alt Hacker NewsLLMs drive the unit cost of cognition to zero. Therefore, you will exhaust yourself near-instantly trying to drive differentiated value out of cognitive work. Non-arbitrable labor is one safe haven: bending steel, drilling wells, running cables, flying drones, etc. Physical agency gets you a premium the clankers can’t (yet?) trespass upon. That’s why guys building data centers are making bank & job-hopping while the SAs administering the computational guts of them are struggling. A second vector is reputational: either by authority (you’re a regulator) or by taste (you’re a rare/reknown specialist) you make quality attestations about cheaply-produced cognitive artifacts. The first vector is a big community; the second is not. Get out of being in a knife fight with the clankers on their own turf, they’ll gut you.
Replies
I’d scope it down further than cognition.
Cost of generation has been reduced, and is highly subsidized currently.
Cost of verification has effectively not changed. I’d say as a rule of thumb: verification is the tough part.
Our brains don’t fare well under constant review pressure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation
Flying drones is an interesting one, I guess you do have to drive the car out to site and set up the drone. But a lot of drone ops are waypointed, automatic flight. I can see a future in which the only thing the operator does is drive the drone van to site, hit the deploy button as the drone pops out the roof, and wait for it to return. Mission set up already by an LLM prompt back at the office.