[staticassertion]

> how long would it take to encode the average lawyer into a hdf5 file

I'd say, minimally, a good 50 years, except perhaps for the busywork. At that point you could maybe have a tool that could handle a lawyer's job. Law's often an extremely creative, verbal, expressive job, so I think machines are particularly unlikely to do well there.

I'm not worried about being automated away. If someone wants to make coding easier, neat, I'm not a programmer, that's just how I get shit done. I solve complex problems, and I don't see machines taking that job for a long, long time.

Frankly, if machines can take away the mechanical bullshit part of a job and let us humans do the interesting, creative work, that works for me.

[kwhitefoot]

> Frankly, if machines can take away the mechanical bullshit part of a job and let us humans do the interesting, creative work, that works for me.

How much "interesting, creative work" is there? Surely most of the work that most of us do, and that most of us are capable of and interested in, is not simultaneously interesting and creative.

I count myself as lucky and I have certainly had a more interesting working life than average but the proportion of that forty years of work that counted as both interesting and creative is probably, looking back on it, measured in single digit percentage points.

If a machine does all the easy stuff how would I ever get enough practice to stretch myself to the difficult creative parts?

[staticassertion]

> How much "interesting, creative work" is there?

I would imagine that the answer is roughly "infinite". It's like asking "how much art is there?" - infinite.

> If a machine does all the easy stuff how would I ever get enough practice to stretch myself to the difficult creative parts?

By doing the easy stuff? I don't know, you can do whatever you want.

[kwhitefoot]

> By doing the easy stuff?

The machine is doing the easy stuff. Why would anyone pay a human to do it? If I am not being paid how will I get the resources needed to be able to spend time working on the easy stuff?

[icoder]

The mechanical bullshit part is being abstracted away time and time again and none of the issues you bring up have become problematic so far. Sure there's a point where this might change profoundly, but AI is currently nowhere near that point if you ask me.

(stuff being done for me: CPU design and work with the OS on top of it including multithreading and IO, executing database operations, turning higher level commands into tons and tons of machine language instructions, libraries that allow me to go higher and higher in abstraction level, think synchronising, multi threading, basic data structures like dictionaries, map/filter/reduce operations, etc - where I need to I learn about them, but mostly I just use them and let them do the heavy, boring, lifting)

(working with a low code solution like Mendix is comparable, you can become creative without the boring work, of course it has a learning curve, which learns you how to use the higher abstraction layers without the need to really practice or fully understand what it takes out of your hands)