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Comment by htsh | Hacker News Reader

Having just left a large enterprise, it certainly feels like executive jobs are replaceable soonest with the AI tech available to us now.

Not sure why those of us that live in code editors or even Excel should worry about our jobs more than those that live in Powerpoint.

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The human moat is mostly physical labor, but also socialization - that’s really most of the executive’s duty, in my experience the slide decks are created by junior staff or consultants and often end up serving as a coffee table book to the discussion.

A high paying job that might be diminished greatly by AI are clinical doctors. In modern medicine, a large part of the job becomes interpreting test results and prescribing accordingly. How long before an Urgent Care diagnosis can be done by an LLM? Surgeons will of course not be replaced and an LLM can’t do even a blood draw, but writing a prescription? That seems within reach (if medical LLMs can be tamed of hallucinations)

Urgent Care diagnosis won’t ever be replaced by an AÍ because there are too many factors at play (including liability). People who believe tech can replace doctors in open-ended scenarios don’t have any idea of how doctors perform triage and diagnosis.

Have you heard of MedPalm, developed by Google that scored 85% on exams equal to an expert?

Or that AI outperforms doctors in controlled studies and reading imagery? https://hbr.org/2019/10/ai-can-outperform-doctors-so-why-don...

Even being more empathetic than doctors as an LLM? https://today.ucsd.edu/story/study-finds-chatgpt-outperforms...

The first to go AI will be the telemedicine firms like TeleDoc, than the Urgent Care Centers will get AI screeners, and next the doctors will be left to click a confirmation button, and last since AI alone will outperform a doctor, that confirmation will fade away or lose importance.

Doctors get sued all the time, mostly when they mess up, if AI truly does better than these doctors, legal losses and insurance costs will drop off for hospitals.

Ironic. Every time a company measures its employee output with number of lines of code or commits, devs are the first to point out that management is dumb for using a surface-level metric. But you're doing the same thing here, except with execs and powerpoint.

Powerpoints are just the final output you see. The real work execs do is in the decisions that went into the powerpoint.

No sane board will give decision-making power to an AI they can't blame. Besides, there are probably 100 devs for every exec, so it makes no financial sense to automate execs.

I know how that works. And my point was not that they should or will be replaced, but rather that they are no less expendable than developers (not very much).

But the decisions they make are one of the things that can be automated. I do not know if you have been inside one of these places but the executives are not doing a great job deciding (at mine they decided opensearch was a better bet than elastic and switched existing installations).

A new regime came in and then bad decision after bad decision drove our best talent away. Consultants, everywhere.

Also, that number is much lower. Full time devs are down, contractors and consultants are up. As a full time dev at one of these places, it felt like the number of executives was growing as everything else shrank.

Perhaps you are right about the highest levels, but think about all of the middlemen executives and what they do.

And even that -- I think an AI could choose to not spend millions on Deloitte or Accenture on software that inevitably failed.

That would be a lovely outcome. History tells us that capitalist revolutions hardly hit the top of the pyramid, though.

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