> Layoffs would be a poor indicator that recursive self-improvement had occurred as you need people with knowledge around domain/layer the work is done on.
This is why I keep saying we can't all agree even on a single letter of "A", "G", and "I".
Before ChatGPT, I would have said "obviously a generally intelligent system can do all the things". While LLMs are much more general than AI before them, the quality of their performance in all the things is distributed in a very un-human-like way.
Some fast-moving optimiser can be a threat well before it stops needing any humans for part of their labour. Cancer and viruses are examples of this: they're the same category of thing as a paperclip optimiser, but for biology instead of manufacturing office supplies.
But some others will argue LLM-spikey isn't "AGI", they'll demand something which reaches the performance of the best human (or the mean human, or the mean domain expert, because we can't agree on "I"), and a standard of "≥ best human" would mean that no, you don't need "people with knowledge around domain/layer the work is done on".