The things that most people ignore when thinking about AI and health is that 2/3rds of Americans are suffer from chronic illness and there is a shortage of doctors. Could AI really do much worse than the status quo? Doctors won't be replaced, but if we could move them up the stack of health to actually doing the work of saving lives rather than just looking at rising cholesterol numbers and writing scripts?

Except that there are still a lot of assembly programmers.

And even more C/C++ programmers.

It's also likely that C/C++ programmers didn't become Python programmers but that people who wouldn't have otherwise been programmers became Python programmers.

> At the well-specified end, you have tasks where the inputs are clean, the desired output is clear, and success criteria are obvious: processing a standard form, writing code to a precise spec, translating a document, summarising a report. LLMs are excellent at this

Yeah

> At the ambiguous end, you have tasks where the context is messy, the right approach isn’t obvious, and success depends on knowledge that isn’t written down anywhere

Sounds like most programming

Almost all of the programming I've ever done.

> I’m arguing that the most likely outcome is something like “computers” or “the internet” rather than “the end of employment as we know it.”

Yeah

The number of programmers has changed so much, from ~zero in the 1940s to tens of thousands in the sixties, to, what, maybe 30 million today? While most programmers worked a little or a lot in ASM from invention until the 1980s, it's a very specialized role today.

I do not believe that 'roughly similar numbers of people were employed writing' ASM, C, and Python except for the instant that C outpaced ASM in the seventies and when Python outpaced ASM somewhere around the millennium.

Probably at no time were ASM, C, and Python programmers even close to similarly numerous.

This isn't a new take. The problem is, "boring" doesn't warrant the massive bet the market has made on it, so this argument is essentially "AI is worthless" to someone significantly invested.

It's not so much that people aren't making this argument, it's that it's being tossed immediately into the "stochastic parrot" bunch.

That's just simply not true.

It has become difficult to grade students using anything other than in-person pen and paper assessments, because AI cheating is rampant and hard to detect. It is particularly bad for introductory-level courses; the simpler the material the hardest it is to make it AI-proof.