If humanity is over-reliant on frontier labs' models to perform work, the result is a dependence on the actual intelligence of these models -- not on human intelligence. This could be a small reason, on top of many others, why investors are throwing hundreds of billions of dollars a bit "carelessly" to these labs. It's fascinating seeing the models do the "hard work" (the deep, challenging thinking) for you.
The conundrum which tricks me though - is this a net negative or a positive? If humans are less intelligent, but their output is 2-3 times more intelligent (with AI), what's the result? At what point do we, as humans, stop comprehending anything and give all intelligent work to the neural nets?
And if that does happen, could we live in a society where no work, or at least a significantly less amount of work, is needed? To me, it seems like a dystopian net positive.
It might seem far-fetched to ask these, but I think these questions are getting more prevalent by the day.
If there was a way to guarantee that every human would have equal access to external intelligence then it would be hard to argue against it but everyone knows that the US oligopoly will do everything they can to ensure that no one else has the keys to the kingdom.
Just listen to what the SV ownership class says out loud. They openly discuss how China cannot "win the AI arms race" and how China's development is existential. Existential to who? It's impossible to fully subjugate people with agency.
It's not just a dependence on the intelligence of the models, but also their intentions, as programmed by their owners.
A friend of mine asked me if I was optimistic about AI. I told him, it depends on who owns it. If the people own it, I'm optimistic. If the oligarchs own it, I'm pessimistic.
I am going to try to cheer you up. Hear me out. One day, not long from now, I am going to buy a humanoid bot for 40k. This human android will 1) get my groceries, 2) make my elderly parents meals, 3) go to the backyard and plant 1 acre of corn, 4) paint my neighbors house. 5) get the kids from school 6) change my oil.
What will happen? Massive. Deflation. What will you pay for an oil change? Corn? Meals? Everything is about to be free. But tokens will be expensive!! Sure but, you wont do white collar work anymore so it wont matter what tokens cost.