It's going to hit so unevenly. My partner works with children at a homeless shelter, I'm an algorithm designer. I'm certain my job will be obsolete before my partner's is.
It's going to automate away nearly all pure desk jobs. Starting with data entry, like you've seen, but it'll come for junior SDEs and data scientists too. Customer service, then social media/PR, then marketing, as it culls the white collar. Graphic design is already struggling. But janitors will still keep their jobs because robotics is stuck at Roomba stage.
It's going to be fascinating. I can't think of a time in the past where white-collar jobs have been made obsolete like this.
Those people are all doing white collar jobs nobody does today: adding up columns of numbers with desktop adding machines, retyping manuscript memos, responding to customer and vendor mail, summarizing other hand-generated reports into newer more digestable reports (which are in turn the input for yet more manual clerical steps), maintaining paper indexes into warehouse-sized file stores, etc.
Each of these people (well, it's a movie, but the real people they represent) had a career, performance reviews, Christmas bonuses, all of it. Now the whole work output of this entire high-rise office building floor (and probably more floors on either side of it) can be replaced with one copy of Excel.
I'm confident we'll come up with all kinds of new data-pushing jobs to hand out, assuming we can contrive to continue living in conditions of energy abundance (like we already were in 1959).
I am not confident at all, because I don't see any law of nature or society that dictates that we shall always come up with new meaningful jobs whenever we render some of the old ones obsolete. It's true that we've done so before, but that was also when our economic development seemed exponential; surely we know better now? In any case, without a clear understanding of the mechanism, who's to say it's not just luck and/or survivor bias?
Alternatively, we can come up with meaningless jobs. Which is, of course, just UBI in disguise and with more incidental waste.
Human wants are unlimited, there'll always be something people want that machines aren't able to provide (until machines can do absolutely everything humans can do, at which point they'll be sentient and probably won't want to work for free).
You forget about the nature and quality of work. These people in an office adding things manually probably had a job that was safer, more dignified and healthier than, say, an worker in an Amazon fulfillment center.
If we are able to replace white collar work like this, i believe we will 'hollow out the middle': low level manual work will remain, as will highly paid engineering and coding roles and certain other areas, perhaps sales executives or others.
But the opportunities for many people unable or unable to meet the conditions or skills demanded by those roles, however, will be reduced.
I've had the same thought, and I'd love to see an analysis of spreadsheet software adoption and (e.g.) financial sector employment to situate LLMs in their proper historical context. A brief glance at FRED data doesn't seem to point to any big changes in the job growth rate in that sector, but there's obviously too much exogeneity there to really say.
As an LLM researcher, I think a large hurdle is the set of last-mile problems like those that have plagued self-driving cars. Yes, stakes are comparatively much lower when automating a job posting, but correctness matters.
Fewer people juggling more very-different responsibilities, which is a continuation of how office work's already been going.
Personal computer? Now everyone does typing/data-entry/data-organization/data-retrieval, not just secretaries—most of whom we've fired. Also, now "programmer" and "analyst" are one job instead of two. We fired most of the programmers, all you analysts are "software developers" now. Hope you like only doing the thing that was your main job about 10% of the time.
Computer spreadsheets? Now everyone has to mess with spreadsheets, not just the finance/accounting people! Fun, right?
Computerized scheduling? Now you get to do that and your other jobs!
"AI" image generation? Congrats, now you, the copy-writer, also do graphic design for your department.
ChatGPT? So much for being a dedicated (well, kinda) copy-writer... hope you like being an editor instead, plus the several other things you do now that used to be their own jobs! Oh and we fired the other three copy-writers in your department, so we expect 4x your previous output on this, and don't let your other several jobs slip, either.
The Junior SE will become the Junior PE. In reality, you still need to plan the architecture, know the concepts, understand the domain, shape the data, and most importantly review and test the generated code.
Also ChatGPT is way way better in English than even other common European languages for which it sounds like poorly translated English. So it's also going to hit very differently outside the Anglosphere.
Well if your job is automated, as well as all software developers then at this point sales, marketing will be because way easier to do. And then no managers will be necessary if there is no human working. At this point Saas companies will probably have no meaning and we all be jobless from the current perspective.
We will either create new jobs that machine can’t do yet. Be reduced to slavery from very rich people owning the tech. Or maybe we’ll all enjoy this new tech that freed more time. Given the past human history the former is pretty unlikely tough
It's going to automate away nearly all pure desk jobs. Starting with data entry, like you've seen, but it'll come for junior SDEs and data scientists too. Customer service, then social media/PR, then marketing, as it culls the white collar. Graphic design is already struggling. But janitors will still keep their jobs because robotics is stuck at Roomba stage.
It's going to be fascinating. I can't think of a time in the past where white-collar jobs have been made obsolete like this.