41–50 of 221 posts
The safest jobs are the ones that can't be done behind a screen. I'm a technician and there's no robot that could replace me and there won't be for a long time.
I think the ChatGPT moment for humanoid robotics is coming within a year or two.
The reason LLMs use the same cadence and cliches is that their RLHF does not emphasize writing well, the way it emphasizes, say, coding. And the reason for that should be pretty obvious: coding is where the big money is at. So the author may be correct, but for a different reason: unless writing starts being very valuable as a profession, it's unlikely the labs will spend significant resources making their AI models…
Software can be checked for being 'written well' by compilers / linters etc. There is no equivalent for well-written natural prose. Spelling and grammar checkers haven't a clue about prose semantics.
The reason LLMs use the same cadence and cliches is that their RLHF does not emphasize writing well, the way it emphasizes, say, coding. And the reason for that should be pretty obvious: coding is where the big money is at. So the author may be correct, but for a different reason: unless writing starts being very valuable as a profession, it's unlikely the labs will spend significant resources making their AI models…
It's slightly weird how confident writers are that it won't get improved.
Safest job from AI is also the oldest job.
I think it's likely to be lawyers who are the safest. Lawyers are the ones primarily in charge of the government, and I think it's likely that as soon as they feel like the legal profession is threatened, they will pass laws making it illegal to use AI for legal issues. It's not all sunshine and roses (paralegals are probably hosed), but the lawyers seem like they'll do ok.
Eh, I think we're going to run into the same issues we're seeing in software. That is, junior and lower status positions (so SDETs in software, paralegals in law) are rapidly being downsized, and that's going to have a big issue in the future where there isn't the same talent funnel. And then in the future those that work their way up will basically be dependent on working with AI.
I don't think writing is an "AI-complete" problem. It's just that the models are inefficient at it right now, due to training and/or architecture. Good writing requires thinking, reflection, and doing multiple passes. This currently translates to using a high reasoning effort and burning lots of tokens, but big AI labs like Anthropic are struggling with handling the load, so they're doing the exact opposite and findi…
Same with code, but that doesn't seem to matter anymore.
Has writing ever been a safe job, even before AI?
If you are Steven King, sure. From what I heard it's a bloodbath at the bottom.
Similar, much narrower crises were managed for manufacturing jobs during the worldwide industrialization era. The solution for those displaced by trade was retraining.
Unfortunately, at the moment we have no clue of what workers should be retrained to. Not writing.
The reason LLMs use the same cadence and cliches is that their RLHF does not emphasize writing well, the way it emphasizes, say, coding. And the reason for that should be pretty obvious: coding is where the big money is at. So the author may be correct, but for a different reason: unless writing starts being very valuable as a profession, it's unlikely the labs will spend significant resources making their AI models…
"The reason LLMs use the same cadence and cliches is that their RLHF does not emphasize writing well, the way it emphasizes, say, coding. And the reason for that should be pretty obvious: coding is where the big money is at." Software can be checked for being 'written well' by compilers / linters etc. There is no equivalent for well-written natural prose. Spelling and grammar checkers haven't a clue about prose seman…
The safest jobs are the ones that can't be done behind a screen. I'm a technician and there's no robot that could replace me and there won't be for a long time.
I think the ChatGPT moment for humanoid robotics is coming within a year or two.
How long after that moment did the ChatGPT robots need to invent the time travel machine which let you come back to 2026 to confidently claim this?
It's not enough that humans can tell the difference and feel an ick, there also need to be enough organizations willing to pay money for that difference. From my vantage point, there are not. It turns out that for a ton of the writing produced by companies, the quality of the prose wasn't really "load-bearing" as Claude puts it. That writing is there to occupy a space and look professional at a glance, the same way elevator music is tolerable for the duration of an elevator ride.