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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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New research paper attempts to quantify which professions have to most to lose from the introduction of GPTs into the larger world. From the abstract:

Our findings indicate that approximately 80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by the introduction of GPTs while around 19% of workers may see at least 50% of their tasks impacted.

The results vary by models but mathematics and math-related industries like accounting have the highest risk. The researchers overall found that "information processing industries (4-digits NAICS) exhibit high exposure, while manufacturing, agriculture, and mining demonstrate low exposure" (pg 15) and "programming and writing skills...are more susceptible to being influenced by language models."

I find myself wondering if "learn to code" from however long back will shortly become "learn to farm" or some such.

Ever seen a non-technical employee try to automate something in Excel? Not even VBA; I mean column formulas or conditional formatting. It’s depressing.

The limiting factor on adoption isn’t what a tool can do. It’s whether the user will actually engage with it. As it stands, people fail to do so even for tasks that take up much more than 10% of their time.

I could see this changing as AI gets better integrated I/O. The chat interface is a decent example. It’s good at user-defined tasks, but the process of defining them is going to be the roadblock for most jobs.