I have heard some form this advice for over 30 years. Not one single penny I have earned in my career came from my critical thinking. It came from someone taking a big financial risk with the hope that they will come out ahead. In fact, I've had jobs that actively discouraged critical thinking. I have also been told that the advice to think critically wasn't meant for me.
I can't help but wonder whether the person who gave you advice "to think critically wasn't for [you]" didn't have YOUR best interests at heart, and/or wasn't a wise person.
I also worked jobs where I was actively discouraged to think critically. Those jobs made me itchy and I moved on. Every time I did it was one step back, three steps forward. My career has been a weird zigzag like that but trended up exponentially over 25 years.
We all have our anecdotes we can share. But ask yourself this: if you get better at making decisions and communicating with other people, who is that most likely to benefit?
It seems you are unnecessarily muddying the water.
It makes sense to me that a culture that values collectivistic cohesion would shy away from paradigm shifting ideas (disruption). I also see the correlation between disruptive ideas driven by principled critical thinking over conventional thinking.
I guess on some level my assumption is that they are adjacent. Those embedded in a collectivistic culture can think critically but can run into walls within a sandbox of convention. This is how they can be great at iterative improvement and engineering but struggle with paradigm shifting ideas.
I think you have a point, but there's definitely some nuance here I'm still untangling.
/s if not obvious
This. Just thinking that those with power would even allow that leveling seems on the verge of impossible. In a sense, you can already see it practice. Online models are carefully 'made safe' ( neutered is my preferred term ), while online inference is increasingly more expensive.
And that does not even account for whether, 'bozo' will be able to use the tool right.. because an expert with a tool will steal beat a non-expert.
It is a brain race. It may differ in details, but the shape remains very much the same.
But this is veering into lit crit territory, so agree to disagree
Imagination knows no negation.
I'm not saying this for social reasons, just for the definition:
"superhuman intelligence" at what?
Calculations? Puzzles? Sudokus?
Or more like...
image classification? ("is this a thief?", "is this a rope?", "is this a medical professional?", "is this a tree?")
Oh, applying the former to the latter would be a pretty stupid category error.
It's almost as if people had this figured out centuries ago...
Maybe if you read past these paragraph it would have been clearer?
The first time an LLM solves a truly significant, longstanding problem without help is when we will know we are at AGI.