Well, except for roles where being human is an inherent part of the value for customers: bartender, prostitute, certain kinds of boutique sales, professional athlete, stage actor, etc. And for roles that have to be human for legal reasons.
Of course such roles make up a small part of the entire job market.
Just because LLMs are good at translating English to code, doesn’t imply they are good at many other jobs.
Coding isn’t that hard, it’s just not enjoyable to most people. The enjoyment has always been the barrier to entry.
hard agree on the last statement. programming is language. if you're literate you can code.
Who said that?
More to the point, how many plumbers does society need?
Direct quote
> Direct quote
And, in your (and GP's mind), that means the same thing as "LLMs can replace plumbers"?
After all, I said:
>>>> When all human output is valued at the fractions of a penny per month of work, there is no future.
I mean, I know it's fashionable to not read the article, but are we all really responding without even reading the comments? Are two paragraphs well beyond the attention span of the readers here?
Okay, lets go with that asinine comeback: What do you think happens when the only work left for humans to do involves 100% physical labour and 0% thought?
How many plumbers does a society need? Electricians? Even in construction, you can automate almost everything away with cranes and similar.
Now imagine that all the doctors, all the office workers, all the warehouse workers, all the bankers, lawyers, teachers, ... basically any job that requires thought ... all those people are now joining the legions of plumbers.
That sort of 1000x increase in supply will drive prices to pennies.
The LLM doesn't need to replace plumbers directly; all it needs to do is replace everyone else, and the value of plumbers approach zero anyway.
I have zero doubt that half of humanity can all have jobs continuously expanding the mansions of the other half who don't do any work but receive all the benefits.
Software engineering was a nice target because inputs and outputs are just data and you don't need to figure out robotics. But idk, 3 years ago it seemed illusory (at least for me) that LLMs could take over software engineering, but now here we are. They are still not 100% there yet (software engineers still have jobs), but we are getting ever closer.
Companies are in the process of figuring out robotics, and even if it's not figured out, then we might introduce a gig-ified blue collar economy where an unskilled, underpaid gig worker implements instructions by AI. Plus a lot of blue collar work already today involves robots (cranes, excavators, trucks, etc).
Seems some on HN haven't been keeping up with progress in physical robotics. Unique physical work is lagging behind a bit, but not by much. Expect to see robots doing simple plumbing jobs within a few years, not a few decades.
Nope, just knowledge workers. We’re decades away from automating many manual labor professions, even “unskilled” ones.
Turns out brains just aren’t as special as we thought.
How do you figure? We’ve already automated away way more manual labor jobs than we currently have.
Nope, just a specific kind. Those who developed and cultivated only a very specific skill set at the expense of all others.
I used to think being a generalist, and having persued technical roles with a people facing element was to my detriment, but it’s turned out to be the best decision I ever made.
Being a generalist was very useful to me 5 years ago. Now AI models have made everyone a generalist. That wide but not terribly deep skillset was immediately devalued by the AI models.
You can argue that the models fuck up 20 percent of the time, or that they make poor code but there is a massive part for the industry that is totally fine with that and I think people ignore it to their detriment.
AI is fundamentally an equivalent to slave economy. Cheap, plentiful workforce. This time ethically neutral. You either get Greece or Rome. I’d prefer Greece but it will probably be Rome. From the past we can predict the future.
I’m starting to be more sensitive to the argument that without god, people are unable to have a strong moral foundation. Not for the people expressing creativity in how they fuck, but as a check on those in power.
In my own experience such people are often far from objectively moral or good people themselves, and overcompensate some deep issues.
It is very true in my experience. It is also very not true in my experience.
FWIW I’m an atheist. Curious what you mean by issues-riddled mind. What issues? What’s the unhealthy place? There is no one person I’d accuse of lacking morality through godlessness, but I do see a trend. Most particularly in the people and communities who would have previously chosen godliness and replaced it with nothing, not those who previously would have chosen godlessness.
If this were true, why did the medieval peasant have less rights and autonomy in society than we do now?
Also, I’m “starting to be more sensitive to” I’m not fully bought in.
I like to think that one of the symptoms is politics becoming really absolutist, idealistic and cultish. You do not debate followers of a different religion. But many topics really becoming kind of a mini religions.
I don’t know for sure though, there are arguments against it too and other factors.
I think substantial amount of people really need some kind of subjective spiritual experience to their life and maybe ignoring that need breeds some maladaptive tendencies
maybe thats a reason that god was deleted from the western cultural lexicon, so that broken communities could be capitalized upon? no way, surely god is merely a deprecated irrelevant vestige. it's not like a fractured social fabric is a ripe substrate of raw suffering to mine profit from. surely a few hundred generations were enough for our morals to have been encoded into genetics, we don't have to bother consciously practicing morality any more. that's for the narrow minded.
<alt version of above paragraphs from ludicrous perspective of individual experiencing theocracy and its own form of propaganda>
..... this isn't intended to be aimed at anyone except those who delete god to make money, and those who use god to make money. there's plenty of negative aspects to religion. the argument is intended to focus on the sheer idiocy of expecting morality to spontaneously manifest in the absence of external motivation or any teaching of lessons already collectively learned the hard way.
Concepts like "checking your privilege" or being "canceled" closely parallel religious ideas of original sin and repentance, where individuals must acknowledge their unearned moral failings to become "good".
Actions like using specific pronouns, displaying yard signs, or performing land acknowledgments function similarly to reciting a catechism; they signal allegiance to a shared belief system and reassure the in-group
Protests and social movements often evoke the communal, revival-like atmosphere of religious gatherings, providing participants with a sense of purpose and belonging.
But what’s most convincing is that many times it is hypocritical in the same way religions are. There is no room for questioning or doubt and yet the actions do not align with the performance. Which means it isn’t driven by dry results but fulfills a deeper human need.