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This is an interesting question to ask, and as you say “More work thinking along these lines seems useful”.

However, I couldn’t help feeling that you were trying to understand how long something would take, given the current state of technology, and yet making predictions about what tasks technology will be able to perform in the future is at least in part about what the capacity will be in the future, which assumes the capacity and range of abilities will be necessarily greater.

You address this in part, but still posit one person in the loop, which still seems to me like an extrapolation from current tech, rather than assuming new (unforeseen) tech (which has caught us by surprise numerous times in the past few years).

I would also argue that a prompt like...

”Here are the specs for an art competition, create an artwork for it” arguably allows an AI to create their own artwork. If you were to ask an AI now, they might ask follow up questions to get your guidance, but again we are not talking about today’s AIs.

or

“Create a paper for the journal Nature”. Again the article specifies no content, only the journal, leaving the AI to imagine something relevant for the journal.

I don’t think I’d see this (prompting) person in the loop as significant in terms of answering the questions posed in the linked surveys.

In saying this, I’m meaning only to offer a question, I think you’re correct that it is worthwhile thinking about what this means for different industries, and how phenomena like Jevon’s Paradox come into play—I generally think this will play a large role, and will offset many of the woes we might worry about.