Looking again, I think you've lost track of the thread.
My point was that if you wanted to subdue the population by denying them vaccines, measles would be a silly place to invest your effort.

Yeah, but compare this with other vaccines, like mumps or tetanus or polio. Those made a huge difference

Measles is a very poor way to achieve that end. When I was growing up there was no measles vaccine, and nearly everybody did quite well. ... Yeah, not everybody. But it's not going to have an effect on the population except perhaps of the American Indians and the Polynesians. (I think only some of the Polynesians had ancestries free of measles, but I'm pretty sure some did.)

You're confusing things. There's nothing stopping a fascist from also being a socialist (and conversely).

That doesn't work for everything. It works for transmissible diseases. Most of the expensive stuff is something else. One example is cancer.

OTOH, the US health care system is one of the more expensive systems in the world with sub-optimal results. This is (partially) because sick people can't really negotiate. I still remember trying to dial a phone with a broken hand so I could get the insurance company to approve treatment.

There's a time-limit problem. You couldn't do that in a day, probably not in a week. And even the best method couldn't be guaranteed to work in any particular year. You need the average over several years.

How much of the code you wrote can you interpret 2 years later?
(Well, with enough work I can usually figure out what I was doing, but I tend to document things. And sometimes even so I can't, because of lost context.)

That's going to be true at the lower levels, but it will be awhile before the upper skill levels are obsolete. Rembrandt isn't famous because he used his oils with more expertise.

Still, most folks are satisfied with a much more common skill level, and that WILL be commoditized.

Well, that's not true, but it sure isn't the same skill. Writing a short story is a particular skill. Plotting out a game is a skill. It's just not the same skill as programming the game.

For that matter, I was trying to plot out a game, and hit a wall. I could write the code, but I wanted a dungeon quest like game that I would find entertaining and which wasn't built around fighting. I couldn't figure out how the economics and interactions should work without an entire AI handling the NPCs. (And I didn't want it to depend on an internet connection.)
(Well, I wasn't trying to do this the easy way. I was intentionally going to build my own maze routine, to produce mazes that I found esthetically appealing...but economic interactions is what I got stuck on. It's a different skill than programming.)

It will continue to be valuable, probably even more valuable, but there will be LOTS fewer jobs. There are still assembly language programmers...but not that many. I've even forgotten the name for the skill that is below assembly language, but there are still folks who do that...but only a VERY few.

So far. No bets for next year.

But those won't attract as much interest.
Yeah, the *should*, but they won't.

No, but assuming most positive outcomes outweigh a single really bad negative outcome *would* be stupid.

Actually, the ratio is probably going to be quite good. It will almost always do exactly what *somebody* told it to do. But it may be an extreme force amplifier. Just like distributed denial of service was an amplifier of the original denial of service attack.

Also, there's the question of that time when it isn't doing what it was told. AIs have already acted for self-preservation. (Ineffectively as far as we know.) And there's "evolution" once you start releasing agents. Most mutations will be harmless, but some won't. This may well turn out to be no worse than a self-reproducing computer virus that adapts to overcome any new attacks without needing human assistance, but it may be considerably worse. How much worse is rather unpredictable. (But this mode of attack won't be very intelligent, because the larger it is the easier it is to detect.)

There's a WIDE range of plausible problems coming up. Some of them *do* threaten human extinction. Some of them threaten society as it exists. I can't think of any that leave things relatively unchanged. Even the versions already released will have effects as they spread through society that we can't imagine.

If you want a fictional prediction, I'd suggest you read Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands". But realize that it's only laying out a possible problem.

I don't know about "these people", but spokesmen for major AI companies have said that we need to slow down development until we can manage proper alignment. And it's a problem, because slowing down just one of them doesn't help. It really requires government intervention. But I'm not sure doing so at the state level is useful, I think it needs to be a verifiable international treaty...and the US govt. doesn't seem at all interested. And two years from not is probably too late to start negotiations.

I think this may be one of the filters in the Drake equation.