but as someone who spent decades being sneered at by STEM people when I told them I majored in liberal arts and why, I hope we can spend at least a brief second reflecting on what the actual purpose of education (and life) really is.
The purpose of education is to learn to love learning and to have the tools to continue doing it for your whole life, not just to get one job you hope you hold onto forever. It's to teach you how to find a good and satisfying *life* for yourself and how to be a good citizen and functioning member of a democratic society. That's philosophy, political science, history, foreign languages, sociology, etc.
Funnily enough the pendulum has swung and those are some of the people we need the most now as we try to restructure our society to manage the almost inconceivably vast power it is going to be handed in the next five years.
The purpose of life isn't a job. It's to do the things you love and spend time with the people you love. You need a certain baseline level of material things so you can focus on that and that's all. If those things become superabundant and cheap, great. Let's stop or drastically reduce the amount of work we have to do.
When I lived in China, I'd go to my local park and see lots of people out there cutting the lawns with scissors. It's not that the city parks department couldn't afford lawnmowers. It's that they were required to employ people doing something so they came up with that.
When we lead with "protect jobs" all I see is hundreds of thousands of people in khaki overalls hunched over breaking their backs, exposing themselves to skin cancer, and giving themselves repetitive strain injuries doing pointless make work so that they can "justify" getting a salary. We are at the cusp of being able to reaffirm our inherent value as people, not just as cogs in a capitalist machine.
The AI companies have taken all of humanities collective intellectual property to create these models. We are owed a dividend that allows us to enjoy our lives with dignity. And for many, that will not include a "job" in the traditional sense. We have to be able to let go of those existing mindsets and imagine the outcome we actually want and then work towards that or we will be left behind by the next generations.
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