I have been thinking about this, too. Take Mathematics as an example — it’s probably safe to say that only the top 1000 contemporary Mathematicians really matter to the human specie, or perhaps even less. And if you do not show the potential to be one of those when you reach the end of your graduate studies (actually probably already too late), you are 99.999% sure to just push out papers no one reads and such, and an associate professor in a no name school is going to be your lifetime high watermark. Like, the human specie doesn’t care whether you existed or not, from that perspective.

Now if we can prove this, expand it to the whole spectrum of academic studies, and somehow convince 99.99% of us that they are basically garbage and we don’t care about them — sure the elites will throw UBI around but that’s it — then maybe AI is very positive to the human specie.

Oh we better pick up the speed of cloning and artificial fertilization quickly, because people who are told to be garbage probably have no interests in boring children, and it is still a myth how genies are born and grown. We need that diversity.

BTW the whole scheme reads like the background of a Chinese net novel 赛博英雄传.