We stand at the threshold of “perhaps the most profound identity crisis humanity has ever faced”, say Tyler Cowen and Avital Balwit in The Free Press. As AI systems increasingly match or exceed our cognitive abilities, we’re witnessing the “twilight of human intellectual supremacy”. In 2019, GPT-2 could barely string a sentence together. By 2023, GPT-4 was outperforming 90% of human test-takers on top-tier medical and legal exams. Today, the best models are better at solving economic problems than the best economists. Leading researchers believe human cognitive capabilities will be surpassed across “virtually all domains” before 2030. This forces us to confront a fundamental existential question: in an age of AI supremacy, “what is there left for our species to do”?

In the short term at least, laptop work will become much less valuable, and “blue-collar” work will become much more valuable. AI requires vast amounts of energy, so presumably roles in that sector will boom. There will also be new jobs, mostly those that harness AI to automate work previously done by armies of other people. These will accrue to a handful of the most “agentic” workers, some of whom will have a level of “per person impact” on a par with Napoleon or Franklin Roosevelt. For billions of others, work will no longer be a valid source of meaning. Where you live will be more important: Abu Dhabi and Singapore may become high-tech utopias (or dystopias); low-tech Mexico and Zambia, say, may appear more exotic. Lives will be longer. Powerful AI will, clearly, transform our world. But it’s worth remembering our world has transformed many times. “Few of us would choose to be on the other side of those transformations.”

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The Porridge

Female prison officers – including governor Keri Pegg (above) – keep getting caught screwing the inmates, says former screw Alex South in Dispatch. What the hell’s going on?

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