"Second Opinion machine" -- that's a good phrase. Before I read your post, the best term I heard was "summary machine". A huge part of "office work" (services) is reading and consuming large amounts of information, then trying to summarise or reason about it. Often, you are trying to find something that doesn't fit the expected pattern. If you are a lawyer, this is absolutely the future of your work. You write a short summary of the facts of the case, then ask GPT to find related case law and write the initial report. You review and ask GPT to improve some areas. It sounds very similar to how a senior partner directs their juniors, but the junior is replaced by GPT.

In my career, I saw a similar pattern with data warehouse users. Initially, managers asked junior analysts to write SQL. Later, the tools improved, and more technical managers could use a giant pivot table. Underneath, the effective query produced by the pivot table is way more complex than their previous SQL queries. Again, their jobs will change when on-site GPT become possible, so GPT can navigate their data warehouse.

It is 2023 now, and GPT-3 was already pretty good. GPT-4 will probably blow it away. What it look like in 2030? It is terrifying to me. I think the whole internet will be full of GPT-generated ad-copy that no one can distinguish from human-written material. There are a huge number of people employed as ad-copy writers on these crap ad-driven websites. What is their future work?