Has it ever been more useless to be academically talented than now?
This question is especially targeted stem majors. Let’s use an example. 10 years ago if someone went to the doctor for a disease, they would be at the mercy of the doctor to understand everything about it, the blood work, the scans, the mechanisms behind it, medications against it and so on. 10 years ago we had google but it was no help to understand all the nuances of higher or lower values in a blood panel. If you were lucky it could explain what a slightly higher count of something \\\*could\\\* indicate but nothing substatial.
Nowadays you can just plug in you blood work to any given chat bot and it will summarize it perfectly for you, while keeping your disease in mind. Same goes for scans and so on. 10 years ago that doctor would have had decades of education and experience, nowadays that knowledge is easily accessible to everyone with a phone.
If a teenager 10 years ago was academically gifted it was envious because that person could do something that not a lot of people could. Now everybody can get everything neatly explained and so forth.
Now if I could talk to my teenage self if would advise to avoid any higher education beyond high school. Reading is very good, but you don’t need to do that for 4 years while not really learning anything significant, like a trade. You can read in your free time