.

I will take clean water, safe sewage removal, and other modern amenities over the insubstantial vagaries of "soul" any day.

cars have made us much less fit though...

I don't think you're logic follows that we need a lot of people suffering to get a few people to be excellent. If people with a true and deep passion follow a thing I think they have a significant chance of becoming excellent at it. These are people who are more likely to try again if they fail, these are people who are more likely to invest above average levels of resources into acquiring the skill, these are people who are willing to try hard and self-educate, such people don't follow a long tail distribution for failure.

If someone wants to click generate on a podcast button or image generator it seems unlikely to me that was a person who would have been sufficiently motivated to make an excellent podcast or image. On the flip side, consider if the person who wants to click the podcast or image button wants to go on to do script writing, game development, Structural Engineering, anything else but they need a podcast or image. Having such a button frees up their time.

Of course this is all just rhetorical and occasionally someone is pressed into a field where they excel and become a field leader. I would argue that is far less common than someone succeeding and I think they want to do, but I can't present evidence that's very strong for this.

> as a society, we need a lot of people who will never be anything but mediocre still going for it, so we can end up with a few who do manage to reach excellence

Do we though? That seems bleak.

"Reach excellence" is the key phrase there. Excellence takes time and work, and most everyone who gets there is mediocre for a while first.

I guess if AIs become excellent at everything, and the gains are shared, and the human race is liberated into a post-scarcity future of gay space communism, then it's fine. But that's not where it's looked like we're heading so far, though - at least in creative fields. I'd include - perhaps not quite yet, but it's close - development in that category. How many on this board started out writing mid-level CRUD apps for a mid-level living? If that path is closed to future devs, how does anyone level up?

> But that's not where it's looked like we're heading so far

I think one of the major reasons this is the case is because people think it's just not possible; that the way we've done things is the only possible way we can continue to do things. I hope that changes, because I do believe AI will continue to improve and displace jobs.

My skepticism is not (necessarily) based on the potential capabilities of future AI, it's about the distribution of the returns from improved productivity. That's a political - not a technological - problem, and the last half century has demonstrated most countries unable to distribute resources in ways which trend towards post-scarcity.

That may be your position as well - indeed, I think your point about "people think[ing] it's not possible" is directly relevant - but I wanted to make that more explicit than I did in my original comment.