alt Hacker NewsEven the Millennium Prize Problems have, in a way, become benchmarks for model companies to prove themselves. The smartest individuals among humans are becoming replaceable. Intelligence has become a product you can quantify and buy with electricity. That feels awful.
Replies
Only if you assume the value in humans is only in solving puzzles. That’s a very limited understanding of human beings
>That feels awful.
John Henry.
There's a reason we made folklore about when the machines came for the strength of men, and now 150 years later it comes for our minds.
> Even the Millennium Prize Problems have, in a way, become benchmarks for model companies to prove themselves
Well, let them have these. They'll play around with open problems which generate media hype and then they might run out and move on to something else, because "AI came up with a problem and solved it in 3 days" won't have the same effects as "AI solved a problem in 3 days that humans couldn't solve in 100 years".
> That feels awful
Only if you subscribe to the "humans are special" rhetoric, in which case I'm - maybe - sorry to say the feeling will only intensify.
> Intelligence has become a product you can quantify and buy with electricity.
There used to be days when women would make blankets, when men would make chairs, when children would make brooms...
But PROGRESS I tell you!
Now that hammers are knocking in nails, I just don’t know what to do with my fists.
AI probably don’t dream of electric sheep but then again we don’t know. Perhaps we can find it out.
Perhaps AIs can figure out how to distribute wealth more fairly so that we can all dream of real sheep.
Intentionally philosophical PoV, what else is left for us monkies.
/s
Solving obscure puzzle samples that approximately ~0 humans on Earth ever attempted to solve, mostly by pattern matching known solutions to similar puzzles, is not intelligence. DeepBlue has been outperforming the best humans at a specific puzzle-like task since the last century.
Do any of the people proclaiming this shit actually use these models? No matter how many headlines are coming out, every day I deal with reams of the most horrific code I've ever seen technically compile, with routine mistakes that any human would get fired for if they made.
All technology on the tech tree which requires intelligence to unlock will soon be available to humanity – mind control, population exterminating bioweapons, new ultra destructive kinetic weaponry, perhaps even a cure for cancer.
Or maybe the smartest humans are the ones making AI and not the ones trying to solve Millenium problems by themselves.
Even those of us that are pro AI need to acknowledge this is the current reality.
The smartest humans now need to move to being less concerned about status games among humans and more with how to provide value to a mix of intelligent machines and humans. i.e. if you're starting an SaaS in 2026 you better be assuming half your revenue is going to come from machines acting by themselves.
You can't really replace the smartest individuals because if you take a person who's not "smart" they can't do much with the AI.
I think the more accurate description of what's happening is that access to expertise is becoming commodified.