American Dream basks in the formula: diligence + intelligence → reward. 2 a.m. problem sets, spam coffee-fueled LeetCode marathons, med-school till your eyes bleed means you’ll eventually outrun everyone else. But maybe no longer. Black-box model ingests the internet, and can now fire off solutions to frontier math problems before you finish your coffee. A lot of information work (radiologist, stock broker, project managers etc) folks might get front-run-ed by an algorithm with near infinite recall and zero bias.
Historically, tech revolutions multiplied our muscles, accelerated our calculations, and freed us to do more. But this supplants our cognition- it could delete entire categories of human input.
Retraining might not be feasible. Most degrees won’t save you from the marketplace upending. Preaching to the choir, O3 solves novel math. Current scaling is slowing down (TL;DR: exhausted data), but current trends alone warrant caution. Ignoring the meltdown potential of this black swan is the fastest route to being blindsided. The stalwart professional with 30 years of stripes might be the Luddite who bet everything on experience in a few years. As Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, predicted, in 5-10 years: “In terms of pure intelligence, it is smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields – biology, programming, math, engineering, writing, etc. This means it can prove unsolved mathematical theorems, write extremely good novels, write difficult codebases from scratch, etc.”
I am optimistic about the abundance we’ll have. But anticipate the translation period to be rough (free money does not always make you happy). We might speed-run a feudalistic eutopia. AI concentrates power through ownership (data, model, infrastructure monopolies). Skills-based social mobility breaks down. The only meaningful differentiator becomes capital ownership (no blockchains solve this).
The thing that bothers me the most is that it reduces all paths to a similar endpoint. It undermines your autonomy. If meritocracy dies, nihilism might be a logical reaction. Kinda bleak.