From: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vice.com%2Fen%2Farticl...
        ""The billionaires understand that they're playing a dangerous game," Rushkoff said. "They are running out of room to externalize the damage of the way that their companies operate. Eventually, there's going to be the social unrest that leads to your undoing."
        Like the gated communities of the past, their biggest concern was to find ways to protect themselves from the "unruly masses," Rushkoff said. "The question we ended up spending the majority of time on was: 'How do I maintain control of my security force after my money is worthless?'"
        That is, if their money is no longer worth anything -- if money no longer means power--how and why would a Navy Seal agree to guard a bunker for them?
        "Once they start talking in those terms, it's really easy to start puncturing a hole in their plan," Rushkoff said. "The most powerful people in the world see themselves as utterly incapable of actually creating a future in which everything's gonna be OK."

What I put together circa 2010 is becoming more and more relevant: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpdfernhout.net%2Fbeyond-... "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

Tangentially, since you mentioned coal, coal plants are discussed there as an example of the complex dynamics of technological and social change both creating and destroying jobs given externalities -- including from the laissez-faire capitalist economic imperative to privatize gains while socializing risks and costs :
      "Also, many current industries that employ large numbers of people (ranging from the health insurance industry, the compulsory schooling industry, the defense industry, the fossil fuel industry, conventional agriculture industry, the software industry, the newspaper and media industries, and some consumer products industries) are coming under pressure from various movements from both the left and the right of the political spectrum in ways that might reduce the need for much paid work in various ways. Such changes might either directly eliminate jobs or, by increasing jobs temporarily eliminate subsequent problems in other areas and the jobs that go with them (as reflected in projections of overall cost savings by such transitions); for example building new wind farms instead of new coal plants might reduce medical expenses from asthma or from mercury poisoning. A single-payer health care movement, a homeschooling and alternative education movement, a global peace movement, a renewable energy movement, an organic agriculture movement, a free software movement, a peer-to-peer movement, a small government movement, an environmental movement, and a voluntary simplicity movement, taken together as a global mindshift of the collective imagination, have the potential to eliminate the need for many millions of paid jobs in the USA while providing enormous direct and indirect cost savings. This would make the unemployment situation much worse than it currently is, while paradoxically possibly improving our society and lowering taxes. Many of the current justifications for continuing social policies that may have problematical effects on the health of society, pose global security risks, or may waste prosperity in various ways is that they create vast numbers of paid jobs as a form of make-work. ...
        Increasing mental health issues like depression and autism, and increasing physical health issues like obesity and diabetes and cancer, all possibly linked to poor nutrition, stress, lack of exercise, lack of sunlight and other factors in an industrialized USA (including industrial pollution), have meant many new jobs have been created in the health care field. So, for example, coal plants don't just create jobs for coal miners, construction workers, and plant operators, they also create jobs for doctors treating the results of low-level mercury pollution poisoning people and from smog cutting down sunlight. Television not only creates jobs for media producers, but also for health care workers to treat obesity resulting from sedentary watching behavior (including not enough sunlight and vitamin D) or purchasing unhealthy products that are advertised. ...
      Macroeconomics as a mathematical discipline generally ignores the issue of precisely how physical resources are interchangeable. Before this shift in economic thinking to a more resource-based view, that question of "how" things are transformed had generally been left to other disciplines like engineering or industrial chemistry (the actual physical alchemists of our age). For one thinking in terms of resources and ecology, the question of how nutrients cycle from farm to human to sewage and then back to farm as fertilizer might be as relevant as discussing the pricing of each of those items, like biologist John Todd explores as a form of ecological economics as it relates to mainstream business opportunities. People like Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins have written related books on the idea of natural capital. For another example, the question of exactly how coal-fired power plants might connect to human health and other natural capital was previously left to the health profession or the engineering profession before this transdisciplinary shift where economists, engineers, ecologists, health professionals, and people with other interests might all work together to understand the interactions. In the process of thinking through the interactions, considerations about creating healthy and enjoyable jobs can be included in the analysis of costs and benefits to various parties including various things that are often ignored as externalities. So, a simple analysis [in the past] might indicate coal was cheaper than solar power, but a more complete analysis, like attempted in the book Brittle Power might indicate the value in shifting economic resources to the green energy sector as ultimately cheaper when all resource costs, human costs, and other opportunities are considered. These sorts of analyses have long happened informally through the political process such as with recent US political decisions moving towards a ban of new coal-fired power plants. Jane Jacobs, in her writings on the economies of cities, is one example of trying to think through the details of how specific ventures in a city affects the overall structure of that city's economy, including the creation of desirable local jobs through import replacement. A big issue of resource-based economics is to formalize this decision making process somehow, where the issue of creating good jobs locally would be weighed as one factor among many. ..."

Informative story. Mod parent up.

I just submitted your link as a Slashdot story: https://f6ffb3fa-34ce-43c1-939d-77e64deb3c0c.atarimworker.io/firehose....

What I put together circa 2010 is becoming more and more relevant:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpdfernhout.net%2Fbeyond-...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

which they posted here: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fit.slashdot.org%2Fcommen...

Thanks for the kind words about the back and forth with the by Ol Olsoc. I saw a suggestion once years ago that ideally mod points on sites like Slashdot or similar should be used to mod positive interactions between people instead of for specific comments. So I'll take that as a "+1" for our interaction. :-) I sometimes use mod points that way even if means modding up many comments in an interaction. And it is true, as I think about it, that mod points are a sort of numerical "grading" I guess -- but I can wonder why they don't quite feel the same? Maybe because they are more clearly about a specific narrow effort (one post, or one interaction) and not about a person in general? Slashdot does not give people an overall visible "grade" related to mod points received or dispensed and such, although there is a vague karma indicator.

You both may find this book of interest because you both talk about motivation whether in relation to competition or other things:
"Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us" by Daniel H. Pink"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.danpink.com%2Fbooks%2F...

A related amusing video:
"RSA ANIMATE: Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

While no doubt there is more nuance to motivation, in short, Dan Pink explains that Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose (I would lump Purpose in with Community) are major humans motivators. While extrinsic motivation like being paid-per-brick-you-place can get people to do physical jobs efficiently, intellectual jobs requiring creativity tend to be diminished by pay-per-idea rewards. Such rewards are different though from a boarder recognition of contributing (which is generally well-received and motivating).

Alfie Kohn makes a related point here on how rewards can diminish intrinsic motivation:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

Growth Mindset is tangentially related:
"What Having a "Growth Mindset" Actually Means"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhbr.org%2F2016%2F01%2Fwhat-h...

Not everyone agrees with all of this, of course, and there are various theories on all this:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

Again, to address a previous point by by Ol Olsoc and others, concerns about "grading" as done in conventional schools is not the same as not providing "feedback". The issue is what kind of feedback with what timing is useful to the person and the community.

Related on feedback from Rands in Repose:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Frandsinrepose.com%2Farch...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Frandsinrepose.com%2Farch...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Frandsinrepose.com%2Fsear...

And, as a key point, frequent feedback should go both ways:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Frandsinrepose.com%2Farch...

In general: "How Effective Feedback Fuels Performance"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gallup.com%2Fworkpla...
"Meaningful feedback is frequent.
Effective feedback has an expiration date. Feedback should be a common occurrence -- for most jobs, a few times per week. People remember their most recent experiences best, so feedback is most valuable when it occurs immediately after an action. Managers should maintain an ongoing dialogue with employees -- using conversations that offer timely, in-the-moment feedback that's inspiring, instructive and actionable."

Maybe both of you just have never had great managers? They sure seem rare...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gallup.com%2Fworkpla...
"Gallup has found that one of the most important decisions companies make is simply whom they name manager. Yet our analytics suggest they usually get it wrong. In fact, Gallup finds that companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job 82% of the time."

And an example of how assigning numbers to employees can go really wrong sometimes:
"How stack ranking corrupts culture, at Uber and Beyond"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.perdoo.com%2Fresourc...
"Creating a cutthroat culture inside your company may seem productive at first, but sooner or later it's bound to catch up -- as Uber is learning."

And:
"Stacked Ranking - A Great Way to Kill Collaboration on Agile Teams"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Finnolution.com%2Fblog%2Fst...

I've collected some stuff on being a better manager here (in part from my own frustrations over the years):
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fpdfernhout%2F...

All the best in finding approaches that work for you both to stay motivated in whatever social environments you find yourselves.

And to circle back to my original point, given all the above, what should "educational" social environments look like to keep people of any age motivated? And does that really differ from what is needed in "work" environments? Tangential, but relates to that point:
"The Three Boxes of Life [School, Work, Retirement/Leisure] and How to Get Out of Them: An Introduction to Life/Work Planning" by Nelson Bolles
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FThree-B...
A comment from there by hskydg80 from March 11, 2011: "Great concepts, just 30 years old, as are the sources pointed to in the book for more information. Concept of balancing education, work and leisure throughout life rather than overloading in each time periods is major point of book. Could see an update from interested writer to apply timeless principals to today's technology."

Thanks for the reply. The value of a grade on the context, which can be complex. Example: "William Lowell Putnam Undergraduate Mathematics Competition 2016 at Rutgers"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsites.math.rutgers.edu...
"The exam consists of two parts (morning and afternoon) with 6 problems in each part. Each problem is worth 10 points for a total of 120 points. The exam is very difficult; typically a score of 20 points (2 problems fully correct) is already good enough to be in the top 20% of exam takers. A score of 40 points will probably put you in the top 5%. Grading is very strict. There is very little partial credit given. If your solution is not well written you may earn only 1 or 2 points."

I forget exactly what score I got on the William Lowell Putnam when I took it at sixteen years old. Maybe around 20 or a little less? The university math professors still seemed impressed.

Nobody is saying don't provide timely and useful feedback or even don't keep track of progress. The issue is substituting that for typical numerical grading assigned in a typical class and all the baggage that comes with it.

Related:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.teachthought.com%2Fp...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fteaching.berkeley.edu%2F...
"Why do we grade and what are grades for? Although grading is ubiquitous in higher education, both long-standing evidence and continued investigations have revealed that the answer to these questions can be very different across courses and contexts. In recent years, multiple different grading frameworks have emerged with the goal of explicitly designing practices that reflect student learning. In particular, these approaches provide opportunities to give more constructive feedback to students, give the instructor and students reliable information about their learning, and focus on promoting students' intrinsic motivation."

Likewise, nobody is saying don't establish minimum standards for credentialing professionals. The issue is how you go about that.

See for example: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fforum.facmedicine.com%2F...
"Medical school grades are almost universally given in one of three ways. (It's actually more like two different ways, but I'll get into that later.) The more traditional programs stick to the 4.0, A-F grading scale that you're the most familiar with. That's right, your GPA nightmares will continue to haunt you every time you receive your end of semester grades in medical school. Alternatively, other schools use a binary Passor Fail scale to indicate whether or not you have acquired the minimum knowledge base to... well... err... pass. Pass/Fail medical schools have become increasingly common, but we'll discuss below why this can very misleading. ...
        I found it surprising that more than half of programs in the U.S. claim to be Pass/Fail medical schools, while only less than 20% use the A-F scale. The binary grading system has seemed to take over medical education, as other systems are being phased out. There has to be some benefit, right? ...
      The main advantage to a true Pass/Fail medical school is the perceived lower level of competition between students. Supposedly, if you are not being ranked directly against your peers, and are instead only motivated to properly learn the material, you are more likely to work cooperatively with your fellow students. More importantly, you are theoretically LESS likely to sabotage or otherwise hinder the others in your class if you are not actively competing with them for a higher grade.
        More elite medical schools (UCSF, Harvard, Mayo etc.) attract some of the most intelligent and capable students in the world. Ranking their students against one another is counter-productive. We already know that these individuals are the best of the best, and an average student at UCSF is likely a stronger candidate than one of the top students at many other schools (at least that is the idea). In these situations Pass/Fail medical school grading systems make the most sense. However, for students who go to less prestigious schools, class rankings (although stressful) can allow you to stand out.
        Additionally, competition is a major stressor on both medical students and residents alike. Residencies in certain specialties are notoriously difficult to obtain, making every exam feel like a potential career ender. Resident performance can also doom your fellowship chances. Every year students and residents are overwhelmed by the pressure put on them to succeed, and every year students drop out or (worse) even commit suicide.
        As a student who went to a straight A-F grading medical school, I will give some support to the less competition is better argument. Only a small percentage of students at my program were able to achieve the highest evaluation in each class. Predictably, there was a lot of note hoarding, elite study groups that rejected weaker students, and even (a very small amount) cheating. I had friends who were on the edge of breakdowns due to the performance stress, and Although I do not have first hand experience, I can imaging that a school with no internal ranking system would be more cooperative and congenial. Obviously, there will always be stress and competition (this is medical school after all). However, taking grades out of the picture is probably one of the most effective solutions to combat the competitive atmosphere. ..."

So, given all that, yes, surgeons who graduated from a medical school without A-F grades but instead pass/fail competency tests are probably a good choice. :-) And I'd suggest such a surgeon is likely to be more cooperative and more compassionate than a surgeon who went to a school where they were graded. Still, that is gaming your question in the sense that such elite schools as above may use previous grades in their admission policies.

To see one other flaw in grading, contrast grading and moving on with, say, a "90%" grade with "mastery learning" like Khan Academy encourages:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdistricts.khanacademy....
"Khan Academy's mastery learning system builds students understanding over time, allowing them to slow down and dig into skills where they need support or skip ahead when they show proficiency. ... Course mastery goals allow students to set their own learning goals, understand their areas of strength and areas of need, and make choices about what to focus on in order to get where they want to go."

So, ideally, I want a surgeon who has mastered every needed skill to 100% at some point during their education. Again, in such a situation, what does a "grade" assigned at the end of a course of study mean? If any student does not get 100% eventually on important skills, shouldn't that be a "fail" for the course when you think about it?

Do people need to be given grades when they read books in the library? Do people need to be given grades when they have a hobby? Do people need grades when they do home repairs on their own home? Sure, these are all situations where feedback of some sort form someone else might sometimes be useful. But what would be the value of essentially arbitrary "grades"?

Anyway, a complex nuanced topic. As I see it (informed by John Taylor Gatto, Alfie Kohn, John Holt, Pat Ferenga, Grace Llewelyn and many others), the whole schooling system is broken and has been for a long time -- and it is only getting more broken with advancing technology. I wrote about that in 2007:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpatapata.sourceforge.n...

See Alfie Kohn: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alfiekohn.org%2Farti...
====
You can tell a lot about a teacher's values and personality just by asking how he or she feels about giving grades. Some defend the practice, claiming that grades are necessary to "motivate" students. Many of these teachers actually seem to enjoy keeping intricate records of students' marks. Such teachers periodically warn students that they're "going to have to know this for the test" as a way of compelling them to pay attention or do the assigned readings - and they may even use surprise quizzes for that purpose, keeping their grade books at the ready. Frankly, we ought to be worried for these teachers' students. In my experience, the most impressive teachers are those who despise the whole process of giving grades. Their aversion, as it turns out, is supported by solid evidence that raises questions about the very idea of traditional grading.

Three Main Effects of Grading

Researchers have found three consistent effects of using - and especially, emphasizing the importance of - letter or number grades:

1. Grades tend to reduce students' interest in the learning itself. ...

2. Grades tend to reduce students' preference for challenging tasks. ...

3. Grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking. ...

More Reasons to Just Say No to Grades

The preceding three results should be enough to cause any conscientious educator to rethink the practice of giving students grades. But as they say on late-night TV commercials, Wait - there's more.

4. Grades aren't valid, reliable, or objective. ...

5. Grades distort the curriculum. ...

6. Grades waste a lot of time that could be spent on learning. ...

7. Grades encourage cheating. ...

8. Grades spoil teachers' relationships with students. ...

9. Grades spoil students' relationships with each other. ...
====

Homework is generally harmful too: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alfiekohn.org%2Farti...

And so is "competition": https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alfiekohn.org%2Farti...

Essentially, just about everything in modern schooling was *intentionally* designed to dumb down kids and make them more compliant, as John Taylor Gatto, a New York Teacher of the Year, explains:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lewrockwell.com%2F20...
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit?"

Se also by Gatto: "The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.informationliberat...
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over time this training has shaken loose from its own original logic: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle classes as well."

Me from 2007: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpatapata.sourceforge.n...
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change. ...
        So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."

The point I make on technology is not exactly the same issue as mentioned in the article (demographics) -- but I can still wonder if technology plays a part in the college town decline? Which is sad, given college towns have been such interesting places to live in the past for many people (especially as many tend to be walkable places).

Makes me think to search on elementary school closures:
"As Enrollment Declines, Districts Consider Closing Schools" By Caitlynn Peetz -- January 08, 2024
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.edweek.org%2Fleaders...
"As school districts deal with enrollment declines and the end of pandemic-era relief funds that padded their budgets for three years, more are facing one of the most controversial and impassioned decisions in K-12 education: whether to close buildings with lower enrollments.
      Districts large and small, from California to New York, are considering closures as they confront enrollment drops that have accelerated in recent years.
        And there's no sign of the trend reversing, according to David DeSchryver, the senior vice president and co-director of research at Whiteboard Advisors, a communications, research, and consulting firm.
        For many districts, enrollment declines aren't what's surprising -- projections dating as far back as 2012 showed birth rates stalling, with the decline often most pronounced in urban districts, presaging smaller student populations in the years to come, DeSchryver said.
      The surprise is just how quickly those declines have come about in the last few years. ..."

Tangential by John Taylor Gatto "The Underground History of American Education": https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.org%2Fdetails%2FTh...

A quote from there: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lewrockwell.com%2F20...
        "Solve this problem and school will heal itself: children know that schooling is not fair, not honest, not driven by integrity. They know they are devalued in classes and grades, that the institution is indifferent to them as individuals. The rhetoric of caring contradicts what school procedure and content say, that many children have no tolerable future and most have a sharply proscribed one. The problem is structural. School has been built to serve a society of associations: corporations, institutions, and agencies. Kids know this instinctively. How should they feel about it? How should we?
        As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have little trouble figuring out why, in the nature of things, government schools and those private schools which imitate the government model have to make most children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and social organization. When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates -- these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of people against people, although circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting the needs of social machinery against the needs of the human spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood, self-maintaining social mechanisms that only require human architects to get launched.
        I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? ...
        Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there. ..."

These sorts of issues become more obvious with modern technology in theory providing more options for learning and living -- even if, as with smartphones as you mention, options may actually narrow in practice due to various "supernormal stimuli" reasons. Plus there are all sorts of other cultural changes including from the increasing concentration of wealth also due in part to how we as a society have commercialized technology. And there is no evidence that wealth concentration will reverse itself soon. And as the late Marshall Brain suggested, wealth concentration will likely only get worse with the deployment
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmarshallbrain.com%2Frobo...
"With most of the rank and file employees replaced by robots and eliminated from the payroll, all of the money flowing into a large corporation has only one place to go -- upward toward the executives and shareholders. The concentration of wealth will be dramatic when robots arrive."

Also related:
"Why Is It So Hard For Recent College Graduates To Find A Decent Job?"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Fj...
"Why are Gen Zers having so much trouble finding work?"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwhyy.org%2Fepisodes%2Fjob-...
"College grads are having trouble finding work. Unemployment for young people is higher than the overall population, and some economists predict worse times are ahead."

Meanwhile, companies using AI are pulling up the ladder for many entry-level jobs:
"AI is 'breaking' entry-level jobs that Gen Z workers need to launch careers, LinkedIn exec warns"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffortune.com%2F2025%2F05%2F25...

To each your point on homework and raise a point on grading:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alfiekohn.org%2Farti...
"Instead of assuming that homework should be a given, or that it allegedly benefits children, Iâ(TM)ve spent the last few years reviewing the available research and talking to parents, teachers and students. My findings can be summarized in seven words: Homework is all pain and no gain."
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alfiekohn.org%2Farti...
"In my experience, the most impressive teachers are those who despise the whole process of giving grades. Their aversion, as it turns out, is supported by solid evidence that raises questions about the very idea of traditional grading."

So, while there are many aspects of all this, maybe young people are also just seeing college as a worse and worse proposition? Contrast with:
"The High-School Juniors With $70,000-a-Year Job Offers: Companies with shortages of skilled workers look to shop class to recruit future hires; 'like I'm an athlete getting all this attention from all these pro teams'"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Flifestyle%2F...

Homework was always a horrible idea whether involving LLMs or not, as explained by Alfie Kohn in 2012: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alfiekohn.org%2Farti...
"After spending all day in school, our children are forced to begin a second shift, with more academic assignments to be completed at home. This arrangement is rather odd when you stop to think about it, as is the fact that few of us ever do stop to think about it. Instead of assuming that homework should be a given, or that it allegedly benefits children, I've spent the last few years reviewing the available research and talking to parents, teachers and students. My findings can be summarized in seven words: Homework is all pain and no gain. ..."

Grades are evil too: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alfiekohn.org%2Farti...
"You can tell a lot about a teacher's values and personality just by asking how he or she feels about giving grades. Some defend the practice, claiming that grades are necessary to "motivate" students. Many of these teachers actually seem to enjoy keeping intricate records of students' marks. Such teachers periodically warn students that they're "going to have to know this for the test" as a way of compelling them to pay attention or do the assigned readings - and they may even use surprise quizzes for that purpose, keeping their grade books at the ready. Frankly, we ought to be worried for these teachers' students. In my experience, the most impressive teachers are those who despise the whole process of giving grades. Their aversion, as it turns out, is supported by solid evidence that raises questions about the very idea of traditional grading. ..."

Even before LLMs, computing technology has made schools-as-we-know-them obsolete (as far as educating people as any of joyful healthy humans, engaged citizens, or even skilled independent workers), as I wrote about in 2007: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpatapata.sourceforge.n...
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change. ...
        So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."

For any school teacher who can accept these ideas, you have my sympathy for trying to make the best of the situation for yourself and your students. John Taylor Gatto is a good example there:
"The Underground History of American Education: A School Teacher's Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.org%2Fdetails%2FTh...

So, yes, LLMs and other AI may accelerate the slow-motion crisis of all this.

I like your idea of encouraging people to use LLMs as tutors. CMU was doing intelligent tutoring work in the 1980s. Looks like they have made some general progress since:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cmu.edu%2Fnews%2Fstori...
"Intelligent tutoring systems have been shown to be effective in helping to teach certain subjects, such as algebra or grammar, but creating these computerized systems is difficult and laborious. Now, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have shown they can rapidly build them by, in effect, teaching the computer to teach."

The biggest thing conventional schooling has going for it is that it is a community. It might be a dysfunctional community in many regards, but it is still a community. The biggest thing I have seen from my own experiments with recent AI and other sources is that it undermines community. For example:
"StackOverflow activity down to 2008 numbers"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2Fsingu...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdevelopers.slashdot.or...

If schools can help community survive in the age of AI, that at least would be a very good thing.

As I outlined in 2008: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pdfernhout.net%2Fpos...
""""
Some comments on the PU Economics department and related research directions from a post-scarcity perspective

The PU economics department, of course, should be abolished as part of this transition. :-)

OK, that will never happen, so it should be at least "strongly admonished" for past misbehavior. :-(

What misbehavior? Essentially, the PU Economics department has taken part in a global effort to build an economic "psychofrakulator". How does a psychofrakulator work? Consider a paraphrase of something Doc Heller says in the movie Mystery Men:
        http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01...
"Dr. Heller: It's a psychofrakulator. They used to say it couldn't be built. The equations were so complex that most of the scientists that worked on it wound up in the insane asylum [in Chicago]. ... It creates a cloud of [dollar denomiated] radically-fluctuating free-deviant chaotrons which penetrate the synaptic relays [via television]. It's concatenated with a synchronous transport switch [of values from long term seven generation life-affirming love of caring to short-term immediate profit and immediate gratification suicidal death-affirming love of money] that creates a virtual tributary [back to large corporations]. It's focused onto a biobolic reflector [of the elite controlled mass media] and what happens is that [economic] hallucinations become reality and the [global] brain [and global ecosystem] is literally fried from within."

Or in other words:
        "Screwed: What 30 Years of Conservative Economics Feels Like"
        https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%2F20...
Or:
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
And:
        "Obituary: Conservative Economic Policy"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%2F20...
"Conservative economic policy is dead. It committed suicide. Its allegiance to market solutions, tax cuts and spending cuts, supply-side nonsense, manipulative and corrosive ties to industry and the rich, have left it wholly unable to cope with the challenges we face. Its terribly limited toolbox simply cannot address the economic insecurities and opportunities generated by today's global, interconnected, polluted, insecure, dynamic, bubble-prone economy. ..."...

From Schumacher:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%2F20...
"Economists themselves, like most specialists, normally suffer from a kind of metaphysical blindness, assuming that theirs is a science of absolute and invariable truths, without any presuppositions. Some go as far as to claim that economic laws are as free from "metaphysics" or "values" as the law of gravitation. We need not, however, get involved in arguments of methodology. Instead, let us take some fundamentals and see what they look like when viewed by a modern economist and a Buddhist economist."

Should the PU economics department wish to stay intact rather than move en masse to another university, the calculus of infinites mentioned at the start of this essay is one new direction for their research and teaching.

But, if PU economists still want to make charts and theories about finite things (they're good at that, obviously, and it is labor that they seem to love to do, see Schumacher :-), then what they need to start looking at and charting are physical concepts like Ray Kurzweil considers here:
        "The Law of Accelerating Returns"
        https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%2F20...

PU economists could graph historical trends over time like:
* increasing computation delivered per unit mass of silicon,
* the increasing amount of freely licensed software and other content,
* the increasing percentage of human attention devoted to free content,
* the increasing electrical energy captured per unit mass for windmills,
* the increasing incarceration rate per capita in the USA,
* the decreasing amount of time it takes a solar collector to repay the energy used in its manufacture,
* the decreasing ground crew size per space rocket launch,
* the decreasing topsoil depth per capita,
* the decreasing global biodiversity, and so on.

Obviously, they'd also want to look at other things at websites like this for more ideas:
        "Redefining Progress: Shifting public policy to achieve a sustainable economy, a healthy environment and a just society"
        https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%2F20...

Like Kurzweil, PU economists could start applying their skills to charting trends in the real basis of prosperity. They need to move beyond charting derived trends that are social constructions like fluctuations in fiat currency. They need to start admitting that as a fiat currency system breaks down with a transition to the emerging post-scarcity economy, dollars are no longer a very good way to measure things (if they ever were). They need to remember that currency is as arbitrary system related to a current economic control system which is rapidly becoming obsolete. Fiat dollars are essentially ration units, and rationing is becoming obsolete as part of the emerging post-scarcity society. For example, personal internet bandwidth use and server disk space are now so cheap as to be effectively "too cheap to matter" except in the most extreme cases for some small number of individuals. So, PU economists need to get back to basics and start charting real physically measurable (or estimateable) things. And then they need to think about the interrelations of those real things. Essentially, they can still use a lot of their old skills at analysis, but rather than apply them to one thing, money, they need to apply them to thousands of individual measurements of aspects of life-support and production. And the challenge will be in seeing how to make predictions about systems where these thousands of factors are difficult to interchange for each other (for example, topsoil depth versus sewing machine production).

The historic focus of PU economists on charting changes in social constructions (fiat dollars) instead of changes in technological capacity that is one cause of PU economists failing to predict a post-scarcity society. It is no surprise it took someone like Ray Kurzweil to be able to handle both the mathematical content and the technological content to provide his analysis of the timing of a post-scarcity transition (or even broader singularity). However, just because Kurzweil is good at seeing the trends leading up to a singularity in our society, does not mean that he can see beyond it (and he admits this). So it is important to understand that the policy proposals Kurzweil suggests come out of his own longstanding conservative/libertarian financial perspective as a self-made technology millionaire.

The exact shape of a future society in terms of what core priorities and values it reflects is still up in the air, and may well be very different then the propertarian approach Kurzweil assumes:
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
as opposed to, say, libertarian socialism:
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
or something else much broader as a gift economy:
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
or something much narrower as an internet mediated central planning like Chile's Cybersyn pioneered in the 1970s:
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

There could be a fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration between PU economists with their charting skills for historical trends and PU engineers with their technical knowledge of what physical characteristics of systems are important to production.

In general, economists need to look at what are major sources of *real* cost as opposed to *fiat* cost in producing anything. Only then can one make a complete control system to manage resources within those real limits, perhaps using arbitrary fiat dollars as part of a rationing process to keep within the real limits and meet social objectives (or perhaps not, if the cost of enforcing rationing for some things like, say, home energy use or internet bandwidth exceeds the benefits).

Here is a sample meta-theoretical framework PU economists no doubt could vastly improve on if they turned their minds to it. Consider three levels of nested perspectives on the same economic reality -- physical items, decision makers, and emergent properties of decision maker interactions. (Three levels of being or consciousness is a common theme in philosophical writings, usually rock, plant, and animal, or plant, animal, and human.)

At a first level of perspective, the world we live in at any point in time can be considered to have physical content like land or tools or fusion reactors like the sun, energy flows like photons from the sun or electrons from lightning or in circuits, informational patterns like web page content or distributed language knowledge, and active regulating processes (including triggers, amplifiers, and feedback loops) built on the previous three types of things (physicality, energy flow, and informational patterns) embodied in living creatures, bi-metallic strip thermostats, or computer programs running on computer hardware.

One can think of a second perspective on the first comprehensive one by picking out only the decision makers like bi-metallic strips in thermostats, computer programs running on computers, and personalities embodied in people and maybe someday robots or supercomputers, and looking at their characteristics as individual decision makers.

One can then think of a third level of perspective on the second where decision makers may invent theories about how to control each other using various approaches like internet communication standards, ration unit tokens like fiat dollars, physical kanban tokens, narratives in emails, and so on. What the most useful theories are for controlling groups of decision makers is an interesting question, but I will not explore it in depth. But I will pointing out that complex system dynamics at this third level of perspective can emerge whether control involves fiat dollars, "kanban" tokens, centralized or distributed optimization based on perceived or predicted demand patterns, human-to-human discussions, something else entirely, or a diverse collection of all these things. And I will also point out that one should never confuse the reality of the physical system being controlled for the control signals (money, spoken words, kanban cards, internet packet contents, etc.) being passed around in the control system.

The above is somewhat inspired by "cybernetics".
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

So, I'd suggest, should the PU Economics Department faculty be kept on, the department should be renamed the "Princeton University Cybernetics Department" with there being an "historical economics" subsection all the current economics faculty are assigned to, and one faculty member each from the PU Department of Religion, the PU Department of History, and the PU department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering be put in as an acting team triumvirate leadership of the larger department. :-) As economics faculty broaden their research, then they could move into other new Cybernetics department sections. See also:
        "The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society" by Norbert Wiener
        http://www.amazon.com/Human-Us...

What is more pressing in understanding a post-scarcity economy is seeing what real physical limits exist currently and how they could change over time. This requires examining physical production from first principles, since only when one understands the physical limits of a system does a discussion of various control systems and their strengths and weaknesses make sense.

The essentials to producing anything in general are:
* Human time (or other decision making time)
* Energy
* Raw Materials
* Tooling
* Transportation
[* Knowledge -- like C. H. Douglas talked about justifying "Social Credit"]

Plus there is maybe the effort involved in cleaning up environmental or social damage. In classical economics there is also "rent" for access to money or land or copyrights or patents and so on, but for the sake of a physical analysis we can ignore that because rent is an arbitrary social construction related to rationing, and so is a higher level concept.

On replacing human time with computers and automation in a couple decades, see, for background:
        "Kurzweil says, by the 2020s we'll be ... building machines as smart as ourselves."
        http://science.slashdot.org/ar...

And to see what is happening right now:
        "Supercomputer Simulates Human Visual System"
        http://tech.slashdot.org/artic...

What cool things can be done with the 100,000+ cores of the first petaflop supercomputer, the Roadrunner, that were impossible to do before? Because our brain is massively parallel, with a relatively small amount of communication over long distances, and is made of unreliable, imprecise components, it's quite easy to simulate large chunks of it on supercomputers. The Roadrunner has been up only for about a week, and researchers from Los Alamos National Lab are already reporting inaugural simulations of the human visual system, aiming to produce a machine that can see and interpret as well as a human. After examining the results, the researchers 'believe they can study in real time the entire human visual cortex.' How long until we can simulate the entire brain?

It's amazing to me how quickly sci-fi supposedly set in the 24th century is becoming reality:
        "Star Trek TNG: The Game (episode)"
        https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmemory-alpha.fandom.co...
"Wesley and Robin investigate the [video game] device in sickbay, [using a computer simulation of the human visual system and other brain systems] and determine that it has a psychotropically addictive side-effect, and that it stimulates increased serotonin production. Most worryingly, it also stimulates the brain's higher reasoning area."

And it doesn't take human level AI or vision to do the kind of things ants can do -- gather materials and process them chemically. So we will see big changes before human AI, even if human level AI for some reason was impossible or undesirable.

Looking at things from this perspective, how can everything become free as computer costs decrease? Well, if you use robotics and automation, the human time goes away as a necessity. If human-equivalent time is free, then there is no human time cost to the other items as well. So, say for energy, with free labor, you only need the other categories to make more energy producing equipment, at which point you have all the free energy you want. So, with free labor and free energy, to get free raw materials all you need is tooling and transportation. And with free labor, energy, and raw materials, you get tooling if you you have transportation, But with free labor, energy, raw materials, and tooling, then you have the ingredients for free transportation. And with free everything else, the robots and computers are free too. Ultimately, there are only two costs to anything -- labor and rent (ignoring the destruction of environmental capital). Since rent is societally determined, if labor is free (via computer driven robots) then everything can be free eventually. Granted, there are *physical* limits involving how fast you can do something with the robots or 3D printers on hand. Those physical time limits and their interdependencies are well worth studying by a new breed of post-scarcity economists. But in practice, if you look at nature, the long term limits are more like incident sunlight and our planet has tens of thousands times more incident sunlight then our current society would need if it was all electric. Most materials can be recycled and so do no pose limits. So as computing replaces labor, everything can eventually be "free", as long as physical capital is produced faster than it wears out or is consumed. No doubt many of the mathematical techniques economists have developed for thinking about imaginary things like fiat dollar return on investment may have some applicability to more complex models considering energy return on an investment of energy, or computational return on an investment of mass, or the sustainable yield of consumer product mass from a productive physical system with a certain target growth rate of mass and energy converted into robots given tooling wear, and so on. Here is a paper prototype of such an analysis system which considers tool wear in relation to expanding industrial capacity:
        http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
""""

My comments from 2000 on that: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdougengelbart.org%2Fcoll...
""""
========= machine intelligence is already here =========

I personally think machine evolution is unstoppable, and the best hope for humanity is the noble cowardice of creating refugia and trying, like the duckweed, to create human (and other) life faster than other forces can destroy it.

Note, I'm not saying machine evolution won't have a human component -- in that sense, a corporation or any bureaucracy is already a separate machine intelligence, just not a very smart or resilient one. This sense of the corporation comes out of Langdon Winner's book "Autonomous Technology: Technics out of control as a theme in political thought".
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%2F20...

You may have a tough time believing this, but Winner makes a convincing case. He suggests that all successful organizations "reverse-adapt" their goals and their environment to ensure their continued survival.

These corporate machine intelligences are already driving for better machine intelligences -- faster, more efficient, cheaper, and more resilient. People forget that corporate charters used to be routinely revoked for behavior outside the immediate public good, and that corporations were not considered persons until around 1886 (that decision perhaps being the first major example of a machine using the political/social process of its own ends).
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%2F20...

Corporate charters are granted supposedly because society believe it is in the best interest of *society* for corporations to exist.

But, when was the last time people were able to pull the "charter" plug on a corporation not acting in the public interest? It's hard, and it will get harder when corporations don't need people to run themselves. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%2F20...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%2F20...

I'm not saying the people in corporations are evil -- just that they often have very limited choices of actions. If a corporate CEOs do not deliver short term profits they are removed, no matter what they were trying to do. Obviously there are exceptions for a while -- William C. Norris of Control Data was one of them, but in general, the exception proves the rule. Fortunately though, even in the worst machines (like in WWII Germany) there were individuals who did what they could to make them more humane ("Schindler's List" being an example).

Look at how much William C. Norris ( https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%2F19... ) of Control Data got ridiculed in the 1970s for suggesting the then radical notion that "business exists to meet society's unmet needs". Yet his pioneering efforts in education, employee assistance plans, on-site daycare, urban renewal, and socially-responsible investing are in part what made Minneapolis/St.Paul the great area it is today. Such efforts are now being duplicated to an extent by other companies. Even the company that squashed CDC in the mid 1980s (IBM) has adopted some of those policies and directions. So corporations can adapt when they feel the need.

Obviously, corporations are not all powerful. The world still has some individuals who have wealth to equal major corporations. There are several governments that are as powerful or more so than major corporations. Individuals in corporations can make persuasive pitches about their future directions, and individuals with controlling shares may be able to influence what a corporation does (as far as the market allows). In the long run, many corporations are trying to coexist with people to the extent they need to. But it is not clear what corporations (especially large ones) will do as we approach this singularity -- where AIs and robots are cheaper to employ than people. Today's corporation, like any intelligent machine, is more than the sum of its parts (equipment, goodwill, IP, cash, credit, and people). It's "plug" is not easy to pull, and it can't be easily controlled against its short term interests.

What sort of laws and rules will be needed then? If the threat of corporate charter revocation is still possible by governments and collaborations of individuals, in what new directions will corporations have to be prodded? What should a "smart" corporation do if it sees this coming? (Hopefully adapt to be nicer more quickly. :-) What can individuals and governments do to ensure corporations "help meet society's unmet needs"?

Evolution can be made to work in positive ways, by selective breeding, the same way we got so many breeds of dogs and cats. How can we intentionally breed "nice" corporations that are symbiotic with the humans that inhabit them? To what extent is this happening already as talented individuals leave various dysfunctional, misguided, or rouge corporations (or act as "whistle blowers")? I don't say here the individual directs the corporation against its short term interest. I say that individuals affect the selective survival rates of corporations with various goals (and thus corporate evolution) by where they choose to work, what they do there, and how they interact with groups that monitor corporations. To that extent, individuals have some limited control over corporations even when they are not shareholders. Someday, thousands of years from now, corporations may finally have been bred to take the long term view and play an "infinite game".

========= saving what we can in the worst case =========

However, if preparations fail, and if we otherwise cannot preserve our humanity as is (physicality and all), we must at least adapt with grace whatever of our best values we can preserve or somehow embody in future systems. So, an OHS/DKR to that end (determining our best values, and strategies to preserve them) would be of value as well. ...
""""

Note: I may think more options are possible now -- including a perspective shift as implied in my sig from scarcity thinking to abundance thinking in how we use AI, robotics, the internet, biotech, nanotech, nuclear energy, bureaucracy, and other tools or abundance. And as I expand on here:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpdfernhout.net%2Frecogni...
"Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."

"The internet is probably going to basically collapse at least a section of it that produced all the free content we've been enjoying. The AI bullshit will consume it but then the internet will be full of AI slop and nothing else and then as things change the AI won't have anything to train itself on except more slop."

See also to support your point: "The Dark Forest and Generative AI: Proving you're a human on a web flooded with generative AI content"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmaggieappleton.com%2Fai-...
"There's a swirl of optimism around how these models will save us from a suite of boring busywork: writing formal emails, internal memos, technical documentation, marketing copy, product announcement, advertisements, cover letters, and even negotiating with medical insurance companies . But we'll also need to reckon with the trade-offs of making insta-paragraphs and 1-click cover images. These new models are poised to flood the web with generic, generated content. ... Weâ(TM)re about to drown in a sea of pedestrian takes. An explosion of noise that will drown out any signal. Goodbye to finding original human insights or authentic connections under that pile of cruft. Many people will say we already live in this reality. Weâ(TM)ve already become skilled at sifting through unhelpful piles of âoeoptimised contentâ designed to gather clicks and advertising impressions. ... But I think the sheer volume and scale of what's coming will be meaningfully different. And I think we're unprepared. Or at least, I am. ..."

Thank you for posting on these important issues. You might like this (main CG website is gone, sadly):
"The Mythology of Wealth by conceptualguerilla.com"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fkai-zen.livejournal.co...

As an analogy, I spent decades commenting (including on Slashdot) about the exponential growth of solar power -- while just about everyone denied the implications. Even major solar energy finance predictors would draw graphs where the exponential line suddenly turned flat at the current year and they did this for *decades*. Meanwhile "Peak Oil" hysteria rages during that time with many people going on about the "Mad Max" future we faced from running out of oil. Now I can buy a 100 watt solar panel from Amazon that is about US$50 delivered. I have to wonder if the same thing is happening with people denying the societal implications oft the exponential growth of AI and other automation?

And, as another energy-related analogy, other people went on -- and still do - -about global climate change caused by burning fossil fuels, when any reasonable (to my mind) "grid parity" projection showed that solar (admittedly with problematic-but-improving batteries) was being reached and surpassed for electricity and eventually also for heat (in conjunction with energy efficiency and heat pumps). Grid parity from the continuing drop of the cost of solar power (and other renewables like wind) essentially means that even with the massive subsidies fossil fuels have from depletion allowances and military defense spending for long supply lines and ignoring most environmental damage from fossil fuels, it will just be financially foolish to burn fossil fuels for power in the near future even in the current economic system. So it seems to me that global climate change due to burning fossil fuels is about to end in the next decade or two for these economic reasons. Again, is this persistent denialism of the likely effects of AI (and other automation etc) the same sorts of thing?

The video "Humans Need Not Apply" suggests most humans will sooner be as unemployable as horses generally are now. (The title of which echoes a joking sign in an image from an earlier video I made on "The Richest Man in the World" essentially suggesting a basic income as one solution.) A follow-up:
"Is AI Still Doom? (Humans Need Not Apply - 10 Years Later)"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

Granted, there is a lot of hype about AI and especially LLMs -- but the undeniable fact is that Machine Learning in general is making continual progress and is increasingly used throughout the economy. A recent comment I made elsewhere on that:
"Amara's law & rates of AI and robotic change"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsoylentnews.org%2Fcommen...

While there may be legitimate-seeming reasons why MIT wants that paper pre-print removed, I have to wonder if the request is in part because of the conclusion of that paper that AI used at work makes most workers unhappier? And maybe that clashes with university research funding goals about promoting AI?

Langdon Winner was denied tenure at MIT decades ago in part because he claimed that the very nature of the educational process at MIT prevented MIT students from seeing the social consequences of what they were doing. Presumably most other MIT professors and administrators really disliked that suggestion.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...
"In 1980 Winner proposed that technologies embody social relations, i.e. power. To the question he poses "Do Artifacts Have Politics?", Winner identifies two ways in which artifacts can have politics. The first, involving technical arrangements and social order, concerns how the invention, design, or arrangement of artifacts or the larger system becomes a mechanism for settling the affairs of a community. This way "transcends the simple categories of 'intended' and 'unintended' altogether", representing "instances in which the very process of technical development is so thoroughly biased in a particular direction that it regularly produces results heralded as wonderful breakthroughs by some social interests and crushing setbacks by others" (Winner, p. 25-6, 1999). It implies that the process of technological development is critical in determining the politics of an artifact; hence the importance of incorporating all stakeholders in it. (Determining who the stakeholders are and how to incorporate them are other questions entirely.)
      The second way in which artifacts can have politics refers to artifacts that correlate with particular kinds of political relationships, which Winner refers to as inherently political artifacts (Winner, p. 22, 1999). He distinguishes between two types of inherently political artifacts: those that require a particular sociological system and those that are strongly compatible with a particular sociological system (Winner, p. 29, 1999). A further distinction is made between conditions internal to the workings of a given technical system and those that are external to it (Winner, p. 33, 1999). This second way in which artifacts can have politics can be further articulated as consisting of four 'types' of artifacts: those requiring a particular internal sociological system, those compatible with a particular internal sociological system, those requiring a particular external sociological system, and those compatible with a particular external sociological system."

So does AI technology also "embody social relations, i.e. power"? Is it possible that for the same reason MIT wanted Langdon Winner gone, maybe MIT wants a paper critical of the social implications of AI removed?

I have not read the criticized paper, so this is just speculation -- and maybe someone might argues it is also a bit of sour grapes MIT bashing since they turned down my undergrad application when Caltech accepted me (even if I did not go there either).

From the sadly late Marshall Brain's "Robotic Nation" series from 2003 or so:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmarshallbrain.com%2Frobo...
"With most of the rank and file employees replaced by robots and eliminated from the payroll, all of the money flowing into a large corporation has only one place to go -- upward toward the executives and shareholders. The concentration of wealth will be dramatic when robots arrive."

I believe the most important aspect of dealing with the perils and promises of AI and other technological advances is a change of heart from a scarcity perspective to an abundance perspective. That is similar to what Albert Einstein said about nuclear weapons:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Finteltoday.org%2F2018%2F10...
"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
(Of course, digital watches these days probably have more computing power than the computers used to design the first atomic weapons, and time tracking itself has other concerns, so even watchmaking is not completely morally free-of-conflicts...)

Here are some of my thoughts on all this from circa 2010 outlining about fifty options (both positive and negative ones):
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpdfernhout.net%2Fbeyond-...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

Other thoughts on this from 2008:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pdfernhout.net%2Fpos...
"Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg?
        These four projects all represent post-scarcity trends relating to a small local investment yielding huge results globally. A few million US dollars on Wikipedia turned into millions of person-hours of global labor (taken mostly from TV viewing) to yield a global multi-lingual resource that is changing the face of education worldwide. A college student (and grandson of a poet) named Linus Torvalds developed Linux in Finland, and, along with others' contributions (both volunteer and done while on payrolls), that free software now makes possible huge server farms and huge supercomputers (which previously were slowed by the inability to customize proprietary software, as well as essentially a tax per CPU); those supercomputers are promising all sorts of wonders including new medicines. A few million dollars spent developing WordNet at Princeton has led to a "cognitive revolution" in software that can process text. GNU/Linux and WordNet together made possible Google as it is now. While Google may have annual operating costs in the billions of dollars, it is saving trillions of dollars worth of time spent researching, and it is also improving the quality and timeliness of information used to make important decisions globally. In each case, a relatively small initial investment has produced enormous global benefits. Encyclopedic knowledge is no longer scarce. End-user modifiable software is no longer scarce. The ability to intelligently process text is no longer scarce. Timely answers to certain questions are no longer scarce.
        And those trends continue to the point where, say, for *only* US$600 billion (plus some more for communications infrastructure in some places) everyone on the planet can have a personal laptop with access to all these services and others, including free-to-the-user voice communications. US$600 billion is about a fifth of the current projected total cost of the Iraq war. And if a family shares one laptop, this might only cost about $200 billion, or about the size to a recent mailing of "rebate" checks to US Americans intended to prevent recession. And the potential benefits of a connected planet to help everyone become prosperous together in a diverse and democratic way is enormous. Even just one breakthrough innovation, like, say, a general cure for cancer, developed by, say, a woman in Africa studying pond water who might otherwise not have received an education, might pay back that $200 billion investment a hundred fold. And, if $200 billion still sounds too expensive right now for a chance at world peace and prosperity, extrapolating from Moore's law, in another ten years, it might only cost US$20 billion ($10/laptop) to give every family such a laptop. And in ten years after that, US$2 billion ($1/laptop, same as some electronic greeting cards now integrating paper, printing, and circuitry). Or, essentially, at that point twenty years from now, the laptops are free, compared to the benefits and other cost savings (like not needing to mail paper as often).
        And, as will be mentioned later, everything that digital computing touches is seeing falling cost trends. Even food, despite the current grim news of food shortages from speculation, can and will get cheaper through agricultural robots and precision farming, and with another benefit of less environmental impact.
        http://www.google.com/search?h...
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
        These exponential trends in rising capacity and dropping costs illustrate a very different future than the increasingly competitive gloom and doom ones most conventional economists tend to paint for the short term. They even suggest a future where money itself may be less and less important as a control system for day-to-day activities. As Ray Kurzweil [and before him, Roy Amara] puts it:
        http://www.kurzweilai.net/arti...
        "Most technology forecasts ignore altogether this "historical exponential view" of technological progress. That is why people tend to overestimate what can be achieved in the short term (because we tend to leave out necessary details), but underestimate what can be achieved in the long term (because the exponential growth is ignored)."
        We are witnessing a historic end to scarcity of many things (maybe not all, but enough to be a new global Renaissance). But is Princeton University helping prepare either students or the rest of society for these changes? Or is it instead an institution under stress, crashing into these trends instead of moving with them? Or is it perhaps conflicted in how it sees itself and its future, and so trying to do both these conflicting approaches at once? :-) "

Maybe I should have instead (or also) have written "Post-Scarcity MIT"? :-)

I have been at companies that make engineered wood products. In this case think of a 4"x12" wooden I-beam. This isn't all they made, but they were pretty much in the wood I-beam business. They were as strong, or stronger, than identically sized solid wood and significantly less expensive.

That said, it is very rare to see a wood I-beam in construction. The reason was simple. People who wanted a big piece of wood wanted it to look a certain way. People who didn't want wood didn't want wood, nothing was changing that either.

As in other ventures, I hope the best for them. I am sure they will find some clients. That said, I do not expect to see it start a revolution.