Only if you believe this is a natural stationary progression. In practice, it very likely is not, and current 20 years old won't be as rich as current 80 years old if only they manage to survive 60 years.
I'm skeptical a humanities education doesn't show up in earnings.
The question is more about whether a humanities degree does. It may be that the humanities "genius" is not something you catch in a bottle successfully. After all, the most successful authors don't usually come out of a special Author College. An employer might appreciate theoretically the talent without thinking it significantly correlates with any one degree. And on the other hand, someone like Steve Jobs certainly did have quite a bit of this knack - design and branding require artistic sensibility - yet he's mainly seen as a STEM figure.
If its boredom, better to subsidize the YouTubers, podcasters, and TikTokers than the colleges
The problem with this is that there absolutely are plenty of humanities studies that require time, impartiality and rigour, and that sort of format has all the wrong incentives for it. I think in many ways the subdivision is sort of artificial. History or philology for example are, much like natural sciences, digging towards one truth that theoretically exists, but is inaccessible save for indirect evidence. They're not creative, artistic or particularly subjective pursuits. "Human sciences" would be a more appropriate name for them.
I think debt cancellation would make sense as a sort of amnesty if it came together with some kind of reform that has the goal of preventing the situation from repeating in the future, whatever that may be. Otherwise, it's just a one off with the downsides you mention.
The problem is that fundamentally the argument is that humanities studies have positive externalities that aren't reflected in the salary of their graduates. I don't dismiss this argument, though I think with humanities a lot of value is provided by the very top percentile (e.g. a handful of very capable historians will write books that will be read by millions, most others will do very little unless they teach). In that sense there may be a need to subsidize the humanity degrees, but that might be best done in the long run with things like fully paid bursaries for deserving candidates. There's also a problem of evaluation because of course if you push such an argument you must accept some political accountability, and right now humanities are often terrible at making a case for themselves (every discussion about this I see tends to degenerate into "you can not appreciate our sophisticated knowledge, you bumpkins, but somehow studying humanities makes you a Better Person, so just accept it and thank us for our existence", which isn't terribly persuading. And at the very least, that the experts in subjects most closely associated with rhetoric and the understanding of human nature are so awful at persuasion is in itself concerning).
You're right, but while those heuristics of "better safe than sorry" might be too conservative for some fields, they're pretty spot on for powerful AGI, where the dangers of failure vastly outstrip opportunity costs.
Well, this is really just networking effects. Also why it's really hard to break out with your new hot dating app or social media website, no matter how much Tinder or Twitter suck. For your app to provide utility to users, it needs... users. Good luck breaking that stalemate.
Roads, or bike lanes, are a very literal network. Usefulness suddenly undergone a phase transition only when you hit the percolation point.
The concept of refusals being mediated entirely by a single direction really makes the way in which interpretability and safety from malicious users are pretty much at odds. On one hand, it's a remarkable result for interpretability that sometimes like this is the case. On the other, the only possible fix I can think of is some kind of contrived regularisation procedure in pretraining that forces the model to muddle this, thus losing one of our few insights in its internal process we have.
it's more like the normal software business model with a new cover
True enough, though it's also the fact that these projects seem to have almost entirely displaced everything else that makes me suspect we're almost in bubble regime. VCs just throwing money at anything that involves AI.
Most of these jobs are less interesting, and less impactful than they claim.
Well, I mean, they could be somewhat impactful in expectation. One out of a hundred might become big, and you don't know which (in fact, 1% I suspect would be a good success rate...).
Has anyone ever tried outlining a straight up first come first served system? Vet and pay a first batch of VIP users, then offer incentives to later joiners (eg vouchers for other products), then just free users, and finally introduce fees after reaching a certain user base, all committed to and outlined transparently from the beginning of course.
A fair point. I suppose part of my doubt though is exactly: are most of these applications going to automate jobs, or merely tasks? And to what extent does contributing to either advance the know how that might eventually help automating people?
Albeit with wilder swings, current 80 year olds in the US lived and worked through some of the years of highest GDP growth ever. That's not necessarily reproducible. In addition, one's net worth isn't just a linear function of the integral of the GDP throughout their life. For example, being able to buy a house early is a big boost because now you have capital that appreciates, possibly faster than the interests on your debt accrue. Meanwhile if you have to rent, your money disappears down a black hole. Guess what's a big difference between Boomers and Gen Z.