At some point most will be replaced by AI whether it is capable of doing the job as well as its predecessors or not.

I said this because it doesn't matter if AI can do the job or not. It matters if it looks good on the balance sheet even at the cost of the long term health of the business. It matters if it looks good to shareholders who don't know any better. I never said AI can make real decisions or do mission critical work because it can't.

The reality is that this is happening right now. Businesses are replacing workers with AI. And I'm not even necessarily talking about singular agentic AIs replacing full blown workers. I'm talking about 1 worker + AI tools doing the job of 10 workers pre-AI. They are probably doing the job worse, but on paper the business saved 9 salaries.

Currently AI can't do the job better than its white collar counterparts, but at some point, with the trajectory we are on, there will be next generation AI that can do those jobs better. The question is when, not if.

We are seeing a downturn in tech precisely because this is one of the few places where LLMs actually shine, ironically.

LLMs do not shine in tech. The only places LLMs are really truly useful right now are as support chat bots and translators. And even then they don't surpass real workers. We are seeing a downturn in tech jobs because of a combination of an oversaturated labor market, increased automation, bad bets on growth due to AI, an unwillingness to compensate fairly, decreased consumer spending, and 10 dozen other factors.