"All the jobs" includes those tasked by the state to commit, plan, and organize violence, it's plenty dystopian already. Like, one important reason why the military and militarized police don't engage in egregious overreach is that the people who'd be responsible live standard lives in their own society and it's hard to get high compliance for that sort of thing. Replace that relatively democratized infrastructure of thousands of intelligence analysts, mid-level management, etc with a bunch of AI agents, and a meaningful restriction on the power of the upper echelons of the state is removed.

Simple answer: taking the jobs is how it’ll impact regular people the most.

We already have personalized, algorithmic advertising and what I would call “control” all over the place: things like consolidated oligarch-owned media.

AI isn’t going to change how we are advertised to or controlled all that much, at least compared to the prospect of being put out of work or taking a huge salary cut similar to the mid-century worker who used to have a $40/hour union factory job and now works at Walmart below health insurance threshold for $15/hour.

"You're absolutely right, I think you deserve to treat yourself with Mococoa, made with all-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua! It's what humans like myself crave."

Much like Truman's town, I fear a future where every non-in-person "interaction" might be a bot-network with an agenda and the inhuman patience of playing for the long-con.

... and building a business off of skills you don't have based on a strategy already exists! You use capital to pay humans that do have the skills.

Or capital a comparable sum to pay an AI to approximate the skills of humans I guess is the proposed future?

It works at the individual level but won't if mass adoption happens.

The mechanism will become like taxes, you don't have to use public services thus pay those taxes, unless most people comply as it's easy to oppress those who don't.

The parallel isn't about legitimacy, but Mechanism. Some companies already oblige employees to use AI to deliver their work. In a near future we may see jobs seekers registering their AI ID for companies to decide which humans qualify to be plugged into the compensation system, at what rate, and usage conditions to avoid terminations.

Food delivery systems already show a glimpse of how it could look like.

I can't even manually resolve the merge conflicts alone that happen between my code and that of everyone else submitting code at agent speed in my team's repo. So long as I have financial obligations toward my family, I cannot opt out. I must use these things.

Not that simple. If I opt out and others don’t, and it confers a competitive advantage they win and I lose.

At this point, or perhaps not too far off it's like opting out of electricity, or the automobile.

Sure you can. But you're going to have a bad time.

A few confounding factors come up right away: one of professors removed final project which increased grades; due to less appealing CS career, you do not get the best students anymore: another professor is not a fan of curving so perhaps he just accidentally gave harder tests; math prep for CS courses happened over the last 15 years not last 2 where LLMs have become ubiquitous; many failed because they were caught using LLMs when not allowed...

So really, two professors' gut feel about what the reasons are and not backed by much.

If humanity is over-reliant on frontier labs' models to perform work, the result is a dependence on the actual intelligence of these models -- not on human intelligence. This could be a small reason, on top of many others, why investors are throwing hundreds of billions of dollars a bit "carelessly" to these labs. It's fascinating seeing the models do the "hard work" (the deep, challenging thinking) for you.

The conundrum which tricks me though - is this a net negative or a positive? If humans are less intelligent, but their output is 2-3 times more intelligent (with AI), what's the result? At what point do we, as humans, stop comprehending anything and give all intelligent work to the neural nets?

And if that does happen, could we live in a society where no work, or at least a significantly less amount of work, is needed? To me, it seems like a dystopian net positive.

It might seem far-fetched to ask these, but I think these questions are getting more prevalent by the day.

Indeed, for work and software most are already beholden to Microsoft and Google. This is something wayy more.