AI's current trajectory is actually the best one for workers where it increases worker productivity but does not replace them which will increase demand.
IF an LLM could ingest news and summarize headlines every day some jobs might gain help, but so far next to nothing is there. Some have tried for stocks and does not went anywhere, some others have tried to replace call center operators with horrific mean results and so on.
Actually I fail to see much else except producing quick graphics for publishers and porn deepfakes for teenagers. At a certain point in time things might mature enough for something else, but so far...
To the point I think I am the exception, and that's why LLM will have a larger impact than I would estimate.
If that's the current bar well, LLMs cost way too much for the results they produce. Of course things change so at a certain point in future we might get much better results and to achieve such goals research, so data, experiments etc is needed but from research and release early and often vs "Artificial Intelligence is here" from PR there is a big gap in the middle.
And, as you say, Google provides links to better answers in 2 seconds.
I suppose some people like the interaction with the machine. I'm much more exhausted after an LLM session and my brain is literally fried until the next morning. I stopped using LLMs and am much happier.
Googling for answers and reading them strangely enough energizes me.
And talking about benefits, would you claim that life 50 years ago was the same for the average citizen as today? Because if not, to me it seems that people work less (see chart) for more (see what you have).
This [2] site has a plethora of data about the inflection of basically everything that happened in 1971. 1971 was when the US defaulted on its agreements under Bretton Woods, enabling it to begin printing money at its own discretion, which is essentially when our current economic era began. Vast amounts of wealth has been generated, but it has come with costs.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/242022/number-of-single-...
What I started to notice, and I think some people on HN have noticed already before me, is that producing lines of code is faster. Much faster, even, if examples are already in the knowledge base. This means that "rolling your own" has never been easier. So, we end up with the same solution, replicated many times in the code.
So, now, programmers are producing code faster than reviewers can review. Even the authors of this GPT assisted pile of code may not read or even fully understand it.
I think the critical thing missing is code duplication detection. I know some tools are available but I have yet to see one that does its job satisfactorilly. If, however, that does not get built in soon, then companies will start to see that AI causes people to produce lots of unmaintainable/duplicated content and will start to turn away.
Or are you saying that AI will create a lot of demand for workforce? And how so?
Look up the unintentional impact of the cotton gin for an example.
It will only hurt industries with limited demand or fixed amount of work (think bookkeepers, customer support) that are cost centers.