I know this applies to other people too because I've personally met people who can't read and never will. I've met people who couldn't graduate high school, and not from a lack of trying, and everyone in between. Based on that, and my own limits, I'm concluding there are limits to how "smart" someone can get and it varies. For me personally, I felt as though if I continued my education higher I would really be pushing it.
Perhaps you should speak for yourself then. It is not useful to extrapolate your experiences onto everyone else as it's comparable to someone with an IQ of 50 thinking everyone else is the same, not realizing that others might be much more intelligent than them. I simply do not agree that we have reached anywhere near the limit of human potential yet, as evidences by thousands of years of adaptation of work in the face of new technology that hunter gatherers could not have dreamed of, yet we are anatomically identical to them. To think that only today are we reaching the limits is a prime example of recency bias; it was famously said that in the early 1900s that everything that could've been invented had already been.
I feel I don't need to speak for myself when I say something so obvious as "not everyone can be an astrophysicist"
Rather, perhaps you should think more reasonably of yourself? I admire the confidence to believe you can truly do anything, but I'm definitely more confident in saying, no, you can't.
For the vast, vast, VAST majority of human history you could live simply by performing labor. This is no longer the case in modern societies.
Only KNOWLEDGE jobs now provide, IMO, an adequate income.
We have ALREADY left a lot of people behind. People who cannot read, or write, are completely fucked.
We are LUCKY that most people are able to read and write. As time goes on and this trend continues and we continue to cut off the bottom X% of jobs, what happens to those people?
Imagine a hypothetical secretary. This is all she is capable of doing, and she barely passed high school, and not from a lack of trying. Her job is then automated.
What does she do? This isn't a hypothetical question - spell it out for me. There are no jobs below her. What does she do?
To expand further, assuming some automate X removes the bottom Y percent of jobs, the lowest hanging of fruit, that means the jobs left MUST BE > Y. If someone can only do up to Y, then they cannot work a job. As Y approaches infinity, nobody on planet Earth will be able to work.
You're able to work right now because you happen to be smart enough to perform the average jobs available. When some automation, AI or not, doesn't matter, eliminates the bottom 90% of knowledge jobs, only the top 10% will be left. You will not be able to work one of those jobs, because you aren't working one right now and I'm assuming you've already pushed your brain to its limits. If you haven't, you're leaving money on the table, and you should be a rocket scientist.
Of course. The difference is the level of education. Otherwise, do you really believe that those, all across the world, become astrophysicists? Everyone has the capacity to change, grow, and become more than they once were.