I agree with the overall assessment, but there's a catch: even "highly skilled" workers are not skilled in "all the things". I've felt that ChatGPT hasn't increased my productivity in my core languages and frameworks, but it has helped immensely in areas where I'm not an expert.
To be concrete about it, I recently ported a project from SwiftUI on iOS (an ecosystem I am very comfortable with) to an Android app written in Kotlin (an ecosystem I mostly dread). I don't find ChatGPT very helpful with my day-to-day Swift stuff, but it was incredibly helpful with the Android work, from language syntax to idioms to outright translation of code.
What framework or approach did it recommend you use for the Android UI? Compose? XML layouts? From code?
I tried using the Bing chat interface, and it repeatedly pushed me in the direction of using Microsoft tools to accomplish tasks for a cross-compile mid tier solution. I had to explicitly tell it to exclude them.
In areas where I'm an expert, I find myself correcting ChatGPT constantly. But for a language I want to learn, it's been really helpful to get me started on a simple algorithm or debug an error message.
I can't help but think that it sounds like productised Gell-Mann Amnesia. If a system is useless and/or counterproductive in areas you're an expert in, but appears useful in areas that you aren't, shouldn't it be a red flag? How would you know if solutions it comes up with are bad, wrong, or just bad practices?
I really love your optimism here, but as an ex-executive I can see how this will be used -- to put wage pressure on any skilled/senior leaders by inflowing a churn of unskilled to replace them.
I don't think you grasp how this will play out over multi-game
Different companies and executives will play this out differently. Some will replace their unskilled workers, some will fire everyone, some will ignore AI altogether.
What matters is which of these strategies will result in actual success. This is honestly far too hard to tell at this point.
You can apply the law of "power wins" I think to this pretty well. It will be initially be used to put labor in a lower position and expand ownership margins -- until that creates an opposing power scenario. Which maybe be sooner... or could be later. Hopefully before robots become real, because otherwise it will be never.
I'll say here, I've spoken to and spent time with a few well known billionaires and I'd say deep down, they are exterminists no matter how nice a face they try to put on it. Over time they just come to believe most people don't matter at all. Its really dark, and the sooner we come to terms with that the better.
Software has been cannibalising itself for 70 years, and yet look and behold - being a programmer is still one of the best paid jobs. I don't believe a simple 20-50% boost for intermediate users is going to change things much.
70 years? I’d argue that programming has only recently (last 10-20 years) become a mainstream source of high paying jobs. Before that it was relatively low paying or inaccessible/undesirable to most people. Recent simplification through the movement of much CRUD work toward web frameworks has made it more accessible.
As others have remarked, it allows them to be marginally more skilled in areas where they are lacking. I am expert level in a couple domains, but now I am advanced novice to intermediate in a whole lot more due GenAI. I can now hang with junior folks in their domain, not mine.
While I agree with your assessment on wage pressure, the folks this is going to hurt the most are the new graduates that don't have the knowledge or experience. Their competition just got a whole lot stiffer.
It benefits two groups the most, someone with literally zero experience and experts.
Yes, I think that middle section will see enormous pressure from below (bootcamp folks probably doubled their productivity) and from above (skilled folks can roll up their sleeves rather than delegate).
That's the way with about any real leap in productivity applications. About every time you add "smart" to something, you take from skilled domain experts.
Just think of when Photoshop 4.0 added layers and now composing was for everyone, not just for those venturing into channel operations… (To be fair, here, things got much easier even for those who managed previously without this.)
> In other words, if you're skilled, there's nothing AI can do for you…
If the task you are working on is phone support. If you are a dev, you are perpetually learning new things, it's not possible to memorise the whole field so AI would have more opportunity to help.
The study group were mostly customer support agents. The nature of that work is very different from other knowledge workers so probably the results don't map to more creative fields.
> "Customer support agents using an AI tool to guide their conversations saw a nearly 14 percent increase in [overall] productivity, with 35 percent improvements for the lowest skilled and least experienced workers, and zero or small negative effects on the most experienced/most able workers... [out of] 5,000 agents working for a Fortune 500 software company."
AI quality is somewhere in the middle between highly skilled and neophyte (at present anyway).
On the other hand, "zero or small negative effects on the most experienced/most able workers".
In other words, if you're skilled, there's nothing AI can do for you…