"Maybe its management fan-fiction"

:D Priceless!

see also "the future is no code!" fad of a couple of years ago

Never went away; been hearing about it since msft sold the idea to managers in regards to SharePoint... Fucking SharePoint. They can design their own forms and hook the data up to bits of automation. Like magic for muggles.

I suspect there's a strong invisible ideological undercurrent pushing a lot of this. When I was younger and enthusiastic about things like a universal basic income, I would often follow the latest murmurings, always ready to let my hype (and hyperbole) meter go to 11. I remember when I saw the first news about some drone delivering a pizza (in New Zealand?) I immediately jumped to it foretelling the imminent end of all delivery jobs, with broad customer service not especially far behind. There's even the fully automated Henn-na hotel in Japan, I mean omg!

In my naivete, the idea I had is that if the jobs disappeared en masse then a social solution to the economy would be forced to be enacted. So I was essentially hoping to see the destruction of normalcy and employment in any new technology. I would expect that view is not uncommon given the direction of contemporary education. It feels analogous to cows hoping for the end of beef/milk harvesting. My beleaguered bovine buddies, what awaits you there is something rather different than cowtopia.

I think the difference here is that LLMs are powerful, general purpose and suited to take on many common office tasks as well as accelerate programming work. I think “we need 10% fewer white collar workers” is a massively destabilizing scenario that is not very far fetched.

I also completely agree that society/politics will not have caught up with these developments in time to mitigate them.