They most certainly will, for at least two reasons. First, jobs aren't just about raw productivity, they're also about responsibility / liability diffusion. A CEO managing an army of agents is possibly on the hook if anything goes wrong - for example, if one of the agents does tax fraud or hacks a competitor. A CEO paying an army of employees, even if the employees are there just there to supervise agents, usually has little to worry about.

The second reason is that we often prefer humans to do it even if a machine can do it faster / cheaper. Sometimes, it's a status thing. For example, some people will buy Ikea furniture, some will have it custom made by a local craftsman. In fact, it's sort of the hallmark of the upper middle class that you can spend more for that human touch. Cupcakes from an artisanal bakery, private banker, etc.

Now, I don't think there's enough people who want to pay extra for human-made software. From the current trends in the industry, my impression is that we don't value our craft, so it would be surprising if others did. For mathematicians, I don't know; it's a bit painful to watch.

> A CEO managing an army of agents is possibly on the hook if anything goes wrong - for example, if one of the agents does tax fraud or hacks a competitor

This is correct under present day thinking.

But imagine the accounting AI of twenty years hence. If it can reliably do the books, reduce and prevent fraud, significantly better than any human ever could, why would you still need the human in that loop?

In the present day it's a legal requirement, not to mention a practical requirement given present AI capabilities. That doesn't mean it still will be in the future.

To put it another way, if the human is on the hook for the agent, but the agent is proven by a decade+ of statistical evidence to be way less mistake/fraud prone than the human, what's the point of the human there?

I'll give you that the capabilities of LLMs are improving rapidly. Their safety, however, seems to be stuck in mid-2023. They're still easy to dupe and prone to cheating to solve problems. Prompt injection is still a thing, and it's still something we need to paper over with input and output classifiers and other hacks external to the LLM.

What we're seeing so far is consistent with the training data being the upper bound for capabilities. They get better at recall / synthesis / reasoning over the corpus, but they don't, for example, acquire trans-human ethics; they're at best as ethical as we are, except not grounded by the fear of consequences. A perfectly-behaved, perfectly-moral LLM is not a given in 20 years, not unless your position is that there's room for unbounded, exponential self-improvement without any loss of fidelity. In that case, we'll probably have problems more pressing than the outlook for accounting jobs.

I'm hearing "better" and "less" but not zero and none. The more interesting question is what happens when that rouge/hallucinating agent does commit that statistically unlikely fraud. Who is responsible then? Or is it now no low we just consider it an "accident", pay a small penalty, and move on?

>How do you even plan for that

The honest answer is via politics not education, but this debate is often had in "apolitical" circles that try their best to ignore this.

Hacker News is largely libertarian/conservative and believes the free hand of the market will fix all.

I don't know, a lot of SWEs are suddenly discovering the value of class consciousness now it's our jobs in the crosshairs. I've heard more talk of unionisation in the last year or so than in my entire career so far for example.

Some careers that will undoubtedly exist are the 'human manipulation' trades: politicians, salespeople, con artists, religious leaders, basically anyone who convinces people to feed them.

Universal Basic Income from all the Ai abundance. Is what Musk touts and since 2016, adding working will be optional.

A dark side of this is that a lot of unethical, deplorable, and amoral people who were otherwise occupied by jobs might suddenly have a lot more free time to make trouble instead of spending 1/3 of their day working for rent and food to survive.

Not needing to work is a neat future that might be ahead of us. But it could unlock some new negatives as well as positives.

That's a rather strange concern to have.

Yeah especially when the Terminator(s) are keeping us in check ... sounds crazy today but the world is quickly changing.

Give me one reason why Musk would honour this.

Looks like he and the other Ai overlords have Trump on this train too.

https://youtube.com/shorts/CaJd88zh1h0?feature=shared

Free money and universal healthcare thanks to the abundance of Ai is where "they," say we are headed. Thanks to Ai ravaging our civil society we are use to.

Since AI abundance is taken for granted, why not just just offer every single person in the world full health insurance?

yes with UBI they say they would be offered too. I am only pointing out what the Ai overlords are saying.

UBI is not going to happen. You're talking about ballooning the federal budget by trillions of dollars a year.

I'm not talking about it as fan, rather just pointing out Elon Musk, Sam Altman and etc have been for decades and still are.

I believe Sam Altman no longer supports UBI. But that doesn't matter because nothing he says can be trusted.

This got downvoted but i wasnt saying i am for it, rather pointing out what the Ai overlords have said. Ones whom we are allowing to run amok and ravage our civil society with moving in new neighbors (Ai Data Centers) that eat us alive from the inside.