That was mostly the point, though there are dozens of offshoots I'd love to argue to death on. I feel quite strongly that the path we take on labour and automation will strongly pivot us towards very different futures.
Do we want to live in a future filled with thinkers, or with consumers ?
Are you honestly suggesting there is anything other than education preventing them from it ?
That asides, research mathematics is only a small subset of mental tasks available to humans. There are a lot of areas that could benefit from "computation" Laws, philosophy, literature, sociology, psychology. We seem to have forgotten how much of our society is based on how our thought is applied to knowledge. Thought rather than Praxis has been relatively neglected in our age.
Elevating educational standards of society as a whole, especially the poor, has nothing to do with whether all disenfranchised groups have the native intelligence to become academics or well paid knowledge workers.
The number of active NBA players is in the hundreds and their careers are short. Education is a very effective weapon against multi generational poverty and the focus of international aid organizations for a reason. Someone from an impoverished background is much more likely to live a better life with more education than someone without.
I don't really want to divert this thread into a full discussion on the validity and value of IQ tests, but I do find the view you are espousing to be very depressing and I had hoped that they had died along with Ellis island and phrenology.
