Exactly. The post read to me as another variation of the denial that people with expertise are reaching for right now. My sense is that we as programmers went through it over a year ago already (perhaps not all of us, but at least anyone paying attention), and so it's easy to overlook that it's still new to people who do other forms of "knowledge work," i.e. people whose identity is bound up with their expertise.
My working theory at the moment is that for programmers it was relatively "clean" and took the form of an inside-out transformation of the work, where AIs directly produced the central work product more or less adequately and relatively early on, but for other forms of work it will appear as some mixture of inside-out (in which case it will appear similarly first as a tool, then as something more than mere tool) and outside-in (the things surrounding their work and the supports their work processes rely on will be progressively automated). This is going to give rise to all sorts of pathologies in the white collar world, we'll get all kinds of variations on denial/negotiation, and so on, until it fully transforms the division of labor.
One interesting point of reference here: Yuval Harari gave a talk recently about the radical changes that will take place relatively quickly, in which he noted the AIs are not quite as good at writing as he is yet, although he expects they will be relatively soon. He then gave the timeline for what he considered "soon": 10 years! So we find the denial ("I still have time, they're not as good as me yet, maybe in 10 years...") even among the most vocal "prophets," among those supposedly most wised-up to what's going on and where the capability frontier lies.
Did you maybe consider that the 10 year timeline is not denial, but actually well educated reasoning based on Yuval’s experience and understanding of the problem space? You shouldn’t dismiss people’s thoughts as denial just because they don’t match your perspective.
I would guess if asked Harari would actually revise that lower. The point was: even those arguing most strongly that AI is an autonomous historical force can slide back into the mere abstract recognition of it. In context, Harari was saying "I'm speaking to you as a writer now, but my own standpoint will eventually be undermined." I'm saying "yes, and your 10-year timeline suggests you along with all of us are not taking your own thesis seriously enough."
Have you considered the possibility that you're simply not as good as the experts, and that your experience of LLMs being capable of performing your work up to your standards doesn't imply that experts are necessarily in denial?
Being fairly at expert level in a "solved" domain (for some definition of solved) but also having near-expert level proficiency in a non-technical as-yet "unsolved" domain and watching the process repeat there (and watching how people react as inroads are made progressively deeper) is basically my own standpoint. But I am intentionally using "solved" and "unsolved" very loosely here: you can get stuck in the thicket of arguments about verifiable domains, what it means for a domain to be solved, whether a set of evals can tell us something has been solved or not, and so on. One way to avoid that (as my original comment pointed to) and focus on what matters for us is to look instead at the effects being produced in the work process and on the division of labor as a whole.
What sort of denial are you reading into the author's post? I don't read it as denial. He is fully acknowledging the usefulness of AI.
He's saying: "Expertise improves AI-assisted work, experts can steer better and get more out of models."
The obvious conclusion for anyone is "therefore experts will remain the indispensable and specially rewarded center of the production process."
That this is appearing exactly now, and in this form, strikes me as extremely suspicious. I don't doubt the author's sincerity on the surface. What I suspect is that anxiety over the possibility that the (unstated) conclusion might be false (!) motivates the argument in the first place.
I'm asking the question, "Why is this argument appearing now?" At least one reason seems to me to be, "because we're afraid of what the world could look like if it's not true."
Okay, I get your point.
However, I personally agree with the author and I don't think his argument is necessarily motivated out of an anxious fear. On the contrary I think it may be motivated out of a sense of extreme exhilaration and empowerment.
Because experts (like myself as a programmer for 15+ years) who are using AI in many fields are suddenly empowered and much more useful than we were before AI. My employability and value has gone up and not down, precisely because of being able to apply my expertise with AI, which people without expertise simply cannot do. I am a professional programmer and also owner of my own startup.
Let me give you a concrete example that I am dealing with at my startup. I'm a small business owner. Before AI if i wanted to produce production quality video for marketing it would taken such a huge budget and such a large team of people (or an expensive agency) that I wouldn't even have considered it due to the enormous cost. I'm talking about Apple quality video production which takes millions of dollars to produce.
Not anymore. A single competent person with AI can replace an entire marketing video production department or agency. But expertise is key here: knowledge of film terminology to be able to describe the effect you want, and ability to use video editing tools effectively, as well aesthetic taste. I as a programmer with no filmmaking experience don't even know how to write the prompt which makes the video that i want because I don't even have the terminology. But a person with that expertise has suddenly become more employable and more valuable to my business because I as a small business now have the capability to create Apple quality marketing videos.
So AI actually created a new job for an expert that would have otherwise not existed because it was outside the budget of small businesses. Previously somebody like that would have been employable to only a few large production studios but now they become employable by almost any small business.
> A single competent person with AI can replace an entire marketing video production department or agency.
This is a good example of what I was pointing to with "fully transforms the division of labor."
I'm personally in a position similar to yours, but as I watch the different moves the labs make, I see the edge we've been handed (for now) also constantly under attack from different angles. This is why it seems to me that so many who can make the most of things for the moment also feel the clock is ticking.