The Jock walks into the room wearing his Phenotype credentials. The Nerd needs you to inspect something. Ideally something you cannot understand without his assistance.

In Clique Theory, the repository serves a social function beyond containing software. It makes a concealed advantage legible and negotiable. Here is evidence of my mind. It is Phenotype Expression itself, in a manner of speaking. "Here is why I should be paid. Here is why the unfortunate situation with the rest of the phenotype should not settle the matter." A civilization of Nerds built elaborate institutions for converting this evidence into money, authority and occasional eye contact. Fair enough. It was a living.

AI interferes with the conversion. You're intellect remains yours. Unfortunately, the artifact through which people used to recognize it can now be produced by someone whose intellectual credentials you would previously have refused to countersign. The output ceases to reliably identify the producer. You can still be the smartest man in the room while discovering that the room no longer cares, if it ever did.

Hence the peculiar developer objection that AI cannot operate "at a high level" or "understand System Design." Sometimes the criticism identifies an actual failure. Good. Show the failure. But sometimes "System Design" becomes a retreating jurisdiction encompassing whatever the model was not asked to do. Nobody supplied a consistency requirement, a trust boundary, a recovery objective or even a coherent account of who uses the thing. Say the model was given a bounded implementation assignment, which it completed. Now, it's being reprimanded for failing to become the product sponsor. Apparently a function is only intelligent when it independently discovers the business strategy and schedules a difficult conversation with Sales.

There are real questions about invariants, failure domains, migrations and operational ownership. Ask those questions. "It cannot architect" is a rather grand conclusion to extract from your decision to use it as autocomplete imho. The Idea Guy was allegedly worthless for twenty years if you asked most Nerds. His responsibilities have suddenly become the last sacred precinct of human consciousness.

The same distinction matters in the butthurt mathematicians’ arguments about OpenAI. A bad proof should be killed. Check the quantifiers. Find the missing hypothesis. Nobody owes a model a courtesy theorem. But the interesting specimen imho is the critic whose correctness objection gradually becomes an objection to the social provenance of correctness. Someone might arrive at the result without undergoing the approved sequence of humiliations. The proof may eventually survive. The apprenticeship monopoly may not. One can understand the irritation without recognizing it as a new branch of mathematics imho.

The Jock’s position is more immediately intelligible (much like, all too often, his Height) . His display remains attached to him. The machine can describe his shoulders. It cannot put them on you. Eventually somebody has to attend the barbecue. This is the stubborn advantage of the Expressed Phenotype. Presence has an attribution mechanism that a repository lacks. The body shows up. There it is. Champ.

Losers are harder to price. They may end up acquiring unprecedented productive capacity and yet persist in bombing job interviews, or in not getting interviews. The jury is out imo. If competence becomes cheap, Phenotype may just become all the more salient. Perhaps not unlike in other eras where labor was in oversupply and commodified as fuck, the idea that work could yield status for an individual didn't exist afaik. The Romans looked on at any form of labor that was in the service of another. Maybe we'll be going back to that sort of value system. Actually, it was the value system all along if you read between the lines, but soon, the Veil will be Pierced. Discuss.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5911669&forum_id=2#50183008)