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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

> Similarily, everyone becoming their own accountant / lawyer / other professional services.

These professional services will defend themselves with gatekeeping. Suddenly it doesn't depend anymore on the quality of your legal advice, but whether it has been stamped by a qualified Lawyer. It doesn't matter that your taxes are correct, but whether they are submitted by an approved accountant. Etc.

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It's not just gatekeeping though. The reason you get a qualified, credentialed structural engineer to sign off on your house instead of just YOLOing the build is so that you (and your insurance company) can sue their pants off if it collapses.

If a future version of Claude ever gets less error prone than a human, I might prefer the smaller chance of a building collapse from Claude than the larger but insured chance from a human engineer.

That future version of Claude will still be mediated by an error prone human who in this case would be a non-engineer. So even if Claude is not error prone, it could be giving correct answers to the wrong questions and correct designs for the wrong constraints because the human getting Claude to do things doesn't know any better.

Except in extreme cases of fraud or negligence, you won't win a suit against your accountant or lawyer.

They already do protect themselves. It’s what licensure is for in large part. I’m not saying licensure doesn’t have other benefits, many are plainly obvious. But licensure is also used as plain old gatekeepong.

Probably true, but the rubber-stamp process will be a race to the bottom.

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