Every time I say to myself "AI is no big deal because it can't do X", some time later someone comes along and makes an AI that does X.
Over time, as the gaps in human knowledge get filled, the god "shrinks" - it becomes less expansive, less powerful, less directly involved in human affairs. The definition changes.
It's fascinating to watch the same thing happen with human exceptionalism – so many cries of "but AI can't do <thing that's rapidly approaching>". It's "human of the gaps", and those gaps are rapidly closing.
Every time computers outperform humans in some domain this is conflated with deep general progress, panicked projections of replacement and job losses, the end times and so on. People are way faster to engage in reductionism of human capacity and Terminator-esque fantasies than the opposite. Despite the fact that it never happens.
It's even reflected in our popular culture. I can barely recall a single work of science fiction in the last 30 years that would qualify as portraying human exceptionalism. AI doomerism, overestimation and fear of machines is the norm.
“but AI can’t write poetry”
“but AI can’t do real work”
Panic is probably not warranted. Too much incentive stacked against the truly apocalyptic scenarios. But yeah, a lot of jobs are probably going to shrink.
Say instead (for example) "It is important that I understand the differences between both the capabilities and internal mechanisms of AI and people, even if, over some period of time, the capabilities may appear to converge".
wget https://bellard.org/pi/pi2700e9/tpi-0.9-linux.tar.gz
tar xvf tpi-0.9-linux.tar.gz
time ./tpi -T 8 -o pi.txt 1M
real 0m0.176s
user 0m0.500s
sys 0m0.049s