How hard should we 'try', how much time should a person spend working, learning, versus living?
And also, that generation got quite a few students who did sacrificed their future in protests just a few years ago. The crackdown was very real and is still ongoing.
Awareness of issues only gets you so far. But it factors into daily decisions. And when it's all too much to bear, we just push it out of mind and continue with our little sphere of influence.
Society is built up this way: everyone has their own little sphere of influence.
Money and power have much larger spheres.
So you either protest enough to cope and move on, or you get angry enough to change.
Again, I have no answers, just observation. I'm fine with AI, despite realizing our economy is eating itself. You slowly begin to realize all we ever do is eat each other, or other things.
From that point of view, your stance seems more like a theory/ideology you project on the world rather then an observation.
The only way to act is to not produce or consume (to the best of your ability) any slop, and be loud about it. We are being absolutely overrun with low-quality art, prose, and software, and making the production of such unprofitable (and even unfashionable) is the only reasonable action you can take.
Roles are necessary because we simply don't have time to be experts in everything.
AI changes the way we contribute.
You're right, we all don't have time to be experts in everything. But that doesn't mean experts aren't valuable, or that experts shouldn't exist.
Anyone that thinks an LLM won't be up to spewing endless Harlequin Romance level prose is in a state of denial. And the cost of tokens continues to drop. This either means the current generation of content gets cheaper or better content becomes affordable through chain of thought token burning. I don't see a problem with that. The problem IMO is pushing a narrative that AI exists primarily to displace humans and the pushback is finally loud enough that it's getting blasted back into the faces of the billionaires. I see that as a good thing. May their endless hedonistic orgy at everyone else's expensive finally become a living nightmare of inadequacy on the hamster wheel of despair
In other words, we always do whatever is easiest, and rarely are willing to sacrifice our way of life to make real change. One person can never make a difference when fighting against people's desire to 'take it easy'.
Humans will always compete, there's never any rest. AI is never going away. The crowd is booing but they will never act.
Circus and Bread has become Casino and Colleseum. The competition never stops.