4 ms·

I'd concur and also add one other aspect here. The reason a person hires a e.g. janitor is not because they themselves are incapable of janitorial work. It's be

I'd concur and also add one other aspect here. The reason a person hires a e.g. janitor is not because they themselves are incapable of janitorial work. It's because they have different tasks that they would prefer to dedicate their energy to. Even if there were absolutely perfect LLMs capable of e.g. generating code precisely to specification, you still end up with the issue of actually creating said specification, deploying the result, managing with various local constraints/limitations, updating all of this when it turns out there's an unforeseen issue, and so on. Even if its work that a wider range of people could do, it's still work that's going to need to be done, and it's not going to be done by a chatbot. So it seems that even for many jobs that LLMs could ostensibly replace, it's more likely to widen the labor pool rather than literally replace people. If anything it might increase the number of businesses and opportunities, because it would enable the breadth of domains that micro and small companies could perform in.

analognoise 3y ago
It will widen the labor pool until it suddenly doesn’t anymore, right? “Horses Need Not Apply” was all about that - the point being new devices were introduced until suddenly horses became pets rather than working animals (on a farm), and our insistence that technological change creates new jobs (“creative destruction”) wasn’t well founded.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  I'm not arguing that more tech advances create more jobs. I'm arguing that what we're trying to automate would be insufficient to obsolete many of the jobs people fear it could, even if successful. And I think that's a very big if. Vehicles were quite unique in that they were capable of entirely replacing their predecessor for simple transportation tasks. But in e.g. software, the programming tasks LLMs may one day be able to carry out are but one aspect of the job. Getting back to janitors for instance, you're not going to replace a janitor with a roomba.

analognoise 3y ago

It will widen the labor pool until it suddenly doesn’t anymore, right? “Horses Need Not Apply” was all about that - the point being new devices were introduced until suddenly horses became pets rather than working animals (on a farm), and our insistence that technological change creates new jobs (“creative destruction”) wasn’t well founded.

somenameforme 3y ago
I'm not arguing that more tech advances create more jobs. I'm arguing that what we're trying to automate would be insufficient to obsolete many of the jobs people fear it could, even if successful. And I think that's a very big if. Vehicles were quite unique in that they were capable of entirely replacing their predecessor for simple transportation tasks. But in e.g. software, the programming tasks LLMs may one day be able to carry out are but one aspect of the job. Getting back to janitors for instance, you're not going to replace a janitor with a roomba.