So, yes, AI is a big deal and we don’t know what it’s going to affect, but the goal of replacing everyone’s job is extremely ambitious and there’s a long way to go.
This has to be assessed separately for each kind of job.
Moravec must be at some level gratified things are arriving close to his predicted timeline.
There might be a thing beyond intelligence that we can't even conceive of.
The “absurd” dimension does not enter. This is a situation where you have no evidence at all.
In the absence of any information, the average (mean or median) is your best guess. Now where that average is, you have no idea.
> There might be a thing beyond intelligence that we can't even conceive of.
This statement already supposes there is a thing called “intelligence”. People have been pretending to measure this for more than a century. Modern thinking at least says what we call intelligence is not a single concept.
Most technologies level off sharply after bouts of boundless improvements.
In 1968 they thought we'd be flying to the moon by now but instead we're flying across the ocean in planes not that different from the 747 that existed back then.
> BY L. J. LANDER AND T. R. PARKIN
> A direct search on the CDC 6600 yielded:
27⁵ + 84⁵ + 110⁵ + 133⁵ = 144⁵
https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1966-72-06/S0002-9904-1966...
It is a conjecture whether grinding it out on Lean is a difference in kind, rather than degree. I say degree. But it remains to be seen.