My favorite people to talk with are tradespeople because they can do things I can't and they know things I don't. And we're really not all that different once you're really start talking.
AI has infinite time (and likely human evaluation incentive) to spend on couching pushback in the softest possible terms.
Humans outside of grade school honors classes generally don't have the time to preface "You're wrong" with "That's a brilliant thought, I see where you're going. How about we also consider an additional perspective..."
I just read it as people having different priorities and yes, some of those being online brainrot (that I also partake in), alongside various medical conditions, economic conditions and other outside factors decreasing the ability to get things done.
We've all seen what brilliant people like John Carmack or Linus Torvalds can do, and if we turned this into a measuring game or something then most of us statistically would indeed be "NPCs", but I don't think we need such optics.
Even without that, we can acknowledge that some people will have a really large impact on how the future goes and we can hope/demand that they do their best. I might not be smart/committed/lucky enough to change the world much, but so aren't most folks - I'll do what I can and I hope that the ones that will have larger impact will do good, too.
What an odd take, why would I suggest that? I meant that people who have the means to do meaningful work, especially high impact work, should do so - generally that'd mean research or in the case of IT, writing good software.
> Great Man Theory
You can see the sibling comment, would you not agree that there's some software and research out there that's very useful to humanity as a whole? Where I and the other critical commenter seem to disagree is that I don't expect another Einstein, but still acknowledge that some people will just achieve much more than others due to a variety of factors.
For example, it's hard to take risks when you're struggling to pay bills due to the economy being in a bad state, and it's hard to build great things when you're in a locale where nobody cares for whatever it may be. It's also hard to make much of an impact, where disproportionate amount of time goes fighting against illness that life has inflicted upon you.
It doesn't make everyone else useless (like me paying my taxes and working on relatively boring software is still good, just low impact), just that those who have the means to do more, should!
The ones who care about AI research and developing software for that kinda stuff, should do that. The ones who can contribute to medicine, various engineering disciplines, or anything else that benefits humanity should do that too. The ones who'd rather squander their lives away when good things that'd benefit others are within reach (regardless of which discipline that is in, AI being just one of many)... I mean sure they can do that but maybe shouldn't do that.
I don't think the readings of anything I've said here are at all charitable so I'm done engaging in this discussion.
I don't care for your outrage because I don't buy into the culture that might be passionate about using the term "NPC" and attaching much additional meaning to it, I'm working with the vocabulary presented. You could substitute that for "normies" if you care for Internet slang, or in other words "average people" - everyone else. In this context, when not talking about some very committed and talented people who, by being in the right place and time, can advance entire areas of research or technology.
> Even having infinite intelligence and work ethic wouldn't allow you to accomplish the things that people in the 20th century were able to simply due to the field maturing significantly since then.
That is also an odd standard to set, just look at how much "Attention Is All You Need" changed things and where we are now. Same with what Carmack did for VR. What about WireGuard, PyTorch, Stable Diffusion, FlashAttention, LoRA? Even within the supposedly mature fields people are still making immensely useful new tech and research that benefits many and that they build upon.
It might not always even be a single individual, but groups of people collaborating and through repeated failures eventually producing something really good!
Again, I see nothing problematic with the original comment's conclusion:
> So if you are able to fly above the AI-generated addictions and have the privilege of time to do it, see what you can do.
I read the rest as commentary on how many won't really have the means/circumstances/capabilities to do so, but the ones that do, should.
I don't get what other words you're trying to put in my mouth, I might not be a fan of the original phrasing, but the point itself isn't bad.
The "NPC" is your own imagined addition, haven't seen any advocates of humans being, just like anything else in the world, physical, say this means they are "NPCs". You seem to think systems of atoms HAVE to be "NPCs".