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.