you will not lose your job because an AI will replace you. you *will* lose your job because the white-collar criminals driving AI's fraudulent circular financing are going to cause a global financial crisis when the bubble pops though
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4this might sound depressing but it's actually hopeful. if we could get everyone to recognize this basic reality there's a very different course of action we could take to address it, which is not "constantly freaking out about robots taking our jobs"
relatedly my personal emotional orientation towards the AI chatbots themselves has been evolving a little bit. I needed to do small bits of experimentation, mostly to inform my skepticism. doing that in the past largely had the valence of constant frustration and anger. now I feel more… mournful. LLMs are doing something really fascinating, and it would be so great if we could actually study it to discover what it *is*, instead of pretending that whatever that thing is is "thinking" or "work"
for example, long-term, I think one of the uses of LLMs might be as a sort of cognitive red-team. right now the economic orientation towards them is "look at all the work these things can do!" but in a just world, you might use an LLM to automate part of a task, and *the fact that an LLM can automate it* could be seen as evidence that the task itself is unnecessarily adversarial, or duplicative make-work. if spam can solve your problem maybe you're solving the wrong problem
like the fact that LLMs "really can" do some parts of programming reads to me not as a demonstration of their economic utility but as a brutal indictment of our tools *for* programming. it feels productive to have these things emit mountains of boilerplate because *we constantly need mountains of boilerplate* and gosh I wish we could address that problem
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