The cheaper the better, but such an opinion will undoubtedly lead to the collapse of civilization lol.

Here “replace” doesn’t mean “being able to do the same job”. It means you get fired. Automation in most fields never even tried to get close to a level of quality comparable to what a human can do, but it was enough to displace a majority of workers.

The author is a machine learning engineer, so he’s perfectly aware of the limits of whatever is called AI. The point is to make those limits irrelevant by lowering the expected level of quality, as it happened with textile, food, and so on.

The article makes a good point that it’s less about replacing a knowledge worker completely and more industrializing what some categories of knowledge workers do.

Can one professional create a video with AI in a matter of hours instead of it taking days and needing actors, script writers and professional equipment? Apparently yes. And AI can even translate it in multiple languages without translators and voice actors.

Are they “great” videos? Probably not. Good enough and cheap enough for several uses? Probably yes.

Same for programming. The completely independent AI coder doesn’t exist and many are starting to doubt that it ever will, with the current technology. But if GenAI can speed up development, even not super-significantly but to the point that it takes maybe 8 developers to do the work of 10, that is a 20% drop in demand for developers, which puts downward pressure on salaries too.

It’s like in agriculture. It’s not like technology produced completely automated ways to plow fields or harvest crops. But one guy with a tractor can now work one field in a few hours by himself.

With AI all this is mostly hypothetical, in the sense that OpenAI and co are all still burning money and resources at a pace that looks hard to sustain (let alone grow) and it’s unclear what the cost to the consumers will be like, when the dust settles and these companies will need to make a profit.

But still, when we’re laughing at all the failed attempts to make AI truly autonomous in many domains we might be missing the point

At my job we’re just finishing up a big project that’s mostly ChatGPT output because the consultant we wanted to do it quoted a super high price. So there’s at least one consultant in the world that missed out on 4 months’ work.

50% of people are “low to average”

Yeah, if the user can’t verify the truthfulness of the LLM generated text then it has no use as it can’t be trusted.
I’d say the thing LLM is best at for me is giving me a starting point, in the same way that it is easier to fix someone else’s writing than it is to write something from a blank slate. Oh and copilot is generally up to date on where in Microsoft 365 Admin you find an option right now, compared to all the outdated official and unofficial guides out there.

Maybe yes maybe no but they are trying very hard to make it a reality keep that in mind.

Well, in Terminator it looks too cool, in reality it could be like in the novel Brave New World.