> We are centuries into the deep automation of certain things, like looms, but people with deep understanding of those things are still needed to guide the automation and keep it working to meet human needs.

The difference this time is that the thing they're trying to automate is intelligence. The goal is a machine that's as smart as a Nobel Prize winner or a good CEO, across all fields of human intellectual endeavor, and which works for dollars an hour. The goal is also for this machine to be infinitely copyable for the cost of some GPUs and hard drives.

The next goal after that will be to give that machine hands, so that it can do any physical labor or troubleshooting a human can do. And again, the goal is for the hands to be cheaper to produce and cheaper to automate than humans.

You may ask yourself, who would need humans in a future where all intellectual and physical tasks can be done better and cheaper by a machine? You may also ask yourself, who would control the machines? You may ask yourself, what leverage would ordinary humans have in a future that no longer needed them for anything? Or perhaps you would not ask those questions.

But this is the future investors are dreaming of, and the future that they're investing trillions of dollars to reach. That's the dream.

I think people feel that once the pool of humans required to do a thing diminishes to the point that their occupation is rare enough to be invisible, that is essentially the same as "fully automating" it.

I have certainly never met anyone who works in "loom engineering" in my entire life.