There are smarter and better humans at just about everything you or I could want to do, that's just life. Most of life isn't about comparative advantages, it's about enjoying life with people we like.

Sorry to be nihilist, but you never had any objective value if you're thinking in these terms.

As far as we know, the universe "just is". There is no universal objective value of human beings, at all, any one of us.

You have to make or find your own value in the universe. I try not to think too hard about the nihilist side and try to appreciate that for some unfathomable reason, I seem to have what I call consciousness - the ability to observe the present and have it superimposed on the past, and what may be the future, leading me to "experience" things. I don't understand it, no-one does (some people suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect think they do, but they don't), and yet, here we are.

So it doesn't matter to me if machines perform better than I do, because already lots of other people do. Just try to find your own joy or meaning, somehow.

Your value is intrinsic as a human being. We’re capable of love and shared experiences that a machine will never know.

Do you have friends or people in your life that are also not geniuses? Do you think about them this way? Why or why not?

You have inherent value by virtue of being human. Unfortunately it seems like people have forgotten humanism.

Manual labor

To be able to propose interesting conjectures you need to walk the walk of trying to prove things yourself. That's not great for future generations.

Surely the machines will have superior conjectures soon.

I think, and I may be totally off base, that the labs are specifically avoiding art and (non-technical) writing as an endpoint. It's bad PR for them- it calls attention to the copyright question and threatens the 'human flourishing' kind of jobs- and there's no money in it because people prefer art to be human made and there's hardly any money in that anyway.

The difference is that artistic sensibility is largely subjective. This means that:

1. It's hard to measure (and people can disagree about it)

2. It can't really be improved using RL without a human in the loop (which is how math is being trained)

Art is so entwined with the human condition that generative AI which conjures output from a statistical pass over background noise is bound to be stagnant.

Obviously it can impersonate art, but where creativity and the human story matter artists need not worry.

AI is no match for rapidly shifting goalposts ;)

What are you even talking about? The last few years, AI has made an insanely big jump in capabilities, performance, accuracy. It destroyed the carrier of a ton of writers and can generate images that are good enough to bamboozle people into thinking it's human made, that sounds like an insanely big leap to me, and yes it can be very creative and in music as well, I would bet it beats already 90% of musicians (most musicians are not that competent).