I don't personally think that's how it will go. AI will always need its hand held, if not due to a lack of capability then due to a lack of trust. But since you do, why the gloom?
And say like LLMs get good enough to displace 30% of the people that do those. That's enormous economic devastation for workers. Enough that it might dent the supply side as well by inducing a demand collapse.
If it's 90% of all jobs (that can't be done by a robot or computer) gone, then how are all those folks, myself included, going to find money to feed ourselves? Are we going to start sewing up t-shirts in a sweatshop? I think there are a lot of unknowns, and I think the answers to a lot of them are potentially very ugly
And not, mind, because AI can necessarily do as good a job. I think if the perception is that it can do a good enough job among the c-suite types, that may be enough
Because at that point there's 2 scenarios:
- LLMs don't need humans anymore and we're either all dead or in a matrix-like farm
- Or companies realize they can't make LLMs buy the stuff their company is selling (with what money??) so they still need people to have disposable income and they enact some kind of Universal Basic Income. You can spend your days painting or volunteering at an animal shelter
Some people are rooting for the first option though, so while it's good that you've found faith, another thing that young people are historically good at is activism.
202X: SWE is solved
202X + Y; Y<3: All other fields solved.
In this case, I can't retrain before the second threshold but also can't idle. I just have to suffer. I'm prepared to, but it's hard to escape fleshy despair.
Seems more anti-fragile.
EVERYTHING is upturned. "All other things solved" includes robotics. It's a 10x everywhere.
Say there used to be 100 jobs in some company, all executing on the vision of a small handful of people. And then this shift happens. Now there are only 10 jobs at that company, still executing on the vision of the same handful of people.
90 people are now unemployed, each with a 10x boost to whatever vision they've been neglecting since they've been too busy working at that company. Some fraction of those are going to start companies doing totally new things--things you couldn't get away with doing until you got that 10x boost--things for which there is no training data (yet).
And sure, maybe AI gets better and eats those jobs too, and we have to start chasing even more audacious dreams... but isn't that what technology is for? To handle the boring stuff so we can rethink what we're spending our time on?
Maybe there will have to be a bit of political upheaval, maybe we'll have to do something besides money, idk, but my point is that 10x everywhere opens far more doors than it shuts. I don't think this is that, but if this is that, then it's a very good thing.
Most people are just drones, and that's fine, that's just not them.
If AI can do the drone work, we may find more vision among us than we've come to expect.
Work on your soft skills. Join a theater club, debate club, volunteer to speak at events, ...
Not that it's easy, and certainly more difficult for some people than for others, but the truth is that soft skills already dominate engineering, and in a world where LLMs replace coders they would become more important. Companies have people at the top, and those people don't like talking to computers. That is not going to change until those people get replaced.