“[on the topic of a patient with moderate brain damage] back in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, in a nice tribe with Dunbar’s number of people, there would be no problem … he could just hang out and live in a cave and gather roots and berries and maybe hunt buffalo….
“But society came and paved over the place where all the roots and berry plants grew and killed the buffalo and dynamited the caves… This increased productivity by about a zillion times, so most people ended up better off. The only ones who didn’t were the ones who for some reason couldn’t participate in it… Society got where it is by systematically destroying everything that could have supported him and replacing it with things that required skills he didn’t have.
“…Imagine an employment waterline, gradually rising through higher and higher levels of competence. In the distant past, maybe you could be pretty dumb, have no emotional continence at all, and still live a pretty happy life. As the waterline rises, the skills necessary to support yourself comfortably become higher and higher. Right now most people in the US who can’t get college degrees – which are really hard to get! – are just barely hanging on, and that is absolutely a new development. Soon enough even some of the college-educated won’t be very useful to the system. And so on, until everyone is a burden.”
I see this happening myself as well. Part of my job as a hotel receptionist is taking bookings over the phone: in many cases I am literally just asking them questions and typing their answers into a form, exactly the same form that is available on our website. They even get the same price as if they went to our site directly. But they call up instead, because phones are within their capability to understand, while websites are definitely not. E-commerce has brought increased economic activity, but for some people it has also paved over most of the ways they are capable of performing economic activity.
GPT4 has raised the productivity waterline to a level where “people who blog” are now underwater, so we’re hearing about it a lot more. But it’s just an instance of the general phenomenon. Civilization has been systematically drowning the less cognitively fortunate for a few hundred years, and we should have had something in place to address this long ago.