Badpenguin,
I truly hope you are right, and A.I. turns out to be a nothing-burger.
You suggested in your post that A.I. functions may not be "worth it", if you have to check its work. In the legal field, I would argue, this is not true. With some regularity, I use the A.I. feature on Westlaw--legal research software for lawyers, which just incorporated an A.I. search function. Because I worry the A.I. feature might get things wrong, I check all the important citations every time I use it. However, after a few months of use, this feature has not once been wrong. I am still going to check it. More important than this, checking the cite is way quicker than doing the research from scratch. As a result, lawyers who successfully make use of this feature are more productive. More productive individual lawyers results in large employers of legal labor hiring fewer lawyers.
It might be, as you suggest, that A.I. has less of an impact. I don't really think that changes the fundamental premise of my point for aspiring pool players. The cost of education is exceedingly high (for "normal" people), and the pay-off is not what it used to be. In the near term, I still think there is an over-supply of white-collar labor (unless maybe we are talking about work in the sciences). This over-supply, combined with the cost of education, and technological advances (even if A.I. doesn't kill us all), means that simply telling kids to stay in school is too simplistic.
kollegedave
