projectazorian
Joined 5 years ago
Joined 5 years ago
I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen LLMs one-shot responses that are fit to paste to Slack verbatim. It does happen though.
Even without this mandatory polygraphing and the absurd rules around lifetime drug use are enough to rule these roles out of contention for many.
I mean yeah, but some of us are old enough to remember how the consensus was that the world was done with America because of Bush, but then Obama got elected and suddenly it was all forgotten.
And what happens when the SQL query has some subtle error or is missing data?
With interns, there’s an implicit understanding that you will spend a bit of extra time reviewing their work and mentoring them. With “just AI it bruh,” there is not.
Most consulting is not some flashy 25 year old Ivy grad putting together a slide deck that says “fire people,” it usually involves either gathering (or providing) extensive domain knowledge much of which is in forms not legible to AI (or at least in forms that can’t be encapsulated at a context level that doesn’t cause unacceptable quality drops.) Often there are compliance mandates involved that have real teeth. So again I think there will still be plenty of humans involved.
Lawyers will be fine IMO, they’re a government protected guild whose key outputs have to be human certified, and where error has real consequences + can threaten licensure or lead to civil/criminal liability in the worst cases.
Not to mention that AI dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for filing lawsuits. Courts are already being inundated by pro se filings, mostly from nutters as usual, but some of which will have real merit. And entrepreneurial litigators will eventually figure out how to harness AI properly, some probably already have. All of those lawsuits will require lawyers to handle them. And this is without getting into the complex IP issues that AI raises.
I’d say that there might be some short term dislocation but demand for lawyers is about to go up, not down. Paralegals without specialized knowledge may be in for a hard time though.
20-40% sounds about right for me, today. Maybe 40-60% on a good day. But a lot of the reason it's not higher comes from harness gaps and org processes that haven't caught up.
All of that will get fixed with time.
Maybe it's just my prompt or something but my coding agent (Opus 4.7 based) says things like "this is the kind of thing that will blow up at 2am six months from now" all the time.
You know that mental health is a continuum right? There are a lot of problems people have that fall far short of active suicidal ideation. Maybe you think they should just add them to their journal for discussion at their regularly scheduled therapy session, but the world doesn't work that way. The "ruminating at 3am" headspace can be a productive one and is difficult to access in a normal therapy session.
Not to mention that many people who have actually called suicide hotlines will tell you that they aren't terribly helpful. (edit: not saying that they're always unhelpful, but many people have unhelpful experiences, or have eg. social anxiety that stops them from calling)
LLMs are far less toxic by comparison, but people are all about censorship in this case because they don't like the vibes. If lawyers and activists force the frontier labs to completely lock down their models, people will just go to open weights models that have no protections at all. This is already happening to some extent.
It's also interesting that people are always going after GPT when Claude's guardrails are far less strict. 4o caused OpenAI to overcorrect in my opinion. Again goes to the point that these arguments are more founded in vibes than reality.
I’m overall an AI optimist but this is going to blow up in people’s faces very quickly. (I would explain this to my manager but he has AI note taking turned on in all his meetings!)
And that’s not even getting into the use of it for sensitive clinical notes in eg. mental health…
In combination with requiring human operators to register, the idea here is that we'll develop a curated community that encourages quality discourse and interesting emergent behavior.
Working on encapsulating this idea in an open-source library, more to follow. In the meantime happy to answer any questions!
Workplaces are where many of us spend a large percentage of our waking lives. So, it is "normal," unfortunately. This is why HR language and norms have broken containment into the non-work world. (Whether that's a good thing is another question.)