What will be left for us to work on?

Key point:

- Work is shifting from building/doing to evaluating, judging, and steering — that's where human value will concentrate.

Other supporting points. ------

- No lab milestone or "RSI breakthrough" will suddenly eliminate jobs — economic impact unfolds gradually over decades.

- Reliability, not raw capability, is the real bottleneck holding back AI automation today.

- Historically, making work cheaper/faster (ATMs, radiology, coding) has grown employment, not destroyed it.

- Superintelligence claims misunderstand human intelligence, which is itself amplified by tools like AI ("co-superintelligence").

It is not a good idea to compress articles like this but there are many of these opinions to read and trying to get to the point quickly to uncover new viewpoints.

I like the narrative but the key point

> A battle of two narratives > Build wealth before AI obviates our skills > Build skills, agency, taste, judgement

both narratives are portrayed as being odds with each other but, I can't come up with a single "build wealth" scenario that doesn't involve building skills, agency, taste and judgement.

what am I missing ?

I have been writing software for over 40 years and have had a long time interest in and some work in AI over that time. I wouldn’t say this gives me any more prognosticating power about how all of this is ultimately going to go, but I believe we're soon nearing an area of plateauing; whether that's because the science itself is plateauing or the intervention of governments is going to force plateau it.

So if things continue as they are today, I think in the near future, being a software developer is going to be more analogous to the medical field, where in the medical field you have different levels of professional expertise.

Some will be like nurses, and some will be closer to a medic and a smaller set will be like doctors. Each with increasingly required knowledge and experience to fulfill a needed role.

Those who used to be actual software developers are going to be (or have to become) more in the doctor role with years of internship and practical experience to be the architects guiding the overall AI implementation of software development in organizations.

The medics are going to be people who are semi-technical, where they have some technical understanding but they don't dedicate themselves to it, like say product managers, where they jump in to help development along, but don't need to have many years of experience or very deep technical knowledge.

At the nurse level, it's probably going to be similar to what people would do in the past with no code tools, where somebody in marketing who knows very little to nothing about coding at all is just going to directly converse with AI systems, but they'll never be likely to get anything more advanced than the tools they could think up for themselves.

Of course, it's so hard to tell what the next big discovery or changes to the nature of world society might push things in one direction or another.

The answer to this question after a lot of reflection: games.

AI can slop fork or clone existing software well, but a clone of an existing game is pointless, it's basically guaranteed to be derivative and worse than the original game, and games aren't so expensive that you can't just buy the original. AI can't know if new mechanics or angles to an existing genre will feel good to play, or if a new genre is fun, that requires a human to experience the game in its totality.

Games are also very resilient to sloppy AI coding, and if an indy game crashes nobody is getting paged.