Comment by dmix
3 days ago
If the barrier to entry is lower then more people will engage with it. Everything in life is about incentives. This is a hugely powerful tool for people working in the information industry, which is most people with office jobs. A sales person who can overcome a simple customer objection without a major time investment with devs is a sales person who makes more $$ and gets more promotions.
Most people in practice won't, they'll stick to what they know, but there's tons of semi-nerds on the edges who are going to flourish in the next decade. Which is great news for the economy.
Engaging with it is different than "learning" though, that's specifically what I was talking about. LLMs seem to be interesting because they're a technology that doesn't encourage you to learn. I know people who talk to ChatGPT, copy code, run it, paste errors into ChatGPT, copy output, run it, etc. They're not really learning anything, they're a glorified console through which ChatGPT can interact with their machine. I'm not saying that that's exactly what happened in your story. I just think that learning will be the exception, not the rule.