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Comment by pfdietz | Hacker News Reader

This already describes the world for the vast majority of people. These changes are just the same thing coming to a thin intellectual elite who thought they were immune.

["First time?" meme]

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Bringing elitism into it for what benefit? Its more like were giving away the ability to drive our own destiny.

Imagine the response of the general population to the kinds of arguments you all are making. "Where were you when our jobs were changed out of existence?" They will be properly outraged by the perceived intellectual elitism, the implicit argument "this is different, because we are the ones that matter".

The “ism” requires something beyond simply recognizing the distinction, which OP didn’t do. Its not “elitism” to recognize that, for most people, the world around them might as well be magic. “Ism” would be if they went further and said we should treat people better if they’re higher IQ. In fact, the point was the opposite. AI could erase the class distinctions that exist for the cognitive elite.

I'd go even further: even the ‘cognitive elite’ (the university educated? researchers?) understand only a thin spike of frontier human knowledge, even if they might understand it very deeply. Outside their specialty and maybe a slightly raised background level of general education, the world is still magic. No one human understands even a significant chunk of human frontier knowledge. That's why we build artificial societies comprising many humans to make complex decisions.

Illustrations: https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

I can see humanity walking to its collective doom with a sense of satisfaction, like "at least/last it is happening to those other guys too".

The mathematicians could make an argument that applies to everyone. But that probably leads to outright communism, and that well is still quite poisoned. Maybe AI ultimately gets powerful enough to give us Banksian full luxury communism. Alternately, it gives a world where corporations don't need workers and tyrants don't need citizens.

So what? You can't see the difference between "the average person doesn't understand it" and "no one understands it"?

I can see the difference. But is that a difference that matters? Why is the thin elite layer you are referring to a group anyone else should care about, any more than any other occupational minority that's been rudely displaced over the past centuries?

Someone needed to understand engineering for the industrial revolution to happen, even if most people didn't.

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