[HarHarVeryFunny]

I'm half joking, but what I meant was that self-sufficiency seems to be more demanding than many jobs, so success might be more dependent on characteristics that used to be more important in the past, and got us to where we are today.

On reconsideration, it's not clear how much of our increase in intelligence over the last few million years is due to the greater success of more intelligent individuals, or rather the greater success of more collectively intelligent populations, based on language and communication etc.

Again, half-joking, but it's interesting to consider if AI as an "intelligence leveler" could eventually have an effect. If we all have access to super-intelligence, then does our own individual intelligence matter that much? You could even speculate that the invention of AI puts a cap on the intelligence of a species since then perhaps the success of the species depends more on the intelligence of the AI, not of the species itself.

[cubefox]

I think our intelligence is crucial to make sure that we won't get replaced by AI.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

Yes, but we seem hell bent on creating AI that is smarter than ourselves, and putting it into embodied robotic form as well - humanoid robots, automated factories, AI driven cars and trucks, autonomous fighter planes...

With AI already able to hack into our human-written computer systems, now being trusted to write much of the new code itself(!), it certainly doesn't take a Sci-Fi fantasy to predict an AI agent wreaking major damage or taking control over some system/factory it was able to hack into, in pursuit of the goals it was given.

It really would not be surprising to discover that, even today, some vibe coded system has an unrequested backdoor built into it, that the agent thought (without malice) it might be useful to add.

Right now we truly are building paperclip maximizers. Idiot-savant RL-trained goal-seekers that we're hoping can be controlled via quaint means such as prompts and guardrails.