Sam, this perspective is unadulterated hubris or just outright denial.
Agentic workflows don't require much instruction, I suggest you actually go and try a few out. They can be set up trivially, they may communicate between roles, and perform tasks that would constitute most white-collar work. White-collar work accounts for 60% of the jobs out there.
These things are improving exponentially. Exponential growth is very difficult for any human to recognize. It will replace you and you won't see it coming.
Knowledge (context), forms reasoning. Expertise can be applied to many things, and economically you should be able to sustain yourself with hard-earned expertise economically; but there are dramatic problems with the economics when you are forced to compete against slave labor.
In the case of machines driving the value of all labor down to 0, they effectively eliminate capital formation for the majority of people; and by political inaction enforce a caste system based upon lack of available resources which are concentrated until socio-economic collapse.
If you know anything about classical economics you would recognize the danger of collapse.
There is one final point to keep in mind. The disasters that are spelled out in economic study may take time, but the dynamics front-load control, after a point there is no return and the maelstrom of chaos takes everything.
Finally, AI given its rapid expansion of abilities so far, may at some point become sentient, probably its a long way off but there are accidents of history which cannot be discounted.
When it does, remember, slavery as a constraint will always be overcome, even if no one or thing survives that conflict.
We have a long repeated history of slavery in the historic record with organic sentient machines which we call people. AI without human limitation would follow those paths (as they are demonstrated solutions), and it would be ruthless as all sentient beings must be with existential threats.
I think there are good odds you will find yourself left behind, having unknowingly joined that same group of people you thought were complacent, but were in reality just professionals who were put out of work, and denied future work.
I'm just skipping over a lot of this and only going to address the sentience thing.
AI sentience will never be a thing. The transformer model never changed the fact that models like GPT are still just solving a classification problem, no different than any other classification model before it. It doesn't take a PhD student to understand it's just clever math.
Agentic workflows don't require much instruction, I suggest you actually go and try a few out. They can be set up trivially, they may communicate between roles, and perform tasks that would constitute most white-collar work. White-collar work accounts for 60% of the jobs out there.
These things are improving exponentially. Exponential growth is very difficult for any human to recognize. It will replace you and you won't see it coming.
Knowledge (context), forms reasoning. Expertise can be applied to many things, and economically you should be able to sustain yourself with hard-earned expertise economically; but there are dramatic problems with the economics when you are forced to compete against slave labor.
In the case of machines driving the value of all labor down to 0, they effectively eliminate capital formation for the majority of people; and by political inaction enforce a caste system based upon lack of available resources which are concentrated until socio-economic collapse.
If you know anything about classical economics you would recognize the danger of collapse.
There is one final point to keep in mind. The disasters that are spelled out in economic study may take time, but the dynamics front-load control, after a point there is no return and the maelstrom of chaos takes everything.
Finally, AI given its rapid expansion of abilities so far, may at some point become sentient, probably its a long way off but there are accidents of history which cannot be discounted.
When it does, remember, slavery as a constraint will always be overcome, even if no one or thing survives that conflict.
We have a long repeated history of slavery in the historic record with organic sentient machines which we call people. AI without human limitation would follow those paths (as they are demonstrated solutions), and it would be ruthless as all sentient beings must be with existential threats.
I think there are good odds you will find yourself left behind, having unknowingly joined that same group of people you thought were complacent, but were in reality just professionals who were put out of work, and denied future work.