(This thread is getting a bit long, and we might not be convincing each other very much, so hope it's ok if I only reply with points I consider interesting - not just push-pull.)
With the concert pianist thing I think there's a bit of type error going on. The important skill for a musician isn't having fast fingers, it's having something to say. Same as: "I'd like to be able to write like a professional writer" - does that mean anything? You either have things you want to write in the way that you want to write, or there's no point being a writer at all, much less asking an AI to make you one. With music or painting it's the same. There's some amount of technique required, but you need to have something to say, otherwise there's no point doing it.
So with that in mind, maybe music isn't the best example in your case. Let's take an area where you have something to say, like philosophy. Would you be willing to outsource that?
Well, there's no point in asking the AI to make me good at things if I'm the kind of person who will just keep asking the AI to do more things for me! That path just leads to the consumer blob again. The only alternative is if I like doing things myself, and in that case why not start now. After all, Leonardo himself wasn't motivated by the wish to become a polymath, he just liked doing things and did them. Even when then they're a bit difficult ("chores").
Anyway that was the theoretical argument, but the practical argument is that it's not what's being offered now. We started talking about outsourcing the task of understanding people to AI, right? That doesn't seem like a step toward Leonardo to me! It would make me stop using a pretty important part of my mind. Moreover, it's being offered by corporations that would love to make me dependent, and that have a bit of history getting people addicted to stuff.
There's no "line" per se. The intuition goes something like this. If my value system is only about receiving stuff from the universe, then the logical endpoint is a kind of blob that just receives stuff and doesn't even need a brain. But if my value system is about doing stuff myself, then the logical endpoint is Leonardo da Vinci. To me that's obviously better. So there are quite a lot of skills - like doing math, playing musical instruments, navigating without a map, or understanding people as in your example - that I want to do myself even if there are machines that could do it for me cheaper and better.
This seems like one-shot reasoning though. If you extend it to more people, the end result is a world where everyone treats understanding people as a chore to be outsourced to AI. To me this is somewhere I don't want to go; I think a large part of my values are chores that I don't want to outsource. (And in fact this attitude of mine began quite a few steps before AI, somewhere around smartphones.)
These things can be done well with a browser extension, and this way they can work on other sites too. I recently made some browser extensions and it's really easy.
That said, I'd rather people didn't do this. The walls between human beings are already pretty thick. It's alienating enough to talk with someone by text on the internet, with all the chances of misunderstanding that implies; it'll be even harder if I know the other person is responding to an AI-rewritten version of my comment, referring to an AI-summarized version of my profile, running AI hypotheticals on how I would react, and so on. The human would be almost invisible behind the layers of colored glass.
Yeah, this is maybe also about user taste. I use GW because it feels more like a website, while LW feels a bit too much like an application. There's a certain "website UI feel" that's distinct from "application UI feel" and makes me happier somehow. Though of course other people can feel differently.
I don't carry a phone, watch, or any other device. My smartphone is usually at home, powered off, just lying in a drawer. I turn it on only for two-factor login type of stuff and then turn it off immediately. It's on a prepaid contract and costs almost nothing.
In fact, I never carried a smartphone in my life. For a long while I had a dumb phone. When smartphones became dominant, I stopped carrying a phone at all. It just felt obvious from the start that this device was bad for me.
As for practicalities: when going to some unfamiliar place, I print a Google Maps screenshot, or just look at a map on my laptop and memorize it as best I can. It's a bit yolo-ish but I enjoy it. For messaging I usually wait until I get home and use the laptop. Airbnb can be used from laptop; Uber I don't use.
The most fun times were when I carried pen and paper instead, and made notes everywhere and drawings of random stuff. In fact, now that I'm remembering it, I think I'll try that again.
I see, yeah, then your team is a different culture than me. To me simple server side rendering (well not literally concatenating strings, but using templating and the like) is basically the only non-"crazy nightmare" way to build web stuff. While a lot of React stuff (like hooks, reducers, hydration) gives me crazy nightmare vibes. But since this isn't a programming forum, maybe not much use arguing :-)
That tweet doesn't sound right to me. Or at least, to me there's a simpler and more direct explanation of bubbles in terms of real resources, without having to mention money supply or central banks at all.
During a bubble, people are having fun because resources are being misallocated: misallocated to their fun. Some rich chumps are throwing their resources at something useless, like buying tulips. That bankrolls the good times for everyone else: the tulip-growers, the hairdressers that serve the tulip-growers and so on. But at some point the rich chumps realize that tulips aren't that great, and that they burned their resources just to make a big bonfire and make everyone warm for awhile. When they realize that, the tulip growers will lose their jobs, and then the hairdressers who served them and so on. That's the pain of the bubble ending, and it's unavoidable, central bank or no.