>> Anything that can replace a deeply experienced s/ware engineer can replace anyone in the employment stack
> Direct quote
And, in your (and GP's mind), that means the same thing as "LLMs can replace plumbers"?
After all, I said:
>>>> When all human output is valued at the fractions of a penny per month of work, there is no future.
I mean, I know it's fashionable to not read the article, but are we all really responding without even reading the comments? Are two paragraphs well beyond the attention span of the readers here?
Okay, lets go with that asinine comeback: What do you think happens when the only work left for humans to do involves 100% physical labour and 0% thought?
How many plumbers does a society need? Electricians? Even in construction, you can automate almost everything away with cranes and similar.
Now imagine that all the doctors, all the office workers, all the warehouse workers, all the bankers, lawyers, teachers, ... basically any job that requires thought ... all those people are now joining the legions of plumbers.
That sort of 1000x increase in supply will drive prices to pennies.
The LLM doesn't need to replace plumbers directly; all it needs to do is replace everyone else, and the value of plumbers approach zero anyway.
Are plumbers not "in the employment stack"? How about hairdressers? Are they in the employment stack?
I have zero doubt that half of humanity can all have jobs continuously expanding the mansions of the other half who don't do any work but receive all the benefits.
A new generation of AI companies is out there to take over blue collar jobs as well. Check recent YC batches.
Software engineering was a nice target because inputs and outputs are just data and you don't need to figure out robotics. But idk, 3 years ago it seemed illusory (at least for me) that LLMs could take over software engineering, but now here we are. They are still not 100% there yet (software engineers still have jobs), but we are getting ever closer.
Companies are in the process of figuring out robotics, and even if it's not figured out, then we might introduce a gig-ified blue collar economy where an unskilled, underpaid gig worker implements instructions by AI. Plus a lot of blue collar work already today involves robots (cranes, excavators, trucks, etc).
Robotics aren't new. The LLM robotics trend (half of which are complete scams and the other half are vaporware) might be an even stupider bubble than the LLM programming bubble, though it's also a smaller bubble.
At least LLM programming bubble is applying language models to language tasks, even if the results are mixed. The LLM robotics bubble is doing what exactly? They're making videos of remote-controlled skinsuits doing mundane tasks inefficiently in a way that impressed investors. They're trying to exploit the ELIZA effect for physical movement.
I saw one sorting packages to put the barcode label on top. Do you know what's a better way to do that? You put a camera on every side, including underneath, so the barcode can be read from any direction. This scanner can work at line speed instead of being the bottleneck. This isn't new. And you sort packages into different buckets by having pneumatically activated wedges that swing out and push the package onto a different line. The bottle return machine at my nearest supermarket does that, I'm sure wannabe billion dollar VC funded startups can manage it.
LLMs not but generalized multi-modal VLA models, yes.
Seems some on HN haven't been keeping up with progress in physical robotics. Unique physical work is lagging behind a bit, but not by much. Expect to see robots doing simple plumbing jobs within a few years, not a few decades.
