Comment by hackyhacky
17 days ago
> The irony is that I haven't seen AI have nearly as large of an impact anywhere else.
We are in this pickle because programmers are good at making tools that help programmers. Programming is the tip of the spear, as far as AI's impact goes, but there's more to come.
Why pay an expensive architect to design your new office building, when AI will do it for peanuts? Why pay an expensive lawyer to review your contract? Why pay a doctor, etc.
Short term, doing for lawyers, architects, civil engineers, doctors, etc what Claude Code has done for programmers is a winning business strategy. Long term, gaining expertise in any field of intellectual labor is setting yourself up to be replaced.
> Why pay an expensive architect to design your new office building, when AI will do it for peanuts? Why pay an expensive lawyer to review your contract? Why pay a doctor, etc.
All of those jobs are mandated by law to done by accredited and liable humans.
> All of those jobs are mandated by law to done by accredited and liable humans.
Good point. The jobs I listed will be protected for a little while due to statutory limitations. At first, firms will have one AI-augmented lawyer take on the work of a dozen lawyers. Of course his salary won't increase, and the others will be fired. Eventually, he'll just be rubber-stamping the AI's results, purely for the sake of compliance. Then the ruling class will petition the legislature to change the law in the name of "efficiency," and that will be the end of that.
Meanwhile, programmers have no such protection. Nor do customer service agents, secretaries, publishers, copywriters, banker, office managers. There is no safety net.
Lawyers will always be human and their law firms will always be run by humans because lawyers were smart enough to ensure that they had complete agency and monopoly in their markets by law, not investors, business owners, and what have you.
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> Why pay an expensive architect to design your new office building, when AI will do it for peanuts?
Will it? AI is getting good at some parts of programming because of RLVR. You can test architectural designs automatically to some extent but not entirely, because people tend to want unique buildings that stand out (if it weren't the case architects would have already become a niche profession due to everyone using prefabs all the time). At some point an architectural design has to be built and you can't currently simulate real building sites at high speed inside a datacenter. This use case feels marginal.
There's going to be a lot of cases like this. The safe jobs are ones where there's little training data available online, the job has a large component of unarticulated experience or intuition, and where you can't verify purely in software whether the work artifact is correct or not.
> people tend to want unique buildings that stand out
Just tell the LLM that you want a unique design. I've found LLMs to respond well to requests for "originality," at least in poetry, prose, and coding. No reason that can't do that in architecture as well.
> At some point an architectural design has to be built and you can't currently simulate real building sites at high speed inside a datacenter.
First of all, you can simulate a building site, or any physical environment. We've been doing that for years, even in games. AI companies are working towards a "world model" for precisely that reason. Second of all, even without a physical simulation, the laws of physics are deterministic and easy for an LLM to understand.
> The safe jobs are ones where there's little training data available online,
These cases are "safe" only in relative terms. Lack of easily-available training data is friction but not insurmountable. AI companies have bet big and they have a strong incentive to find and use appropriate training data.