There ought to be more to life than sitting in a pod receiving sufficient nutrients from a tube, even if there was no doubt that humanity would in this way survive until the sun expands and makes the earth uninhabitable.

> Let's assume in the next decade GPT-7 PRO Ultra is cheaply ubiquitous, inspectable, reproducible, transferable, reasonably un-constrained by any institutional interests.

I'd argue that this extremely extreme scenario is the only one in which it kind of makes sense to not have understanding. But let's be honest: no one knows if we'll be there (and it seems unlikely since everything reaches a plateau eventually). So, what happens if we allow ourselves to forget everything and then we don't reach the ideal scenario?

I grew up in a cult. Based on my experience, I believe that the most dangerous thing a human can do is to allow someone else to do their thinking for them.

It’s not going to be ubiquitous? There hasn’t been a single frontier model where generation n costs less than generation n-1 to run. So the reasonable thing is to assume that GPT-7 will cost even more than GPT-6, and more and more of the frontier of knowledge will be locked behind a giant paywall. Participating in any field will mean ponying up to the oligarchs that own the infrastructure that runs the model.