Raw LLM Responses

A lot of white-collar workers, like doctors, lawyers and accountants, doubt that they could ever be replaced by AI. I was once one of them. The basic error white-collar workers make is to assume that AI would have to be just as good at doing their jobs as they are. And because their work involves, at least in part, human interaction, intuitive decision-making, and other quintessential "human" tasks, they conclude that, almost by definition, no AI could ever replace them. Human intelligence trumps AI because AI is not human. This perfectly natural assumption, I found out the hard way, fails to appreciate what happens in a capitalist market economy when some services become freely available to all or almost so. When a service is free or almost free, businesses and consumers alike are willing to compromise on quality - a LOT more than I thought would ever be possible. In my own case, the service involved is the translation of high-end legal documents, such as contracts between international corporations, court briefs for international litigation matters, etc. Until about five years ago, I was convinced that, at least during my lifetime, AI would not be able to replace me. And I was not alone. That's what most translators believed. To this day, I keep reading articles proclaiming that AI (machine translation) will never replace human translators because AI lacks human reasoning, intuition, and nuance. What actually happened when machine translation became widely available took us translators completely by surprise. Though they are mostly too embarrassed to admit it, clients started using - free or almost free - machine translations despite their obvious shortcomings. At first, this happened only occasionally. But as time went by and clients, and their own clients, became accustomed to free machine translations that were available instantly, their resistance to the adoption of machine translations on quality grounds waned until it vanished entirely. Today, my own translation business has been reduced to 20% of its former size. The same, or worse, is true for every other legal translator I know. Everyone is stunned that even in the legal field, where quality and accuracy are generally highly valued, attorneys and their clients are willing to sacrifice quality for cost savings. The moral of the story: If you think you are irreplaceable by AI, think again. Ask yourself what your employer or clients would do if the services you provide at a cost of, say, $150 per hour suddenly became available for free or almost free. For example, if you are a psychologist, what would happen if an AI app became available, at little or no cost, that shows a realistic human face with a human voice on screen and is able to engage in exactly the kind of dialog with patients as a human psychologist? I read that people are actually already doing that with ChatGPT, which is just a general AI, not a specialized psychology AI. The same analysis applies to ALL white-collar jobs. When your services are freely available to all, though perhaps not quite at the same quality, most people (and I include myself) will no longer pay for your services. That's simply how a capitalist market economy works. Nobody wants to pay more for a product or service than everyone else is willing to pay for it.