Dairypharmer mentioned it but in the late 90s-early 2000s, you could find a lot of folks on Slashdot saying that there was no point majoring in computer science or learning to program because all those jobs were going to be outsourced to India soon anyway.
One of the issues with academia and academic training is it defines intelligence very narrowly. For example, it teaches people that simply having the right answer (or even just saying the right answer) is enough to be "smart". And then these smart people get out in the world and struggle because they learned a lot of "correct answers" but they didn't learn bigger things like: how to solve a problem, how sometimes people don't like you when you seemingly have the correct answer, how to account for all sorts of things you don't know outside the confines of a test question or assignment, or how to get the social buy in to actually do the correct thing (because "people liking you enough to do what you suggest" can be just as important as actually knowing what to do, if not moreso).
The other thing is the academic environment teaches a competitive intelligence but in many business situations you need many kinds of intelligence. If you are not good at sales but you're selling something, a social butterfly sales person can make or break you. An actual project manager that knows how to run a project can be worth more than gold. An accountant can keep your books better than you can even if you are broadly better at math in general because tax law is its own thing.
Further, intelligence overall isn't broadly applicable to many areas. Think of the doctors and lawyers who don't know how to open a PDF or the many programmers who blow off license agreements and legal documents until they get sued.
Academia gives you a narrow definition and scope of intelligence. The world is much more complicated.
I mean most of the "AI" companies are all about copying everyone else's intellectual property, why not just start copying companies wholesale? That seems like real bigbrain time.
1. Nobody has really convincingly shown a "killer app" that the mass market and/or regular people need or want or even desire. So far it's techies selling to techies with massive losses and "don't worry we will eventually make a profit somehow, now hold this bag."
2. Remembering when I was a lad in the late 90s that there was a common thread of wisdom that all the IT and techie and programming jobs were just going to be outsourced to India anyway so everyone was doomed.
Hell, you don't even have to go that far back. Remember when we were all going to be working and playing in the Metaverse on our fancy headsets after the bigbrains all went to Burning Man or whatever and came back talking about it and then decided nope?
They're gonna full self drive the tesla roadster all the way there and since they'll have all that time to kill, they are gonna make Twitter the everything app ans also the global town square.
I don't want my washer and dryer to connect to wifi and use an app to send a push notification that only works if I pay a subscription fee and set up an online profile when my laundry is done and then send me push ads and email upsells every day for the rest of my life. I want them to go BRRRRRRTTTTTTTTTTT loud enough for me to hear and ignore and I'll get to it when I get to it.
Also I can't wait for these same articles about AI everything.
