To be honest, if the bottom 50th percent of coding talent is going to be obsolete, I wonder what happens to rest of the "knowledge workers" in those companies. I mean people whose jobs consist of attending Teams meetings, making fancy powerpoint slides and reports, perhaps even excel if they are really competent. None of that is any more challenging for LLM than writing code. In fact replacing these jobs should be easier, since presentations and slides do not actually do anything, unlike a program that must perform a certain action correctly.

I've heard compelling arguments that we passed the "more people than jobs" threshold during the green revolution and as a civilization have collectively retrofitted UBI in the form of "fake email jobs" and endless layers of management. This also would explain https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ pretty well.

Either AI shatters this charade, or we make up some new laws to restrain it and continue to pretend all is well.

Exactly. There's some need, perhaps, to keep these tools "up to date" because someone in a non-free country is going to use them in a horrendous manner and we should maybe know more about them (maybe).

However, there is no good reason in a free society that this stuff should be widely accessible. Really, it should be illegal without a clearance, or need-to-know. We don't let just anyone handle the nukes...

This is true and yet companies (both Private and Public sector) spend literal billions on Accenture /Deloitte slop that runs budgets will into the 10s of millions.

Skills aren't even something that dictates software spend, it seems.