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Comment by czbond | Hacker News Reader

Will GPT-6 replace a plumber? I think not.

Will GPT-6 replace some subset 10..80% of engineering, law, medical hours? absolutely

I'm not so sure. There is a Planet Money episode that talks about the effect the digital spreadsheet had on accounting employment:

> Thanks to spreadsheets, there are 400,000 fewer accounting clerks than in 1980, but 600,000 more regular accountants.

Might something like GPT-6 cause employment to shift to higher value job responsibilities?

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/25/389027988/epis...

Developers are really dumb wanting to optimize code development.

This seems like a pretty limited viewpoint. We could all be coding in assembler still but generally we find value in using something higher level. Does that make us all dumb?

as a programmer, i would be happy to automate myself out of a job. Because it means that the work i do is infinitely valuable, and i would have been rewarded correctly for it, in a functioning employment market.

People raise arguments like this frequently, but in every other case throughout history people were made obsolete by tools that intelligences use. Never before has the intelligence part been made obsolete though.

Well you've changed the assertion a little bit there. I shared that one particular technical innovation shifted the mix of jobs towards more skilled jobs. That doesn't say anything about any individual person of course.

Your statement says that "people were made obsolete", which I take to mean that some people are individually unable to switch to the more skilled jobs.

I think the effect on current employees due to technical innovation is a reasonable issue to be concerned about but it's not the same phenomenon as the job "mix" changing towards more skilled jobs, even some that didn't exist before. The two phenomena aren't mutually exclusive either.

We don't have too many stagecoach drivers these days but we do have a lot more "drivers".

Wait, why 6?

Picked a higher number to not be scary. "supposedly" GPT-4 can pass the bar exam

Gotcha. I thought maybe they were planning to skip GPT-5 or something.

That's actually a pretty low bar, FWIW. (rimshot) Law students spend a few months in bar prep to memorize a bunch of crap that doesn't even apply to their real jobs. Maybe the AI will encourage bar associations to finally ditch it, a development that gained some steam during the pandemic.[1]

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/bar-exam-who-nee...

Bar exam has quite little to do with actual legal work. Or being effective in it.

I'm not actually surprised that a AI-model could pass it. The corpus is well known and well defined and test directly draws from that.

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