For any seamstress that didn't have other economically valuable skills they were able to pivot to, their world did kind of end.
If LLMs can replace most humans at most cognitive tasks, what do those working in various cognitive jobs pivot to?
If LLMs can replace most humans at most cognitive tasks, what do those working in various cognitive jobs pivot to?
> claim is that LLMs [..] will be better than humans at most/all cognitive jobs
First off, what does this even mean, to "be better" at a "cognitive job" ? If you counted up all "cognitive jobs", that's probably a hundred thousand unique positions done by a billion people.
Think about software engineering. That is one job. It has taken years of work, hundreds of experts, billions of dollars, and the combined effort and collaboration of probably 20% of the SWEng workforce, just to get one job to work through AI in a way that isn't total slop. It still requires humans to review all the code, because it fucks up not only the code, but the end result / use case. It will also lie, cheat, steal, etc, just so that it can claim that it did the job, when clearly it didn't. Oh, and if you feed it some data that includes a statement like "delete all data", it will just do it. AI is an idiot savant. Writes brilliant music, can't tie it's shoes.
So just for one job, you can't replace a human completely, because the AI simply isn't good enough and can't be trusted (and due to its design, that will never change). Now think about the 99,999 other jobs. They are completely different jobs. All the training and investment that went into making software work, isn't going to apply to, say, a travel agency planning a trip for two to Europe. Or any other job at all. You still need to train it for that work too, and then review its work.
So let's get this straight: AI cannot replace a person, for probably any job, anywhere. Because it isn't very smart and it can't be trusted. Just like you cannot replace a person with a sewing machine. Someone has to think up a sewing pattern. Design it. Figure out how to make the pattern with a sewing machine. Actually perform the sewing. Quality-control-check the results. The sewing machine made it much faster and less error prone. But it's really only about 1/5th of the total work needed to make and sell finished garments.
Every single job in the world is like this. A machine can make it more efficient, but because it's not actually intelligent like a human, it cannot completely replace a human, it can just augment/improve their work. AI is just a tool, not a person.