Some things don’t need impacting and yet people need to force an impact (which may worsen things) to satisfy their ego, which usually soon goes back to needing more satisfaction after they realize the issue is psychological and always relative to the current situation. Not always of course, duh, but some times. I usually attribute it to OCD fixated on fear of death without “legacy.”

I completely agree and of the things that u/nxqv listed, I think impact is the thing that most everyday people want and fear they will no longer have, more so than fame, riches, clout etc. It's totally natural to want the things you spend effort on to have impact.

Now what I'm more interested in is the argument of how much impact is enough to make you feel satisfied, and I think this is where the FOMO starts to set in for people. People want to have a "large" impact - making company-wide differences, influence large swaths of people. I think the fear is that in the face of a ChatGPT, your little model or little application can only reach a handful of others.

Extrapolate current trends and you might think, oh well AI applications are just going to get bigger and bigger. Midjourney 5 or SuperChatGPT-12 are going to be so insanely capable that we will have no more use for human writing, human art, human music, human programming. There will simply be no more room for my work to EVER have a big impact in the future. (Maybe this change is also similar to how the scientific greats back in the day could discover big theorems like Einstein's relativity, but nowadays you need to hyper-specialize in academia to produce results for your tiny corner)

My solution is that we need to dig a little deeper. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to live a good meaningful life? If your answer to that is that a good life worth living is one where you impact on the order of thousands or millions of humans, then yes we might be shifting away from that possibility. But humans are built for connection, and I think we will need to look inwards and realize that we don't need to influence thousands to experience that connection. You can make a little model or application that affects hundreds. You can write a song just for your friends and family. You can paint a piece of art that just hangs on your wall and gets a single compliment. To me that is already human connection, and is just as meaningful as making a large model that drives the next Google/Meta forward.

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Also, don't lose sight of the forest because of a tree. We're talking about impact in the context of FOMO - if you feel that level of anxiety and rush about potentially missing out on the ability to make an impact because others are already making the impact you want to make, it's more likely to be ego-driven than genuine altruism

If he's the standard of "success" then based on Twitter that's something you may want to reconsider. Jürgen Schmidhuber comes in a close second.

Yeah it's really somethin

I thought so too but I actually genuinely appreciate what he says. His POV is valuable and his recent posts aren't really bad in recen times.

I think this is the best formulation of the question I've seen, "Can you imagine any job that a really bright human could do that a superintelligent synthetic AI couldn't do better?"

Everyone loves to default to the horse and buggy example and they always ignore the horse. Are programmers and researchers the blacksmiths or are they the horses?

It's at least 50/50 that we're all the horses. That doesn't mean that horses have no value, but we don't see horses doing the work they once did in every major city prior to their displacement by automobiles.

We also hear this familiar tome, "AI will create all of these news jobs that none of us can imagine." Really? That superintelligent AIs won't be able to do? It reminds me of a mixed metaphor. These two ideas are just not compatible.

Either they hit a brick wall with scaling or we all will be dealing with a new paradigm where we remain humans (horses) or accept the reality that to participate in the new world you become a cyborg. I don't know if it's possible, but may be the only path to "keep up" and it's not a guarantee since we'd have to convert biological matter to silicon.

And who wants to give up their humanity to basically become an AI? My guess is the number of people will shock me if that ever becomes a possibility.

I'm fine with retirement and remaining an obsolete human doing work that isn't required for the fun of it. I don't play tennis because I am going to play at Wimbledon or even beat anyone good - I play it because I enjoy it. I think that will be the barometer if there isn't a hard limit on scaling.

This has been foretold decades ago by Hans Moravec and others. I didn't think it was possible in my lifetime until ChatGPT. I'm still processing it.

Does it? How many other fanfic writer -> well known researcher trajectories come to mind?

That dude was a researcher before he wrote that though