LLMs will make the fight for status more chaotic
A lot of articles about LLMs seem to be a bit of schadenfreude; those lofty programmers aren't so high and mighty now that computers can do their jobs for them. Those mathematicians are being taken down a notch now that AI has blown their field wide open, etc.
I think some people are just impressed by the technical marvel of it all. Some of the mathematicians aren't feeling their egos bruised; they're excited for the coming advancements in their field. Some people of course are worried about the dangers of AI. But, I think some people just see this as a leveling of status. "Those people" are being "taken down a notch."
In some sense this is unavoidable. Status hierarchies, and status upgrades or downgrades are incredibly interesting to people. A soap opera is mostly just a continuous string of vignettes where one character gets a leg up on another; the defeat and powerlessness written on their face. The crescendo of a Marvel film is not actually when they get the MacGuffin save the world. It's when the villain, who was previously so dominant and confident realizes that he has lost, and we see the look of defeat and powerlessness on his face and body language. You can tell who has lost a political debate with the volume off. The loser is the person who shows their defeat on their face.
There seems to be an element of this with LLM coverage too. I actually ran into a meme which read something like "LLMs are divine punishment for artists being really annoying on Twitter." This was from the early days, when most people's experience with LLMs was image generation. It was prior to all the more recent interesting LLM breakthroughs in cybersecurity and mathematics. It's either a funny meme or a rude meme depending on your perspective, but surely the meta-message of the meme is something like "finally, that upstart group will be taken down a peg."
This bothers me, not because I particularly feel for any of the groups likely to be impacted by LLMs. It bothers me because I never wanted these stupid status games to begin with. People bemoan status, but it's people who are the enforcers. It's the women who won't look at you until you have an impressive job. The people who look down on you unless you're upper-middle-class or better. Every bit of your socioeconomic status is this blaring signal to everyone around you; whether you want it to be or not.
I'm in my 40s. I have two young children. I'm exhausted. All I want to do is try to hold onto what I have. I'm not interested in a world where I can't depend on my skillsets I've spent my whole life building up. I don't want a world where whatever status I've managed to eek out for myself is shuffled by disinterested parties.
The people who would cheer at my downfall won't be any better off than before. The status games won't disappear. They will just be shuffled, and will be even less merit-based than before. Prepare for more bullshit and more signaling. In a world where anyone can do what you can do, office politics or celebrity / social media-styled posturing will get your further than accomplishment. And just like social media whatever status you claw out of the world will be that much more precarious. It won't be based on you. It will be based on the evil social signaling which has always been a part of human nature. Previously balanced out by skill an accomplishment, but now let loose to run free. Unconstrained.
update
Someone on HN, in a somewhat unrelated post, made my point better than I had managed to. It's worth reading:
I think beyond the specific elements of any domain AI eclipses humans in, overall, the notion of the thing that grants you status, prestige, and a living wage being commodified would spark in anyone a profound sense of dread.
Beyond just making you redundant in your job, the whole architecture of your existence, the thousands of hours of struggle, the sacrifice of putting off social games or personal enjoyment are now rendered moot in hindsight. You are made one step closer to complete worthlessness, which will surely continue as AI becomes a more satisfying personal companion, a more worthwhile friend, lover, etc.
How is one to feel safe in the progress of the future when the only hints of the wonderful post-scarcity utopia we can quantify so far is the removal of all human leverage via their labor? All it tells us is we will be bargaining with superintelligence with nothing to stand on, only a trust that the 5000 lab executives and researchers solved the most important research problem of all time on the first try.