I don't like to self-publicize, but I think you'd really resonate with a piece I wrote a while back, it went semi-viral and resulted in some very interesting discussion. It's about the systematic biases that expertise invokes, and what that's like as a novice: https://boydkane.com/essays/experts

I am less convinced by the prediction market style of verification

I'm also not super convinced, but I do think the problem of verifying solutions is a big one, so I wanted to put out some alternate answer out there.

the role AI tools themselves can play in easing the mentorship bottleneck

For guiding up-and-coming researchers I definitely agree that existing AIs can help, although I also feel that each person should find something that works for them.

For using AIs to review submissions, I'm not sure the AIs are good enough yet to do a full review, but maybe they can significantly reduce the number of low-effort papers that a researcher has to review. E.g. use an LLM to check for typos, style, prior work, whether the paper actually answers the question, etc.

The ability to draft your own contracts, mediate disputes through arbitration, and represent yourself in court all derive from legal rights which would be very hard to overturn.

Strongly agree. However I believe lawyers to be adept at the legal system, so they'd likely bundle job protections for lawyers alongside job protections for other more empathetic jobs such as teachers or 911 call agents or others. In general, I predict that lawyers see AI job automation as a valid threat, that they take actions against this threat, and also that they are much more competent at legal manoeuvring and politics than I am, so would come up with competent ways to achieve their goals.

I agree with your point. But what I think is interesting about legal work is not that they could/couldn't be automated or that AI usage could be detected. I think that lawyers will see the job automation coming and take legal action to protect themselves such that AI is not legally allowed to be used for some key legal tasks, such that they ~all keep their jobs

It seems likely to me that (at least some) lawyers will have the foresight to see AI getting better and better, and that AI automation won't just stop at the grunt work and will eventually come from the more high profile jobs.

thus making it less valuable to hire juniors; thus making it harder for juniors to gain job experience.

Yes this seems very likely, I don't see why this would be limited to SWEs

Nobody wants grandma to get scammed. But I feel this is a false comparison, the real comparison would be against the grandma's who are today paying for multiple $20/month subscriptions because they got signed up and can't figure out how to unsubscribe.

I agree with Brendan Long below, and while there are always horror stories, I don't think most banks want the bad press of bankrupting grandma.

It might feel like extra costs in the moment, but I doubt it would end up being more expensive, since you're more able to "fine-tune" what you're paying for.

I think most humans prefer a subscription to not have a marginal cost to use what they enjoy / find useful

I disagree here, I feel like I regularly see people online complaining about needing a subscription for everything nowadays, and also about the price of those subscriptions quickly adding up to large amounts.

Oh this looks cool, thanks for the link! Interesting to see something similar and how that worked out.

Jamba! had drawn criticism for allegedly misleading customers in its service advertisements. In general, Jamba! services were sold as a subscription, despite advertising that seems to imply that customers are buying a one-off phone ringtone.

I couldn't find anything about purchases/subscriptions in the WAP Wikipedia page?

From a business perspective, there's always some price the business can charge that would make running adverts comparatively unprofitable. This price might be very high, but it's not infinite. I'll agree that many existing "subscription" services that also run adverts despite you paying the subscription, which is just frustrating.

I'll agree that browser support wouldn't be required, but I've got a feeling that browser support would reduce the friction past some threshold and make this "enabled by default". The number of people with a Stripe login is strictly less than the number of people with a browser, so requiring a Stripe login would be some amount of extra friction. These feelings are weakly held though.

But if I spend money on a single article and then it's uninteresting, it feels like I wasted money

I feel like this might end up being a good thing. If you consider a subscription as a low-frequency high-risk high-reward bet (you could lose the value of the subscription, or gain the value of multiple articles), and many one-off payments as high-quantity low-risk low-reward bets (at worst you lose the value of one article, at best you gain the value of one article), then having multiple bets will give you more information about the underlying distribution. Practically, I imagine that I'd discover whether or not I like a publication faster if I can purchase a couple of low-risk articles rather than having to spend the full subscription fee.

You certainly can spend money on an article and later regret it, but this argument applies equally to subscriptions. Except with subscriptions, you've wasted significantly more money.

This would feel particularly bad if I get charged automatically as soon as I click a link

Agreed, having read your case I now think automatic charging should be off-by-default, so you only enable it for websites you've got high confidence in. Note the parallel with subscriptions essentially being on-by-default.