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I'm well aware, and that's not what I'm worried about at all.
I know a bunch of social workers, some of them a generation or so older than me, and I heard a few stories of how things used to run. Like nowadays there was actual work, and there was a bunch of bureaucratic stuff to deal with. Back in the day you had to type it all out on actual paper, mail it etc. Then everybody and their dog started using computers for everything, everything got digitized, hundreds of apps meant to automate the drudgery got deployed, you could instantly send documents via e-mail... do you want to take a wild guess in which of these eras people spent more time doing actual work than they did dealing with bureaucratic nonsense?
I worry the same will happen with AI. No, it will not "make us equal", it's a side-rant but I'm shocked anyone could even utter such a sentiment with a straight face. There are, and there have always been, entire institutions devoted to the task of ensuring this will never happen. What will happen is that you will need AI to even keep up. You will need an AI text generator to output sheer amount of text you will now be required to write in order to cover your ass, and you will need an AI summarizer to "read" the tonnes upon tonnes of paper that will be sent your way. The best part is that all of this will be centralized in the hands of a few companies, who's owners hang out at the same cocktail parties as various panopticon fetishists at the top of our society, who will dictate how exactly this AI needs to be lobotomized to only output goodthink. It will now be the perfect tool for them to "nudge" us, old geezers like you or me might remember a world where you needed to process information yourself, but children born in the new one will only ever know information summarized to them via AI.
I've mentioned this before, but this is what drives me up the wall with AI-optimists. I know it's hard to learn the lessons of history, but this doesn't even count as history. We literally just watched Big Tech bitch-slap the ever-loving hell out utopian tech-nerds like 5 minutes ago, and I'm now supposed to jump on the next bandwagon that is going to "make us equal"? Give me a break.
That was my first thought as well. Like just how disconnected from the reality of day-to-day work does someone have to be for this prediction to make a lick of sense? It genuinely boggles the mind.
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As I understand it, this is already a standard tactic used by large law firms to crush individual lawyers. They don't need LLM, they just hire a ton of new lawyers to churn out vast amounts of legal documents. A single lawyer trying to fight a lawsuit against them would get buried, because he just can't physically read all of that stuff and respond in any human lifetime, and if he can't respond he loses by default.
Big corporations also do this as a defense mechanism. So you want to sue them, and they're required to turn over the relevant docs? Oh they'll do that... but the "relevant docs" are like a million pages of garbage. Again, only a giant law firm has the resources to actually read through all of it and process it effectively. DDOS via human bureaucracy.
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I share your pessimism. I think of it this way: the amount of time it takes to do anything increases with the amount of time available; the amount of admin that a bureaucracy requires of you increases with the amount they think you can do.
So LLM increases in people's capacity to handle admin work will result in an increase in the amount of required admin. "Of course you can complete this form as well; you can use an LLM to help you..."
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