Before I get into it: what careers do you think are most compelling? Especially if you think all white collar work is going to be undermined by this technology.

I wrote this up a bit ago in my essay fragments collection. It's rough and was just a thought I wanted to get down, I'm unsure of it, but it's at least somewhat relevant to the discussion here:

LLM or LLM-adjacent technology will never take over the execution of work in a way that approaches human where humans continue to guide (like PMs or C-suite just "managing" LLMs).

The reason is that spoken language is a poor medium by which to describe technical processes, and a well-enumerated specification in natural language describing the process is at-least synonymous with doing the work in skilled applications.

For example, if someone says to an LLM: Build a social media app that is like Tinder but women can only initiate.

... this is truly easily replicatable and therefore with little real business value as a product. Anything that can be described tersely that is novel and therefore valuable unfortunately has very little value practically because the seed of the short descriptor is sort of a private key of an idea itself: it will seed the idea into reality by labor of LLMs, but all that is needed for that seed's maturation is the original phrase. These would be like trade secrets, but also by virtue of something existing out there, its replication becomes trivial since that product's patterns are visible and copyable.

In this way, the only real outcome here is that LLMs entirely replace human labor including decision making or are tools to real human operators but not replacements.

I'm curious how this seed/hash/prompt of an idea relates to ladders of abstraction?

Consider "Uber, but for X"

This wasn't a thing you could deploy as a term pre-Uber.

I'm not sure what this means for your analogy, but it does seem important. Somehow branding an idea reifies a ... callable function in? ???

Maybe something like (just spitballing)

The specification-length needed for a given idea isn't fixed - it's relative to available conceptual vocabulary. And that vocabulary expands through the work of instantiation and naming things?

Which maybe complicates the value story... terseness isn't intrinsic to the idea, it's earned by prior reification work?

Hmm

Basically it seems that "Like Tinder but" is doing a lot of lifting there... and as new patterns get named, the recombination space just keeps expanding?

If programmers think they can just learn a trade, they’ll bein for a rude awakening when Elon comes for their jobs next. Optimus will be doing your plumbing by the time you graduate from trade school and get your paper and internships.