Comment by rowanG077

I think highly complex work and “professional” work are basically completely orthogonal. You can have highly complex work you do as an amateur, where AI can be very useful. For example working through a difficult mathematical problem, building or contributing to an operating systems, or researching a highly technical topic for a hobby project such as microscopy, chip design or lithography.

And you can have extremely simple work that you nevertheless have to do as a professional. For example, drafting a routine customer email, summarizing a meeting, formatting a report, filling in standard documentation, or making a trivial code change.

So I don't think the $15k workstation / professional camera analogy really holds. Those are specialized tools whose capabilities are mostly useful within a fairly narrow domain. A general-purpose AI can be useful across thousands of completely unrelated tasks, including one-off problems encountered by ordinary people.