Reminded me of this post by EY. (You're making a different point about existing expertise, not LLM expertise, but I think it holds in general.)
Every month a new guy discovers LLMs; discovers a skill the current LLMs require to get good results; and writes about the future jobs that will always be available for smart people like HIM, that are SKILLED in using LLMs.
The next generation of AIs doesn't need his fancy prompt. The image model goes from needing to type in just the right set of weird words and cryptic sorcerous invocations, to most people being able to type in English what they want and get a pretty good result.
There are still tasks that require careful invocation. But they are a much smaller fraction of all the tasks people are trying to do, or you can get a bleh result without the elaborate invocation to get it really good. And to improve on the bleh result you need to be substantially more of an expert than back when the Guy was memorizing a rule about adding "trending on Artstation" to the image prompts, as would always require a human paid to do that.
Another generation of AIs comes out. The next generation of Clever Skills is obsolete. Image models just obey the instructions for compositing panels without mixing them up, and you don't need to be an expert to get them to do it right. Another human value-add is gone. A wider set of tasks require no human expert.
Now a new Guy notices LLMs have become useful in his field for the first time. He discovers they require SKILL to use CORRECTLY. He posts about how there will always be jobs for humans who are SKILLED in using LLMs like HIM.
But it is not an infinite cycle. It is not the same each time it repeats. Now the Guy is a highly paid programmer or a career mathematician in 2026, instead of a graphic artist in 2023.
In six months the models will no longer require his vaunted Skills.
And by then there will be another Guy.
But the process doesn't continue forever. The Guys are coming from fields that were harder and harder for AIs. The brief centaur eras are shorter and shorter.
Today it is writers who are laughing at how bad the LLMs are at their job, and who will perhaps soon be posting about how it takes Skill to get an LLM to do their job Correctly. But the models are coming faster, and the eras of kinds of human value-add in each field are shortening.
There is a point when you run out of Guys, either because the centaur eras are too short for people to develop SKILLs and post to Twitter about them; or because there are not lands left for AIs to conquer; or because ordinary people are not reassured by some Nobel laureate proclaiming there will always be jobs for Nobel laureates with the SKILLS to prompt robotized biology labs Correctly.
But we'll never run out of amateur economists who assert entirely without a brief contemporary example that there will always be jobs for humans skilled at operating AIs!
We'll run out of professional economists saying it when nobody is paid for that work anymore.
I guess we'll also run out of amateur economists when they're dead.
Source: https://x.com/allTheYud/status/2057136382817231151