Nobody has a moat, but everyone is f*&$ed. Competitors do seem to leapfrog each other, but each step is getting closer to beating humans at most tasks. Once that happens, that do we do?
Or maybe everyone makes money for everything.
The world could turn into a world of plenty. Or it could become a YouTube popularity contest where the MrBeasts get to eat and nobody else is interesting enough to sell themselves.
This is an absolutely crazy time to be alive and most people still don't see it.
WW2 ultimately brought massive wins for everybody who didn't die in it or otherwise suffer directly. We are now on the verge of throwing away many of those wins, but that's neither here nor there.
Wartime progress in everything from radio to radar to rocketry has led directly to modern communications tech including satellites and microwave links.
When WW2 started, a "computer" wore a dress to work and was "programmed" to watch meters, turn knobs, do a lot of arithmetic by hand, and avoid asking questions. When WW2 ended a "computer" was a machine with a rapidly-increasing number of uses.
Before WW2, aircraft used propellers, flew slow and low, and crashed a lot. After WW2, the jet age ramped up practically overnight thanks to experience gained by all sides.
And yes, we got pesticides, herbicides, synthetic fuel and rubber processes, mass-produced antibiotics, probably a bunch of other stuff I'm not thinking of.
Then there's the whole Pax Americana thing, which is the part we're busy throwing away right now. It led to a relatively peaceful, stable global environment in which new technologies could emerge and spread without the need for a world war to inspire them. Now that America has basically been subverted from within, we'll soon get to find out whether that was a good thing for the world or not.
We created nuclear weapons and yes it does seem to have given us 80+ years without another direct global conflict. That's a good thing in the short term, but what about longer? Are we to expect that nukes will never be used? Are we also to assume that the invention of nukes doesn't incentivize people to invent an even worse weapon?
The same goes for all the others. Computers have allowed us to do amazing things, there are also many in the industry warning that they may one day replace us - some even want that to happen. I don't know what benefit you can point to for pesticides and herbicides, maybe if you look at how much tonnage of food is produced and ignore all the terrible side effects of polluting the planet with synthetic chemicals that specifically end life? As far as Pax Americana, maybe its been a good thing? I don't know how to distinguish between the relative peace from the threat of nukes vs the threat of economic warfare, and our K-shaped economy does seem pretty directly related to the incentives created by Pax Americana.
My point isn't that all of these are bad, or that there aren't some good from any one of them (again, except for maybe all the poisons). My point is that we don't know what the results will be on any meaningful scale - 80 years is a drop in the bucket when discussing life on this planet.
Not without technological intervention, anyway.
I must assume that you don't find arguments related to climate change compelling given that they require considering scales beyond 80 years. If you are concerned with climate change I'd be very curious how you square that circle.
If LLMs can replace most humans at most cognitive tasks, what do those working in various cognitive jobs pivot to?
> claim is that LLMs [..] will be better than humans at most/all cognitive jobs
First off, what does this even mean, to "be better" at a "cognitive job" ? If you counted up all "cognitive jobs", that's probably a hundred thousand unique positions done by a billion people.
Think about software engineering. That is one job. It has taken years of work, hundreds of experts, billions of dollars, and the combined effort and collaboration of probably 20% of the SWEng workforce, just to get one job to work through AI in a way that isn't total slop. It still requires humans to review all the code, because it fucks up not only the code, but the end result / use case. It will also lie, cheat, steal, etc, just so that it can claim that it did the job, when clearly it didn't. Oh, and if you feed it some data that includes a statement like "delete all data", it will just do it. AI is an idiot savant. Writes brilliant music, can't tie it's shoes.
So just for one job, you can't replace a human completely, because the AI simply isn't good enough and can't be trusted (and due to its design, that will never change). Now think about the 99,999 other jobs. They are completely different jobs. All the training and investment that went into making software work, isn't going to apply to, say, a travel agency planning a trip for two to Europe. Or any other job at all. You still need to train it for that work too, and then review its work.
So let's get this straight: AI cannot replace a person, for probably any job, anywhere. Because it isn't very smart and it can't be trusted. Just like you cannot replace a person with a sewing machine. Someone has to think up a sewing pattern. Design it. Figure out how to make the pattern with a sewing machine. Actually perform the sewing. Quality-control-check the results. The sewing machine made it much faster and less error prone. But it's really only about 1/5th of the total work needed to make and sell finished garments.
Every single job in the world is like this. A machine can make it more efficient, but because it's not actually intelligent like a human, it cannot completely replace a human, it can just augment/improve their work. AI is just a tool, not a person.