alt Hacker NewsThis might hold up for theoretical intellectual work without any economical value, but if you are researching anything that can be applied to the industry, you will instead have 1 year of market ownership and first-mover advantage.
I think it says more about what the value of math as intellectual work is, than about intellectual work in general.
Like if an Egyptian historian would come and say "let's wait one year until the methods are good enough to decrypt this language", no one would be bothered or surprised.
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“if you are researching anything that can be applied to the industry, you will instead have 1 year of market ownership and first-mover advantage.”
I would like to disagree with you on that point. Given the very popular rise of https://rea.tools/, it appears the time to reverse engineer anything software based (up to maybe 80% or more?) could be down to minutes. With a recent example, some indie video game developers are not going to show off their video game until release as a few have been flipped and made it to market before the original developers have. Point being, a few moths of market ownership could be possible if llms can’t reverse it in any way.
First movers often lose though in the market. Relevant to today's news about DoorDash acquiring Instacart for a few billion dollars: WebVan came out a decade earlier (i.e. at the wrong time) and went bankrupt after 3 years.
A perhaps more relevant personal anecdote: About a year ago I told a non-technical friend that I'd help him migrate his small business website that was originally set up in WordPress (by a developer who is since long gone) to a format that would be much easier for him to manage with no dev support. I planned to move him over to one of the usual suspects like Wix or Squarespace, but this is one instance where my procrastination was a virtue. In the ~9 months since he originally had an issue with his site, AI capabilities had exploded. Turned out it was a lot easier (and cheaper) to use Claude to fully migrate his site and get it up on Cloudflare workers, and I set up everything so he could manage all the content himself. Plus, it took me less than a day to do the migration off WordPress, and most of that time was just me wanting to learn the ins and outs of Claude Code because I was new to it at the time.
You imply "worth" being equal to some known economic value.
You even imply, economic value was determined correctly in advance for arbitrarily long future intervals. And the applicability was known in advance to begin with.
Obviously, you're completely wrong.
Applying simplistic models to real life incurs a penalty. The affected scale multiplies with that penalty. When dealing with things affecting humanity as a whole, that makes careless over-generalizations a serious hazard.