My manager was dragging me through useless projects that went nowhere despite multiple people telling him "it ain't gonna work" while shooting down proposals that later turned out to be "high priority tasks required directly by upper management". And he's a well-paid, educated employee with years of experience. Don't even get me started on delivery guys who cannot read a simple instruction like "do not ring the bell, leave the package on the doorstep". They just follow a 50-line script and that's all they can do.

Whenever you mention that AI won't reach human intelligence, remember that this is the benchmark. Not Alexander the Great, it's the millions of people throwing their life savings ($1000 each) into Labubus. Long time ago there was a series of articles in my country about the costs of wedding receptions skyrocketing and some people taking out loans to pay that, and someone made a meme "robots will never have human intelligence!" with reply "bro, you took out a loan to pay for a wedding, I don't want your human intelligence".

Denying this reality is pure cope.

You are showing disagreements with your priorities (mostly money) as unintelligent. You're showing a lack of care and conscientiousness as unintelligent.

You're reducing intelligence to alignment with money and following instructions. Under that framing the argument is already won in favor of AI amd some vague effective maximizing of a cost function.

Many jobs are like this, so it's fine for employment. Maybe the vast majority of mankind was never suitable for reliable employment of the "cost function" style.

But I know two things:

1. Centralization should be avoided. The reality that AI can do most jobs is not a reason to concentrate power behind those portraying that or building AI. We still want local, ideally individual, empowerment. I don't see enough said about this. Maybe we can even say the system must be one people wish to opt in to, to maximize profit.

2. Intelligence is being very narrowly defined and humans value more than an INT score in the RPG sense. The more I meet people outside my belief circles, the more I realize the intelligence of some actions, in the sense of "logically deduced from a higher principle" not "aligned with my western white collar principles". The ultimate role of culture and humanity IS this principle exploration and to say we've reduced that exploration to "maximize X" is crazy.

At some point deciding fate of the company or system or state flows from principles embedded in cultures and that's in danger of being flattened away by optimizing outcomes with machines.

Vague and wishy washy, but its the clearest I can state it.

If the principle embedded in the culture of my manager is to do dumb shit that goes nowhere, then I'm not sure what goals we're achieving.

Denying that reality is pure cope.