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increasingly believing much of the communication gap between LLM Enthusiasts and LLM Skeptics on this website boils down to “are you someone who has largely experienced a *reasonable* amount of job security in tech, or are you someone who has not experienced job security and likely aren’t in tech”

I think a lot of people who are well-intentioned LLM boosters who have been able to fairly reliably find well-paid work in tech really do struggle with putting themselves in the shoes of people working in other sectors that have been feeling precarious for a long time and now feel WAY more so

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I think the biggest issue is that if the AI future is to be believed, "prompt engineering" should be an extremely transitory phase nobody's getting "left behind." it's a machine that understands human language - in context. if it works correctly, there should be no effective learning curve.

yes, you can reasonably argue that People Should Adapt and all, but the likely runway for how one does that while retaining a non-abusive job that pays a living wage is arguably more coherent for people in tech who make software for a living than for many others who are not

I really don't think one can reasonably argue that the unethically trained machine that makes its users dumber, is driving environmentally destructive industrialization, & is part of a tech industry circle jerk that is almost assuredly going to crash the economy is something anyone should adapt to.

I do see posts from LLM enthusiasts that boil down to “critics are just mad the computer is better than them at trivia now” and idk, I think *most* critics are just genuinely terrified they’ll never find work they don’t hate that pays a living wage again in the current batshit climate

Speaking for myself, I'm mad that every CEO in America is drooling over the idea of replacing humans with a probability distribution in a while loop, which is at 80% as capable as a human on a good day, and dangerously wrong the rest of the time. Which millions of people trust as "intelligent"

I agree that it’s silly to claim that LLMs Can’t Do Anything (obviously they can do many things). I also think it’s silly to claim LLMs Can Do Everything (obviously they can’t). regardless of how one feels about that, this is a very scary time to need a job and people are reacting accordingly

Fun to be both an Informed LLM Hater / Skeptic and a librarian, where I feel like I need to be reliably informed both as an ethic and to help my users. BUT, as the latter this is like the 3rd thing in my lifetime we’re “getting replaced” by. (And the roller coaster ride of “satisficing”.)

yes, I know that the tech industry has become way more precarious and hard to find work in in over the last few years, more than it has been in a very long time. it is also true that grinding precarity has been been the case in many other industries for much longer, and just keeps getting worse.

AI is doing to Silicon Valley tech work what Japanese steel did to the mills of Pennsylvania. 10% job loss in one year. You should see my neighborhood. The Teslas are going off lease and being replaced by used Honda Civics. Many homes are going on the market to cash out equity.

I spent a year of my life reverse engineering and rewriting Chinese sample code for a graphics chip that was poorly documented and riddled with bugs in silicon, to realize viable production firmware. I envision guys like me trying to decipher and fix generative coding like that. So much glamor.

And it's not just AI taking jobs, it's the unbalancing of the economy, the impact of misapplied AI that will harm profits & therefore job creation, the inevitable bursting of this monstrous tech bubble, the fact that regardless of actual utility powerful idiots will misuse it & damage us further...

My skill set professionally is photography, video production, graphic design, and illustration. I am not in a good place job wise. And I’m 43, so I’m not in a place where I expected to have to retrain for some entirely new career and start back at the bottom.

There's definitely a worry about job security, but there's also a sense of pride in your work – especially for people who see their job as more than "make line go up". We've seen what has happened to journalism as more and more of it has been outsourced to hallucination machines, it's got worse.

The press barons don't care about quality, if they're making more money that's all that matters to them. I work in local government, I genuinely believe that my job matters and has a positive impact on people's lives, and I don't want to see that lost because cost savings mean AI makes a mess of it.

I think many critics are also immensely frustrated by how the very real shortcomings of LLMs (shoddy research, misdiagnosis, plagiarism, etc.) are brushed aside because people value the cheap & shiny object over real expertise and accountability

Last weekend, I did the taxes for the small business I co-own with my wife. At every turn, my accounting software was trying to get me to use their new AI tools. I’m not an accountant, and they’re already charging me extra for it against my will, so I tried it. I had 300+ expenses to categorize.

There’s might also be the consideration that an LLM doesn’t need to be able to do your job, someone just has to THINK it can do your job to cast people aside or put downward pressure on wages.

Many of our customers (in B2B software) have been asking us to make their jobs irrelevant for years (before the current round of LLMs). AFAICT they assume they have the job because of incumbency, but dislike it because it's hard, and would like to keep the former and ditch the latter

All the economic studies I've seen show that economies adapt, not people. When the mill shuts down, the millers don't learn to code. They eat through their savings and fall out of the middle class. More people coming up learn to code, but those workers laid off are just fucked for life.

I mean I have always had very stable jobs 17 years at my last 4 years at current but im hardline against AI and frankly see it as tech that will wreck the world. Use of water, eroding of trust, giving it automation to murder people, stolen works, expected to just consume garbage now, etc

I think it also is some selection bias on who makes it in. There are probably ten upper middle class kids with good but unremarkable private educations for every one of me, who went to public schools the whole way and got lucky. And that's before you factor in visas from abroad too