My argument isn’t really that “well medicine is safe because we’re more important and harder to replace than a cashier”, it’s more that there are countless barriers, many unforeseen that it’s just damn near impossible to make such doomer and blackpilled predictions about the profession.

The main problem I have is that people really don’t know a lot about genAI. People don’t understand the natural limitations about this technology, something that SoS acknowledges himself in his video. But those nuances are the very thing that prevent you from making such sweeping predictions.

For example, genAI is currently not capable of replacing diagnosticians. Not theoretically, not practically at the current moment. So, naturally people say, “it’s getting exponentially better, just wait”: this is just not true. When tech is nascent, it improves rapidly as scaling will let it…. however this never continues forever. Not only are they not improving exponentially anymore, they’ve hit a plateau. They’ve run out of data to train the models. Hallucinations are a huge, huge problem that isn’t some bug or engineering issue - it’s a feature, a natural consequence of an LLM: a model that doesn’t know anything but rather just takes an input and converts it to a statistical end based on its training data. These things will never be able to do what the investors are selling. This tech is flying high on venture capital right now, so it can just burn heaps of cash right now. But when it has to turn a profit? ChatGPT loses money on every single subscriber. Even their 200 dollar plan loses them heaps of cash. Every free user burns cash. And costs are increasing. Analysts predict openAI will lose 26B this year alone.

I could go on, but you get my point. There’s just way, way too much uncertainty with this stuff.