If they can do those things they can effectively replace any white collar job. That’s about 45% of the workforce. Societies tend to collapse around 25-30% unemployment.

Imagine 45% of higher than average paying jobs gone.

If that happens we’ll either figure out a new economic system, or society will collapse.

Also saying robots are walking just fine is misleading for any definition of just fine that is anywhere near as good as a human.

We never noticed how easy the code writing part had already become because it happened slowly. Through mechanical means, through the ability to re-use code, and through code generation.

Heck, even long before LLMs about 10% to 30% of my code was already automatically generated. By tooling, by IDLs and by my editor just being able to infer what my most likely input would be.

> We have robots walking just fine now, by the way.

I don't think you got the point I was trying to make.

>> We used to say that (not long ago, even) about the code-writing part. Why do we believe that LLMs are going to stop there? Why do we think they won't soon be able to talk to people, listen, and determine what they need?

Because they are currently "generative AI" meaning... autocomplete. They generate stuff but fall down at thinking and problem solving. There is talk of "reasoning models" but I think that's just clever meta-programming with LLMs. I can't say AI won't take that next step, but I think it will take another breakthrough on the order of transformers or attention. Companies are currently too busy exploiting the local maxima of LLMs.

> Why do we believe that LLMs are going to stop there?

Why do you believe they wont? I think it's reasonable to assume that we will hit a ceiling that current models will not be able to break.

> We have robots walking just fine now, by the way.

Walking and reasoning are unrelated abilities.