I suspect it depends partly on how locked each individual is into a particular type of work, both skill-wise and temperamentally.

To give an example from a field where LLMs started causing employment worries earlier than software development: translation. Some translators made their living doing the equivalent of routine, repetitive coding tasks: translating patents, manuals, text strings for localized software, etc. Some of that work was already threatened by pre-LLM machine translation, despite its poor quality; context-aware LLMs have pretty much taken over the rest. Translators who were specialized in that type of work and too old or inflexible to move into other areas were hurt badly.

The potential demand for translation between languages has always been immense, and until the past few years only a tiny portion of that demand was being met. Now that translation is practically free, much more of that demand is being met, though not always well. Few people using an app or browser extension to translate between languages have much sense of what makes a good translation or of how translation can go bad. Professional translators who are able to apply their higher-level knowledge and language skills to facilitate intercultural communication in various ways can still make good money. But it requires a mindset change that can be difficult.

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adelie 15 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm not in translation, but a number of close friends are in the industry. Two trends I've noticed in the industry, which I think we're seeing mirrored in tech:

1. No one cares about quality. Even in fields you'd expect to require the 'human touch' (e.g. novel translation), publishers are replacing translators with AI. It doesn't matter if you have higher-level knowledge or skills if the company gains more from cutting your contract than it loses in sales.

2. Translation jobs have been replaced with jobs proofreading machine translations, which pays peanuts (since AI is 'doing most of the work') but in fact takes almost as much effort as translating from scratch (since AI is often wrong in very subtle ways). The comparison to PR reviews makes itself.

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thbb123 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It is not entirely true that no one cares about quality. I'd like to stay optimistic and believe that those who are demanding on the quality of their production will acquire sufficient market differentiation to prevail.

After all, this has been Apple strategy since the 80's, and, even though there were some up's and down's, overall it's a success.

	▲	palmotea 10 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> It is not entirely true that no one cares about quality. I'd like to stay optimistic and believe that those who are demanding on the quality of their production will acquire sufficient market differentiation to prevail. Maybe, but it probably requires a very strong and opinionated leader to pull off. The conventional wisdom in American business leadership seems to be to pursue the lowest level of quality you can get away with, and focus on cutting costs. And you'll have to fight that every second. I don't think that's true at the individual-contributor level (pursing quality is very motivating), but they people who move up are the ones who sound "smart" by aping conventional wisdom. > After all, this has been Apple strategy since the 80's, and, even though there were some up's and down's, overall it's a success. I might give you that "since the late 90s," but there have been significant periods where that wasn't true (e.g. the early mid-90s Mac OS was buggy and had poor foundations).
	▲	kavalg 10 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		someone still will, but quality will become really expensive

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izacus 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In other words, AI was used to massively depress wages and lower quality of life of employees while outputting worse results. Which is what is now happening in software.