The US citizen is probably well above the median human. There are many countries where the education system is abysmal, many people are stunted because of inadequate nutrition, etc.
That in raw IQ terms LLMs already beat the median human, American or otherwise, and have thus achieved some definitions of "AGI".
That doesn't mean they're capable of completing many human tasks, much less improving themselves, which is generally considered the bar for "real" AGI/super intelligence.
The stat is skewed wildly by immigration. The literacy level of native born Americans is higher. The population of foreign born adults is nearly 20% of the total adult population, and as you can imagine many are actively learning English.
51% of native-born adults scored at Level 3 or higher. This is considered the benchmark for being able to manage complex tasks and fully participate in a knowledge-based society. Only 28% of immigrant adults achieved this level. So yes immigrants are in trouble, but it’s still a huge problem with 49% native-born below Level 3.
Considering the amount of digitalization in society, more government regulations, etc. I think basic literacy alone does not guarantee you can participate in society effectively.
But in the past, literacy was typically defined as "bare minimum".
It's fine if we want to change it to "sufficiently master language to do a white collar job", but if the standard changes we shouldn't be surprised fewer people meet it.
Well the topic of conversation was AGI. I have a stem phd and I like to think I’m a strong reader, but Gemini pro can analyze/distill pages of text at least as well as I can, and much much faster. It only seems to fail when it doesn’t have relevant data/context.
What percentage of those people could never read above a certain grade level? Could 100% of humans eventually, with infinite resources and time, all be geniuses? Could they read and comprehend all the works produced by mankind?
No but they could probably read better. Just look at the best education systems in the world and propagate that. Generally, all countries should be able to replicate that.
From an economics perspective, a more relevant comparison would be to the workers that a business would normally hire to do a particular job.
For example, for a copy-editing job, they probably wouldn't hire people who can't read all that well, and never mind what the national average is. Other jobs require different skills.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States