Comment by RugnirViking
7 hours ago
does it never? seems to me that people pay me precisely for my knowledge, learned over many years. The knowledge translates into action, sure. But thats like the old parable about a plumber being paid €150 for a 5 minute consult that involves turning a single screw. "i could have turned that screw!" the customer cries, ignoring that yes, they could have. But they didn't know to.
I think perhaps the problem is instead "I thought that having this knowledge would set me apart, forever, without me having to learn anything else"
There's a good chance the apprentice plumber could've fixed it just as quickly. That's where we are now.
right. Apprentices will always grow, and so too must you, if you want to keep being paid. Their job is to come with new tools and new ideas, and your job is to keep a wider view into what you're doing and why, maintaining trust (you need to build the authority to tell apprentices no when their ideas might flood the customer's house), and keep moving towards other parts of the business and solving harder problems (working with sales, hiring, etc to manage customers and apprentices). AI will not build authority for you.
If your argument is that the customer themselves could use an AI or whatever to learn plumbing, that was always an option (libraries, google, youtube). They pay you so they don't have to worry about flooding their house (or at least have someone else to blame).
They might be able to "one shot" simple fixes that you might previously have assigned to an apprentice, but believe me, AIs are not about to start doing complex things for the layman that actually required seniors previously in either programming or plumbing, because very few of those things were just "type better into a computer". (build trust, speak confidently, know what doesn't work, take responsibility, test without breaking systems, communicate and work together with other professionals, have opinions)
Libraries, Google and YouTube were/are not nearly as efficient at conveying _targetted_ _actionable_ expertise as AI is.
1 reply →
I think a more sane minded customer would not mind paying for the assurance and having someone to blame in case things go wrong, not necessarily because of their domain knowledge.
I could theoretically learn everything about plumbing but would still rather call a professional for the peace of mind that it was done "correctly" and it the process goes wrong, I would have an instant fix instead of trying to go back and educating myself on plumbing more.
Could you consider that as part of knowledge? Yeah and also no. Because the knowledge can be copied and put into a LLM but legally a LLM cannot sign off on things like NDAs or take accountability like a human has to in these roles.
I agree. I also think that deciding that LLMs encode all knowledge perfectly, either now or in an imagined future, is foolish. My experience is that they match the average general state of experts among the field. The sort of thing a junior might read to start to grasp the general ideas and issues in a field. They rarely have opinions, or good intuitions around more specific scenarios. This is why the current equilibrium of a senior piloting one works so well- theyre leaning on it to speed up, but pushing it away from the "average" where circumstances demand.
We can argue about imagined future progress, but I don't see that getting much better, given that the literature doesn't often do that, and how often experts in one scenario end up being poorly suited given another set of facts.