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Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 21, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I'm close to absolute believer in "AI will never truly eliminate people from the workforce who want to stay in the workforce." This is because AI (LLMs) are just another technology. Technology makes certain specific tasks obsolete, but doesn't obsolesce the people executing those tasks. The classic example is that automobiles drastically reducing the need for ferriers, but any competent or sufficiently motivated person of any walk of life could easily become a mechanic. Consumer automotive mechanics have enjoyed employment for over a century now.

What I think will change in a meaningful way is the relative balance of power (and, following that, compensation) for people who have naturally higher competency in soft skills aka "people skills." Most PMC jobs today are a mixture of technical or semi-technical capability and soft-skills. For example, Lawyerin' is partially pseudo-code review, doctors have to actually be able to make a medically sound diagnoses and design a course of treatment. Consultants and bankers less so, but they have their pseudo-technical-jargon signals that one has to be familiar with. All of these occupations, however, require a healthy does (haha, doctors!) of emotive human interaction.

In many cases, the "top" of these careers are 90% if not more human interaction. The "top" bankers, lawyers, consultants and (yes, probably) doctors are effectively very fancy sales people. They delegate the actual work to their underlings, and collect part of the charged fees for that work.

AI(LLMs) mean that one person with a little bit of technical knowledge can "in-source" a lot of the semi-technical work to the AI (which is still close enough to free compared to an actual employee or subcontractor) while doubling down on their sales abilities. This is actually even true for hard tech careers like software development - I know contract developers who have increased their on paper workloads by 50% or more but are actually working the same to less hours because Claude is handling a lot of code boilerplate and documentation for them.

That being said, not all soft skills are created the same. One PMC soft skills I've seen for my entire career is something you might call "fast following politicking." These are folks who can gauge the relative social standings of various people and groups within a larger org and can quickly align themselves with those on the way up and avoid those on the way down (or out). They cannot, however, actually make their own decisions, set a course for others to follow, or demonstrate anything even close to "leadership." They used to be relegated mostly to HR and marketing positions, but have metastasized into "Product Management" (aka the Sociology of the corporate world) in recent years.

I am optimistic these people will find themselves without jobs sooner rather than later. While their shenanigans are usually readily apparent to anyone that matters, they pay their rent to the company by being process automatons. These are the folks who have incredibly well formatted spreadsheets and power points (with almost no content within that formatting). Yet, up until now, some of that basic information processing had to be done by someone ... and they were there. I believe AI will fix that.