We are not smart

"I can figure this out."

A follow-up to We are the slop and AI Isn't the Problem, HI is:

As has been the case for four years now, I saw yet another piece claiming "intelligence explosion imminent, we're all going to be unemployed at any moment." 

The AI job apocalypse has been imminent for 4+ years. And now, the US is about to set the record for the longest stretch with unemployment under 55 ever. In terms of employment, these four years have been most of the best years the United States has ever had. In terms of employment, no time during "the good old days" has been better than now.

It is not intelligent to ignore simple facts.

On the broader point, I will defer to Tyler Cowen. Key excerpt:

Most of sub-Saharan Africa still does not have reliable clean water. The intelligence required for that is not scarce. We cannot so readily do it.

And when Dwarkesh asked what the specific bottlenecks were, Cowen answered:

Humans. Here they are. Bottleneck, bottleneck.

Tyler than argues that people in Silicon Valley overestimate the importance of intelligence because they're surrounded by unusually intelligent [sic] people. 

But they are not smart enough to realize that their world is not the world. They are not smart enough to know that their job is not every job. They are not smart enough to realize they can't extrapolate from their own experiences to the entire economy. They aren't smart enough to notice that intelligence is not everything. Coordination, incentives, trust, institutional capacity, politics, greed, envy and jealousy, lust <coughJensencough>, and willingness to change -- all those trump intelligence.

It is not intelligent to ignore the vast majority of what drives the world.

Those failures of Silicon Valley intelligence are the failures of all of us.