The majority of work we do now, even in skilled professions, is busy work. How much of the work you do each day is unique and novel? How much of your work could have either been automated or made unnecessary long before ChatGPT? Probably most of it. We’ve long since been able to do less work and yet we continue to do the same things over and over again. Even if ChatGPT can magically do everything for us, what evidence is there that we would take advantage of it? World hunger is a trivial problem to solve given the resources we have today and yet we apparently can’t be bothered to fix that extremely low hanging fruit — why would we buck that trend by radically rethinking knowledge work… because of an LLM?If LLMs were enough to radically change knowledge work, we already wouldn’t be wasting our lives grinding out 40 hours a week so we can retire at 65.
yucky|3 years ago