The field where LLMs are most successful, software development, is also a place where many software developers are paid to use LLMs. I have colleagues who are reluctant to express their skepticism publicly for just this reason.
Companies are salivating over the idea of cutting staff and replacing them with AI tools, so it's not exactly farfetched to think AI might lead to a lot of unemployment, at least for a while
Every type of automation ever invented has led to massive job cuts and yes, some sectors actually did not ever recover
>Every type of automation ever invented has led to massive job cuts
It, never has, in fact the opposite is true. Every type of automation has expanded the economic output so much that it created massive amounts of labor demand, which is why cities early absorbed masses of underemployed workers during the industrial revolution. One famous example, there are now more bank tellers than before the invention of the ATM.
In fact you can go to any poor country with no automation and you'll find entire classes of un- and underemployed people. This is a condition of premodern, not technological societies.
The entire AI debate rests on the speculative claim that it is not merely an automation tool, but a sort of sci-fi wholesale replacement of human beings, contrary to what happened during earlier waves of automation.
> One famous example, there are now more bank tellers than before the invention of the ATM.
Bank tellers do way more varied work than ATMs do. You cannot open an account at a bank from an ATM. This is a stupid example because ATMs were not and never did try to automate the entirety of a bank teller's job, only a couple of the services they do
> In fact you can go to any poor country with no automation and you'll find entire classes of un- and underemployed people. This is a condition of premodern, not technological societies
You can find this in Rural America, forget "poor countries with no automation"
> It, never has, in fact the opposite is true. Every type of automation has expanded the economic output so much that it created massive amounts of labor demand, …
This seems to be true, but there’s a second issue at work here, which that automation and progress in general can _disrupt_ the labor market. Sure there’s a net gain in labor demand, but there are people involved who are more than just “resources” who can easily be redeployed.
Progress is what built and then killed (injured?) cities and towns like, in the US, Detroit, or Gary, or Pittsburgh.
We want to promote progress and automation while at the same time protecting people who are inadvertently over-exposed to the downside. (Generally less educated people or people with less agency).
Well. In an ideal world, LLMs would be used this way, as a tool to help automate the bullshit and let the person driving worry about other stuff.
But I never see them actually used this way. At the big institution end, companies and universities will continue to force AI tools on their employees in heavy handed and poorly thought out ways, and use it as an excuse to fire people whenever budgets get tight (or investors demand higher profits). At the opposite scale, with individual users, it’s really alarming how rapidly people seem to stop thinking with their own brain and offload all critical thinking to an LLM. That’s not “extending your capabilities,” that’s letting all your skills atrophy while you train a machine to be your shitty replacement.