It's becoming clear that efficient work in the future will hinge upon one's ability to accurately describe what one wants. Unpacking that -- a large piece is the ability to understand all the possible "pitfalls" and "misunderstandings" that could happen on the way to a shared understanding.
While technical work will always have a place -- I think that much creative work will become more like the management of a team of highly-skilled, niche workers -- with all the frustrations, joys, and surprises that entails.
Programming, art, music, is just “describing what you want” in a very specific way. This is describing what you want in a much more vague way.
The upside it that it’s more “intuitive” and requires much less detail and technique, as the AI infers the detail and technique. The downside is that it’s really hard to know what the AI will generate or get it to generate something really specific.
I believe the future will combine the heuristics of AI-generation with the specificity of traditional techniques. For example, artists may start with a rough outline of whatever they want to draw as a blob of colors (like in some AI image-generation papers). Then they can fill in details using AI prompts, but targeting localized regions/changes and adding constraints, shifting the image until it’s almost exactly what they imagined in their head.
You can definitely make them incremental. You can give it a task like "make a more accurate description from initial description and clarification". Even GPT-3-based models available today can do these tasks.
Once this is properly productionized it would be possible to implement stuff just talking with a computer.
While technical work will always have a place -- I think that much creative work will become more like the management of a team of highly-skilled, niche workers -- with all the frustrations, joys, and surprises that entails.