Solution if life worked like Little Alchemy: We stop feeding smart young adults into the “Bermuda Triangle of Talent”: “consultancy, finance, and corporate law.” AI replaces these jobs. We use half of the money that rich people would’ve paid human consultants, bankers, and lawyers to pay the AI companies and the other half to pay young adults to work on the AI problem. They convince all the AI companies to stop increasing capabilities beyond what is required to do those specialized jobs. After this succeeds, everybody who did this gains ultimate prestige (helped save humanity), fulfilling the status symbol function that guarantees the rest of their career (worth taking the $300k to $150k pay cut for a few years), and the AI companies can start getting paid the other half of their money. Everyone is happy.
(I vaguely remember seeing that some people don’t like Rutger Bregman, but I think The School for Moral Ambition is a good first shot at tackling the “reroute people away from bullshit jobs into valuable ones” high level. Somebody criticized it for trying to moralwash elites, but it’s not about the “eliteness” of the people involved, just that a major incentive for job selection that impacts competent people is prestige/money)
Solution if life worked like Little Alchemy: We stop feeding smart young adults into the “Bermuda Triangle of Talent”: “consultancy, finance, and corporate law.” AI replaces these jobs. We use half of the money that rich people would’ve paid human consultants, bankers, and lawyers to pay the AI companies and the other half to pay young adults to work on the AI problem. They convince all the AI companies to stop increasing capabilities beyond what is required to do those specialized jobs. After this succeeds, everybody who did this gains ultimate prestige (helped save humanity), fulfilling the status symbol function that guarantees the rest of their career (worth taking the $300k to $150k pay cut for a few years), and the AI companies can start getting paid the other half of their money. Everyone is happy.
(I vaguely remember seeing that some people don’t like Rutger Bregman, but I think The School for Moral Ambition is a good first shot at tackling the “reroute people away from bullshit jobs into valuable ones” high level. Somebody criticized it for trying to moralwash elites, but it’s not about the “eliteness” of the people involved, just that a major incentive for job selection that impacts competent people is prestige/money)