Many would likely still reach for the far left. A human would have to make a call saying "Wow, this is not a compromise we can make, other humans are not going to use this".
That said, it's a moot point - I am in full agreement that the two revolutions are different.
You might find the first two comments interesting:
@russell usability of the node on the far right is a nightmare. Where do the humans attach the cables? No empathy in AI design.
What makes you think humans will have to attach the cables?
The argument actually speaks against what he was trying to say. He is basically saying that humans aren't clever enough to utilize optimal solutions which is a weakness not a strength.
Your phrasing is too harsh since "optimal" is not defined thoroughly.
It is indeed defined as the blurp also says. I am trying to find the original paper again.
My immediate response is to think that the machine was told to "do something that does X, Y, and Z while W". The computer kicked ass at this in your link, but if XYZ were more fuzzy, or required more lateral thinking, how would a machine fare? I guess a machine could try keep trying, but the number of options to take might explode over time.
Thoughts?
Strong AI is not coming anytime soon. People will still be necessary.
In many cases, the design effort moves from making the structure to writing out all the possible structure constraints the design needs to satisfy.
PS. This is not new at all if you look at the literature.
I.e. computers are already used for ingenious solutions and that's really all that matters here.
To say humans have no place in this is the same as saying in the future, my compiler will be so smart human programmers won't be necessary.
Frankly that design is cool but not mind blowing. If you knew how much angst computer optimization packages can put you through, you might be more cynical. Even before NNs were all the rage there were (ex: genetic techniques, hill-climbing, simulated annealing, Monte-Carlo, pick-your-optimization-technique) to do exactly the things which that Twitter post referenced.
1) AI is not there
2) Human ingenuity is necessary.
With regards to 1) of course it's not there yet. But the progress is astounding and quite a few things will be possible even before we get to strong AI.
With regards to 2) already today there are several areas where technology is better than humans to detect mistakes. In fact we use computers in many cases to test our work. This is an increasing trend and will result in end to end computer design and implemented solutions.
While knowledge tasks are different than mechanical ones, you could argue that they're both "tasks" that are being "done" and require thinking in some way, but just more (or different) thinking is involved this time.
I don't know if machines could automate things like ingenuity, although at the same time I don't know if the demand for ingenuity is large enough for people to have a stable job.