A while ago, I was having an intense and heated argument with a good friend in the Finance sector about whether AI would replace jobs. I informed him that AI can only do something repeatable, "already solved problems", or what I call "shit kicking work". His response was something to the effect that I was underestimating how many people's jobs were _entirely_ shit kicking work.

To be fair to him, my partner who works in Healthcare has the same concern, and for quite precisely the same reason: if the kind of work normally done by juniors who are training/building their skills is done by machines instead, where do the next generation of seniors come from?

My response to both was that I was confident the market would fix this problem itself - people will not pay for garbage. There is a reason books are still printed by established publishers. Why buy a book when you can just print a book on printer paper yourself? Because reading a book on printer paper sucks.

I cannot imagine that machines will ever replace any work where there is any meaningful threshold for "correct". I am so intrigued to see how this plays out across the broader economy.

> if the kind of work normally done by juniors who are training/building their skills is done by machines instead, where do the next generation of seniors come from?

AWS CEO had roughly the same thought. Senior devs may skyrocket in price if juniors cannot progress to senior skillsets. Those that stop hiring juniors will have a rude awakening when they need more capable software devs in a few years, and all senior roles are now skyrocketing in price. Hire some capable juniors today to train up.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/aws_ceo_entry_level_j...

>My response to both was that I was confident the market would fix this problem itself

Based on..?

>I cannot imagine that machines will ever replace any work where there is any meaningful threshold for "correct".

Autopilot?

> people will not pay for garbage

exactly, the usage of LLMs will only grow as they quickly get better than all the garbage code slop humans write

>I cannot imagine that machines will ever replace any work where there is any meaningful threshold for "correct".

For most of human history calculations were performed by humans. Entire banking systems were 100% dependent on humans, with some helpful tools, performing accurate calculations. The idea of not performing that work with machines is laughable now. Machines have replaced humans, especially when correctness matters.

Humans are also remarkably bad at being correct and most jobs have a very low impact. I think your perspective is skewed towards the job you are doing, which is in no way representative of most office work, which is mostly tedious, low impact and low stakes.