I agree LLMs are useful tools, but I am dismayed by a lot of cargo-culting around them, which happens because we don't understand them. I think we will have much better tools when we understand what is the expectation and what is the algorithm they run.

Somebody else said that the magician analogy was poor. I like magic tricks, but it took many years of cultural change (influenced by people like Houdini, Randi, Penn & Teller) to stop illusionists (and mentalists) make claims they have supernatural abilities, or people believing it on their own (a magician pretending to be able to catch a bullet was shot by an audience member who didn't understand the distinction).

It is detrimental, I think, to treat LLMs as if they have magical abilities ("superintelligence") rather than understanding they just run some clever algorithm. The fear for (programming) jobs comes from that framing; nobody fears of their job because of compilers, since compilers are understood.

(And it actually runs against kind of "socialist" framing of the problem, which I agree with, that is why should people be worried about the jobs in the first place, when society is getting richer as a result of better tools?)