Yeah, STEM is a bit of a synecdoche.

I’m more pointing to a differentiation into castes, driven by those personality / cognitive / status things.

Of that ~25% of Americans that aren’t fat, some are unhealthy, anorexic, or poor, but the top 10-15% are all fit or skinny, highly educated, conscientious people with good careers in the Professional Managerial Class.

They have all the good jobs, own all the real estate in any city worth living, and exclusively mate within their class. It’s gonna be their kids getting into the Ivies and T20 and being the next generation of them, too.

THEY have meaning and a successful life script to follow. THEY found or work at the companies that have all the Phds. Everyone else? Just cattle / corn being harvested.

And yeah, I think the 90’s were genuinely different. No smartphones, no trillion dollar companies fueled by adversarial Phd’s, people still did stuff in the world, people still dated within their social networks. Overdose deaths, ie “deaths of despair,” were literally 5x lower back then. The internet was an exciting new frontier that promised a world of boundless possibility.

Now the exciting new frontier is AI, and it’s exciting for the PMC and capital because it means they can replace a lot of mid employees with AI minds. This is not so exciting for everyone else, they’re the ones being replaced. It’s closing possibilities for most people, not opening them.

And I know this makes me sound like some sort of “end stage capitalism” doomer, but I’m really not, I’m solidly on the side of capital and the PMC, personally. I think capitalism is great, it’s THE thing that lifted ~1B people out of poverty over the last 30 years. I’m just pointing out that there are broad dynamics here that are nerfing people’s abilities to have nice, fulfilling lives and successful life scripts.

I really think future minds will look back on this time as "so wait, everyone smart stopped having babies, they decided to create and YOLO much-smarter-than-them unaligned artificial minds, AND they set all the smart people onto coordinating together to milk rubes instead of actually solving any of their problems?? Well there's your problem right there!"