Those people are all doing white collar jobs nobody does today: adding up columns of numbers with desktop adding machines, retyping manuscript memos, responding to customer and vendor mail, summarizing other hand-generated reports into newer more digestable reports (which are in turn the input for yet more manual clerical steps), maintaining paper indexes into warehouse-sized file stores, etc.
Each of these people (well, it's a movie, but the real people they represent) had a career, performance reviews, Christmas bonuses, all of it. Now the whole work output of this entire high-rise office building floor (and probably more floors on either side of it) can be replaced with one copy of Excel.
I'm confident we'll come up with all kinds of new data-pushing jobs to hand out, assuming we can contrive to continue living in conditions of energy abundance (like we already were in 1959).
I am not confident at all, because I don't see any law of nature or society that dictates that we shall always come up with new meaningful jobs whenever we render some of the old ones obsolete. It's true that we've done so before, but that was also when our economic development seemed exponential; surely we know better now? In any case, without a clear understanding of the mechanism, who's to say it's not just luck and/or survivor bias?
Alternatively, we can come up with meaningless jobs. Which is, of course, just UBI in disguise and with more incidental waste.
Human wants are unlimited, there'll always be something people want that machines aren't able to provide (until machines can do absolutely everything humans can do, at which point they'll be sentient and probably won't want to work for free).
You forget about the nature and quality of work. These people in an office adding things manually probably had a job that was safer, more dignified and healthier than, say, an worker in an Amazon fulfillment center.
If we are able to replace white collar work like this, i believe we will 'hollow out the middle': low level manual work will remain, as will highly paid engineering and coding roles and certain other areas, perhaps sales executives or others.
But the opportunities for many people unable or unable to meet the conditions or skills demanded by those roles, however, will be reduced.
I've had the same thought, and I'd love to see an analysis of spreadsheet software adoption and (e.g.) financial sector employment to situate LLMs in their proper historical context. A brief glance at FRED data doesn't seem to point to any big changes in the job growth rate in that sector, but there's obviously too much exogeneity there to really say.
As an LLM researcher, I think a large hurdle is the set of last-mile problems like those that have plagued self-driving cars. Yes, stakes are comparatively much lower when automating a job posting, but correctness matters.
Those people are all doing white collar jobs nobody does today: adding up columns of numbers with desktop adding machines, retyping manuscript memos, responding to customer and vendor mail, summarizing other hand-generated reports into newer more digestable reports (which are in turn the input for yet more manual clerical steps), maintaining paper indexes into warehouse-sized file stores, etc.
Each of these people (well, it's a movie, but the real people they represent) had a career, performance reviews, Christmas bonuses, all of it. Now the whole work output of this entire high-rise office building floor (and probably more floors on either side of it) can be replaced with one copy of Excel.
I'm confident we'll come up with all kinds of new data-pushing jobs to hand out, assuming we can contrive to continue living in conditions of energy abundance (like we already were in 1959).