I feel sad this evening... I was playing around with ChatGPT this afternoon and I've come to the conclusion that it's now almost inevitable that a large amount of middle-class jobs be automated away by end of decade.

ChatGPT is far more competent than a lot of people here realise. While ChatGPT isn't perfect and it sometimes makes mistakes, so do we humans. The only real difference between us and ChatGPT is that we have a feedback process to correct mistakes. When I write bad code I know because I run it, test it, and if needed, fix it. But that validation and correction step is arguably the easy bit of writing code, and with a few modifications it seems likely ChatGPT could do this fairly well today.

Things are going to change faster than I think people realise. Perhaps by mid-decade companies like Squarespace will have their own AI website builders, then by end of the decade perhaps software engineers will largely be a thing of the past along with thousands of other middle-class jobs.

I think we spend far too much time worrying about the singularity and far to little time thinking about the consequences of AI rapidly destroying middle-class jobs. Software engineers, graphic designers, writers, customer sales reps - these are all going to be gone sooner than I think people realise.

Jobs which require in-person human interaction such as waiters or jobs which require interaction with the physical environment (builders, cleaners, chefs) should be okay - at least until robotics catches up.