That’s just one perspective… Another perspective is that LLMs enable programmers to skip a lot of the routine and boring aspects of coding - looking up stuff, essentially - so they can focus on the fun parts that engage creativity.
But it won't stop there. Why would it stop at some arbitrarily defined boundary? The savings associated with no longer having to pay programmers the amounts of money that they believe they are worth (high enough to result in collusion between employers) are just too tempting.
Some form of AI will eventually take over almost all existing jobs. Whether those jobs evolve or not somehow and new jobs replace them, we will see.
But it's definitely not just programmers. And it will take time.
Society needs to adjust. Stopping progress would not be a solution and is not possible.
However, hopefully we can pause before we create digital animals with hyperspeed reasoning and typical animal instincts like self-preservation. Researchers like LeCun are already moving on from things like LLMs and working on approaches that really imitate animal cognition (like humans) and will eventually blow all existing techniques out of the water.
The path that we are on seems to make humans obsolete within three generations or so.
So the long term concern is not jobs, but for humans to lose control of the planet in less than a century.
On the way there we might be able to manage a new golden age -- a crescendo for human civilization.
Humans don’t become obsolete, we become bored. This tech will make us bored. When humans get too bored and need shit to stir up, we’ll start a war. Take US and China, global prosperity is not enough right? We need to stoke the flames of war over Taiwan.
In the next 300 years we’ll wipe out most of each other in some ridiculous war, and then rebuild.
I agree that WWIII is a concern but I don't think it will be brought about by boredom.
"Global prosperity" might be true in a very long-term historical sense, but it's misleading to apply it to the immediate situation.
Taiwan is not just a talking point. Control over Taiwan is critical for maintaining hegemony. When that is no longer assured, there will likely be a bloody battle before China is given the free reign that it desires.
WWIII is likely to fully break out within the next 3-30 years. We don't really have the facilities to imagine what 300 years from now will look like, but it will likely be posthuman.
I’ll go with the 30 year mark. Countries like Russia or China don’t get humbled in a loss (like Germany didn’t in WW1). Russia will negotiate some terms for Ukraine (or maintain perpetual war), but I believe it will become a military state that will funnel all money into the defense sector. The same with Iran, and the same with China.
Iran supplies Russia with drones. I can promise you Russia will help Iran enrich their uranium. They are both pariah states, what do they have to lose? Nuclear Iran, here enters Israel.
Okay, think about it this way. This thing helps generate tons and tons of code. The more code people (or this thing) writes, the more shit there is to debug. More and more code, each calling each other means more and more insane bugs.
We’re going to move from debugging some crap the last developer wrote to debugging an order of magnitude more code the last developer generated.
It’s going to be wonderful for job prospects really.
The only thing that takes anyone's job is demand shortfalls. Productivity increases certainly don't do it. It's like saying getting a raise makes you poorer.
Actually, in my country, Portugal, if your salary is the Minimum wage, you are exempt from paying taxes, but if you get a raise as little as 15€ or so, you move one category up and start to pay taxes, and you will receive less money than what you used to get before the raise.
One coachman to the other: "Another perspective about this car thing, you can skip all the routine and boring trips - they are done with cars. You can focus on the nice trips that make you feel good".
