There's so much hype around AI right now, it's absolutely unhinged. Yes, we have semi-conversational AI. Yes, image detection is pretty good. It's all supervised.
Can we please touch grass?
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chat...
It is possible that everyone will become a programmer, like everyone has become an elevator operator, but unlike an elevator button press that takes milliseconds and you're done, does it behoove "the boss" to spend their day describing their ideas to GPT? I suspect, like today, they will still want to hire other humans to bridge that gap so that they can spend time doing more important things.
Other than surgeons, a ton of what we would traditionally think of as doctoring has already been abstracted away and work specialized and divvied up to technicians, with MDs pulling strings in the background.
They chose a profession that appears to scale to investors. When software _actually_ scales rather than being a subpar substitute for an existing mechanism is when the people involved were indeed smarter and worked much harder (typically).
Essentially, physicians have been so bottlenecked for so long that a bunch of states has simply said "screw it" and started paving the way for mid-levels (NPs and PAs) to operate in certain roles physicians have previously covered. The physician lobbies seem unwilling to address this, so I expect that mid-levels will continue to move up the chain. They know the market is desperate for a solution and physician interest groups are completely unwilling to provide that.
I think this is the part that's going to break.
IMO, a model where a doctor leads a group of mid-levels seems pretty much ideal. It's like the senior dev leading junior engineers.
Unfortunately, it seems AMA has been so resistant to any change that enough places are simply saying screw it to oversight and allowing mid-levels to practice independently (with limited scope). i
Yeah, rural areas that can’t support a full time doctor have no choice but to let midlevels practice medicine if they can even get a midlevel.
do you believe this is the case now?
The product of mechanical engineering also naturally scales. Once you design a machine, you can build it an infinite number of times. However, in neither case does the labour scale. One engineer, whether their focus be on software or mechanical, can only do so much in a day.
Software engineers lucked out in this era because it is a new, relative to other industries, field that saw a rapid rise in demand for labour, with comparatively few people able to fulfill the need for that labour. By virtue of supply and demand, incomes had to run high to attract workers.
> and scaling is really how you can make a lot money.
That is true, but engineering doesn't scale. It is highly doubtful that engineers will continue to benefit into the long future. The owners of the software built by engineers will be able to continue to reap the benefits of scalability, but the labourer – who does not scale – will undoubtedly start to get squeezed as the industry matures and demand is no longer growing exponentially.