This assumes that a significant portion of the average white collar worker’s job is amenable to automation.

But most white collar workers I know spend most their time either talking to each other, or thinking real hard about what to say the next time they get together to talk. If that’s generally true then it would suggest that there isn’t much white collar work that LLMs, which are now widely regarded as exceptionally poor communicators, can do particularly well.

They're in the process of training the models for those professions, too. They're offering people hundreds of dollars an hour to run recordings of workload they create and questions they ask. It's only a matter of time that companies sell access to those models and sell it as that profession.

I think the bear case (see:short term) benefit is that any and all information gathering, management and parsing the employee did between organizing with other employees will be automated, allowing the employee to do more organizing over the same unit of time.

The bull case (see: long term) is that the “organizing and talking” as long as it’s not something that is essentially human (like caretaking, nursing etc.) will happen between personal agents of sorts with only the deeper judgments being left to the humans opening up even more increases in productivity. This is already happening with PR reviews in a lot of workplaces.

Though I’m guessing most workplaces outside of tech will require total reorganization around this reality, but more likely this way of running will mean newer upstarts challenging incumbents refusing to change as it’s always been.

> thinking real hard about what to say the next time they get together

LLMs can help tremendously with this part, though. Exploration/brainstorming, discovery, data analysis, etc can be made significantly easier with LLMs in most knowledge based fields.

Shhh don’t give away the truth.

When this stuff implodes it’s gonna be hilarious.

The bankers thought they were really smart in 2008. When people get carried away and take it too far things will fall apart.

And a lot of white collar work is process based. But automating it is mostly about getting everyone to agree on a precise definition of the process.

I don’t believe there is any fundamental reason LLMs can’t do this task, and the base models are probably already capable of it. RL to elicit the right behavior just hasn’t been done yet. Coding got solved first because it was cheaper and easier to get the necessary data for RL environments, which made it the natural first market opportunity. Solving white collar communication will require more resources to collect the data and build the environments, but the labs now have more resources and are working on it.

I want to believe reasons why this won’t work, but it feels like cope. It would be smart to be prepared for the world where knowledge workers get replaced by AI and also prepared for the world where AI is a bubble that pops.

The goalposts on what neural nets can possibly do have already moved past chess, go, protein folding, coding, poker, math, the Turing test…

>But most white collar workers I know spend most their time either talking to each other, or thinking real hard about what to say the next time they get together to talk.

Maybe that's just something which made sense when they were necessary to do the not yet automatable informattion processing work, but that only took like 20% of their time, so they added meetings, and useless work to keep them busy.

As the evidence from software programming shows, a lot of white collar workers spend most of their time talking frankly because they are inept at execution.