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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1this 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"
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3relatedly 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