I've seen many arguments about why certain jobs will always need a "human in the loop", or that certain skills aren't replaceable by LLM's, but I am skeptical of this notion. It seems that if the general intelligence of these models continues to increase, then every job is just a matter of feeding in the right context, designing the right structures for agents to collaborate, having the right verification loops, etc, all of which are difficult to create, but not impossible.
If the improvements in models continue at the pace they have over the next 3 years (reminder, 3 years ago the best model was GPT-4), do you really believe that what you do now will not be done better by a system of LLM-driven agentic harnesses?
LLMs do not replace jobs, managers constantly try to increase profit. Managers and business owners try to replace people’s jobs via automation.
LLM companies actively try to convince managers and business owners that LLMs are capable of replacing humans in white collar jobs.
An LLM/AI will not replace you, or me.
A business owner or manager might. They also might use an LLM to make decisions.
But let’s not use language which anctively obscures the decision makers in this process.
For cashiers, beyond simply ringing up customers, they serve the function of:
1. Validating IDs
2. Preventing theft
3. Creating a positive atmosphere
4. Helping customers bag groceries
5. Resolving issues/questions about products/the store
For waiters, likewise they have the job of
1. Creating a positive atmosphere
2. Physically bringing food to the table and setting the meal
3. Upselling items, providing recommendations, catering to specific unusual guest needs
etc. Basically all these jobs have a huge soft-skills dependent interface which no technology currently can replicate what humans can do.
I don't think that every job can be trivially automated by a large language model, but any job where the inputs/outputs are entirely via a computer, LLM's are approaching the point where they are equivalently enabled to a human, and there is no "real human body in-person" soft-skills interface.
My job is safe.
My question is, is that thing which you are doing, ascertaining the subtle concerns, soliciting requirements, etc. truly out of the range of what an LLM or LLM-guided system could do?
Who is the best possible person you could hire to operate the LLM?
Who has a good mental model of what its doing underneath and has the best expertise to direct/guide it?
IMO no one is better positioned to use these tools than software engineers
At minimum you at least need CEO -> product person -> LLM
There can any number of agents/loops after that but someone has to translate the requirements to the LLM and monitor/verify the results.
What I'm saying is in the extreme case the SE evolves to become the product person.
If you want to argue for fully autonomous companies then thats drifting into sci-fi
> If you want to argue for fully autonomous companies then thats drifting into sci-fi
Why couldn't a software company be completely automated with sufficiently powerful LLM-run agents? What fundamentally is the barrier, if the models are intelligent enough?
Long term maybe but its not a very interesting conversation to talk about things that far out.
I'm so tired of hearing about AI.
Until it's no longer true