Comment by keiferski
6 days ago
I don’t think people actually read the article; because it makes a unique point about certain types of queries:
I would have been interested in the experience and thoughts of someone whose opinions I respected, both as a social thing and to learn something.
In other words, some types of questions are aimed at 1) building a social connection with the person you’re asking and 2) because you want to know what they, specifically, think about their topic.
AI can’t really replace either of these. AIs might function as a weak social replacement for some people, but you aren’t really going to advance in your personal or professional life by making friends with Claude.
A good example of the second one are AskMeAnything type forum posts: I don’t care what some generic celebrity/famous figure thinks about something, I care specifically about what George Clooney thinks about it. The AI will always be guessing, building a model on what George has said in the past, but it will never actually say what he thinks right now.
For a more serious and contemporary example: there are dozens of videos on YouTube right now, interviews with various experts and pundits on the situation in Iran. Many of them have hundreds of thousands of views. But why would someone watch this instead of just asking ChatGPT what’s going on in Iran? Because we want to know what this particular person thinks.
> It doesn’t really matter how good AI systems get, that’s not going to change, and since most white collar work deals with these kinds of problems, there is little danger in it being replaced.
Does the accounts payable team keep their jobs because their manager enjoys chatting with them? Does the junior analyst stay employed because the VP values their specific personal opinion on the Q3 revenue forecast? Note the article is about work
I wouldn’t frame it as “chatting with,” more like, corporations want people in certain roles to deal with things, more than they necessarily want just the results that said person gives. Depends on the job and situation of course.
When you have X employee in a certain role, you know someone is “handling” a particular thing. With AI that isn’t really clear. Maybe you just get the same person owning the responsibilities that previously were under 3 people.
I think the word "entirely" is missing from the last line. A significant amount of white collar tasks are getting replaced, and eventually that leads to a need for fewer white collar employees, which subsequently also leads to less communication overhead and less of a need for humans in the loop to interpret subtleties, desires, etc. But that need will always be there at some level, or we'll have very intelligent AI agents that very intelligently blackmail your vendor's CEO because they have determined that to be the fastest way to get the TPS report you asked for. Humans still need to be there as guardrails at a minimum, but also because humans understand humans, and humans are your customers.
So yes, white collar jobs will be replaced, but they won't be replaced entirely.