There’s a lot of discussion these days about technological unemployment due to LLMs. For example, someone could observe that GPT-4 scored better than average at the US Medical License Examination, but human doctors are obviously not going to be obsolete in the short term, if only because GPT-4 cannot legally issue a medical prescription[1].
I am not going to make predictions here; the aim of this post is to make ascertainments. Namely: can we write a list of jobs that could be fully replaced by GPT-4 literally tomorrow?
Let me make clear what I’m not asking for: I’m not asking for hypotetical scenarios where a dedicated workflow including GPT-4 can be set up and tailored in some way in order to replace a human worker. For now I’m only interested in the you’re-instantly-fired version, where your boss could just use plain GPT-4 (instead of you) without having to do anything more than writing the prompt.
I’ve obviously asked a LLM (Alpaca) about this, and its answer was:
Transcriptionists
Interpreters and translators
Customer service representatives
Telemarketers
Administrative assistants
Accounting clerks
Web designers
Graphic designers
Writers
I fully agree about customer service representatives, whose stereotype is a shitty job where you just throw nice-sounding bullshit at angry customers (and LLMs are really really good at generating nice-sounding bullshit with infinite patience).
For the other items in the list, I don’t think that we are near to the point where the job could be totally replaced by GPT. Google Translate has existed for many years, but the world is still full of human translators, and I’ve yet to see a printed book admittedly translated by a machine (probably because every time I’ve tried to translate something more complicated than a single sentence with Google Translate, the output had to be slightly edited… do we have evidence that GPT-4 can be a much better translator?).
“Writers” is a bit too broad. But I would agree that the subcategory of copywriters is probably fully replaceable already.
If a human is formally holding the position for legal reasons while GPT does all the real work, does it still count as technological unemployment? For the sake of this discussion I would resolve this as “no”.
Is your job replaceable by GPT-4? (as of March 2023)
Disclaimer: I don’t have access to GPT-4
There’s a lot of discussion these days about technological unemployment due to LLMs. For example, someone could observe that GPT-4 scored better than average at the US Medical License Examination, but human doctors are obviously not going to be obsolete in the short term, if only because GPT-4 cannot legally issue a medical prescription[1].
I am not going to make predictions here; the aim of this post is to make ascertainments. Namely: can we write a list of jobs that could be fully replaced by GPT-4 literally tomorrow?
Let me make clear what I’m not asking for: I’m not asking for hypotetical scenarios where a dedicated workflow including GPT-4 can be set up and tailored in some way in order to replace a human worker. For now I’m only interested in the you’re-instantly-fired version, where your boss could just use plain GPT-4 (instead of you) without having to do anything more than writing the prompt.
I’ve obviously asked a LLM (Alpaca) about this, and its answer was:
Transcriptionists
Interpreters and translators
Customer service representatives
Telemarketers
Administrative assistants
Accounting clerks
Web designers
Graphic designers
Writers
I fully agree about customer service representatives, whose stereotype is a shitty job where you just throw nice-sounding bullshit at angry customers (and LLMs are really really good at generating nice-sounding bullshit with infinite patience).
For the other items in the list, I don’t think that we are near to the point where the job could be totally replaced by GPT. Google Translate has existed for many years, but the world is still full of human translators, and I’ve yet to see a printed book admittedly translated by a machine (probably because every time I’ve tried to translate something more complicated than a single sentence with Google Translate, the output had to be slightly edited… do we have evidence that GPT-4 can be a much better translator?).
“Writers” is a bit too broad. But I would agree that the subcategory of copywriters is probably fully replaceable already.
Other suggestions?
If a human is formally holding the position for legal reasons while GPT does all the real work, does it still count as technological unemployment? For the sake of this discussion I would resolve this as “no”.