Its run by a secret cabal that wants to push AI to the masses and cash from IPO before the bubble pops

This is really looking at the problem from the wrong angle. It’s not that we don’t need all those degrees. The problem is that tech companies are making so much money that it makes other industries practically irrelevant when it comes to return on investment. It has thrown the economy completely off balance.

> If SDE is collapsing as a field, a whole bunch of people who thought their intelligence and credentials guaranteed them a comfortable life are in for a shock.

Even if we accept your precondition as true, that SWEs contain multitudes of smart people who will jump to other industries, I don't think the conclusion holds.

In the US at least, SWEs are among the most entrepreneurial industry members. They'll bring that attitude to whatever their new industry is. I think there will be an explosion of new startups in different areas, and we'll Jevons Paradox our way forwards.

South Korea would be an interesting point of comparison. High IQs, after-school tutoring, 70% of young people get degrees: result is a college wage premium of only 31% vs 54% average in the OECD

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/education-at-a-glance-2...

I would rather have SpongeBob making my burger patties than squidword. More intelligence is better than less intelligence.

Can you prove to me that the price of human intelligence is going up? At best it is as it always has been, intelligence in some fields is going up.

It's generally true that the rarer something is the more valuable that is, but only if there are enough potential buyers of the thing that can recognize it. If there is an ever-decreasing amount of intelligence there is probably an ever-increasing amount of stupidity - so will the stupid be smart enough to reward the intelligent with high paid positions?

What I suppose is actually that human intelligence will become more monetizable, by allowing those with it to better take advantage of their unrecognizable ability. But only if the interlocking systems of humanity do not fall apart and destroy the world due to there not being enough intelligent people left to make things work, as per various works of science fiction on the subject.

In schools there are massive changes. I was told that kids are more relaxed and care less about education and that the value of the smart kids, the know it all kids, is going down as more students can access Ai and they are not as helpless as they were when failing to tune in while in the class. The dynamics are changing and students are less suicidal too apparently because the pressure to deliver scholastically is going down because no one knows what the future holds and what will be valued.

some people think that's how humans got so intelligent. actually if you think about it, it's the only way humans could have got so intelligent. brains were our tail feathers for a while.

High priced intelligence is currently the doctors, engineers, professors, scientists, analysts, bankers, technical staff.. etc. Many are already replaceable with AI and many others sooner or later you know. In my opinion that is.

We will have the robots that will beat them up; LOL.. My robot will know the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and will beat up their robot!

"Plausibility"

Thank you. Yes, the price of service is falling rapidly. I agree.

What I don't know, and was asking about, is whether the cost of providing that service is also falling rapidly, including the cost of training.

This is the key.

In the age of AI, human super-intelligence, is extremely valuable. But yeah, just being intelligent? Not so much.

Just to illustrate, many have complained that big AI labs "buy" startups only because they want to acqui-hire the Stanford/CalTech/MIT PhDs who started it. Then they pretty much $#!t-can the rest of the people who were, to be fair, mostly just run of the mill UTexas/Umichigan/UofwhateverState TF/PyTorch monkeys. But the point is that in the old days, the second tier guys would have made out like bandits as well.

I think that was, kind of, the start of human intelligence becoming a winner take all game. The AI's only need to learn the latest and greatest from one person before they can leverage that value everywhere. And business is not likely to care too much about who that person is. They will care even less about the people who are not that person.

> Its already been shown synthetic training data is just as good if not better.

Source, please! I'm a machine learning layperson but how can this not be overfitting?