> If an AI can replace me on the mental aspects of work, and robotics are on their way to replacing humanity on the physical aspects of work... then what's left?
At the risk of sounding new age, my answer to this is "emotional work".
What exactly that would mean in the equivalent of the post-agrarian society that LLMs might bring, I cannot know.
You can't ignore how economies shift in response to the surplus of things. When software or other such things can be produced trivially, its cost and value is going to approach as close to $0 as it possibly can. By contrast the value of other things will go up.
So for instance in the past it used to be that literacy was a high value skill. Transcription and other such services were highly valued. Now that literacy is ubiquitous, such skills have basically no value in and of themselves. But instead, we've built a mountain of stuff on top of those skills and in domains which simply did not even exist before, and those things are now valued. But what we value now a days is no more permanent or inherent in its value than anything else that ultimately failed to stand the test of time.
At the risk of sounding new age, my answer to this is "emotional work".
What exactly that would mean in the equivalent of the post-agrarian society that LLMs might bring, I cannot know.