I think Ilya was making a point that operates on three levels at once personal, social, and civilizational.

He meant that intelligence is a powerful optimizer, but if you make it your highest value, you end up superbly equipped to navigate the world while increasingly blind to why you're living in it at all

@suchenzang My issue is people keep sending me Claude generated documents that, after reading 5-6 pages of a 40 page document, end up having two sentences worth of non-trival information.

@suchenzang perhaps the most common failure mode of SF's view of the economy is to see knowledge work as a market of intelligence-based services

but it's actually a relational bargaining system layered on top of intelligence

@suchenzang just look at how large portions of the math community reacted to recent ai progress in their field. that’s part of what he meant.

@herbiebradley that still sounds quite transactional

@suchenzang I should really just have claude-offs at work. Whenever someone sends me a Claude-generated document, I only pass it to Claude and ask it to generate a response which I copy-paste back to the "author".

@suchenzang Yes. As intelligence gets cheaper, taste, trust, and emotional precision get more expensive. Human touch stops being a soft bonus and becomes the filter for what people value.

@suchenzang I wish he worked with @Alibaba_Qwen and @NousResearch on a model harness with high agency and "street smarts".

@iruletheworldmo I was thinking about this statement a lot from the time he said it...

@iruletheworldmo That’s quite the call back. Nice.

@iruletheworldmo Absolutely

@iruletheworldmo wild that the field ignored this, built AGI anyway, and now the same guy is running a safety lab

@IntuitMachine No I'm actually continuously disappointed by our lack of intelligence. And AI is only making everything worse.