We chase money and status largely for the life they can buy. If AI expands supply and makes that life affordable to more people, climbing the hierarchy becomes less necessary and following an interest becomes easier. If the bubble bursts without delivering those gains, why panic about missing a revolution that never arrived?
I read "Working for Fun" on Rao Yi Science today and couldn't agree more. If AI can take over much of anyone's work, perhaps it can also give more people the freedom to follow what interests them, wherever it leads. Hierarchies keep drawing in new people who want to get ahead. When interest matters more than status, even deeply unfair structures may begin to lose the people who keep them in place.
I don't understand why people talk as if AI makes human intelligence irrelevant. Deriving equations and writing code matter, but what about handling several problems at once, learning quickly, and knowing which direction is worth pursuing? Don't these count as intelligence? I would call them a higher form of it, developed through broader experience than any single technical skill demands. These are exactly the abilities we need most when working with AI, whether in research or in making engineering ideas work.
Everyday robotics faces countless interactions, making a detailed model for every situation impractical. In science and engineering, the challenge can lie deep within a single system, where understanding one critical coupling is already a major advance. This changes what I want from physical intelligence: the ability to handle many situations, and the ability to resolve the dynamics that matter within one.
I keep wondering whether scaling can give us physical generalization. Models can share representations and solvers, but different dynamics may still require different control laws. Perhaps a model can generalize by recognizing the regime and applying local rules, without discovering a unified physical theory. What would convince me is reliable control across unfamiliar systems without extensive reference trajectories or retraining. That would suggest a general mechanism for physical reasoning.
Ithaca, New York
I do not expect physical intelligence to show the emergence reported for large language models. If a mechanism for wide transfer exists, it should come from structure rather than from parameter count, because the laws that govern a physical system have always turned out to be short.