> A tractor replaced a horse in turning the field, bit you still need a farmer to drive it.
Before mechanisation, like 50x more people worked in the agricultural sector, compared to today. So tractors certainly left without work a huge number of people. Our society adapted to this change and sucked these people into industrial sector.
If LLM would work like a tractor, it would force 49 out of 50 programmers (or, more generically, blue-collar workers) to left their industry. Is there a place for them to work instead? I don't know.
Fair point. The farms also begun to produce exponentially more food. If LLM’s would prove as revolutionary as Spinning Jenny and mechanisation of farm labour (which I don’t believe for a second), we could provide a easier life for billions of people, cure illnesses and poverty, provide education for countless children… The farm hands and their families moved to cities into factory work, which at least in England was dickensian horror of poverty and slums, but in many other countries (Nordic for instance) created urbanisation and new meaning of life as well as upwards social mobility. Many computer scientis here had a farmer as a grand-father or great-grandfather.
But none of this chamged how food grows and that you need somebody who bloody well knows what they are doing to produce it. Especially how machinised it is today.
However, I do not believe LLM to be a tractor. More like a slightly different hammer. You still need to hit the nail.
Before mechanisation, like 50x more people worked in the agricultural sector, compared to today. So tractors certainly left without work a huge number of people. Our society adapted to this change and sucked these people into industrial sector.
If LLM would work like a tractor, it would force 49 out of 50 programmers (or, more generically, blue-collar workers) to left their industry. Is there a place for them to work instead? I don't know.