I know! What a dumb thing to say, right? Technological progress is always good. It improves our lives and generates wealth. Yes it destroys jobs, but it also creates new ones.

I have a colleague named Priya, who is in her mid 20s and is the sweetest person ever. Over the last 2 years that she has worked at our company, we’ve become close friends. Priya hails from a village in Uttar Pradesh (UP), India, and her parents are farmers. I am not sure if they own land or not, but I do know that she comes from a poor household, even by Indian standards. Priya was the first in her family to have a white-collar desk job, and her first monthly salary of Rs. 30,000 (USD 370) was the highest anyone in her family had ever earned. She sends about half of her salary back home to support her parents. Half of the remaining amount is spent on rent, and the other half is spent on food and other expenses. She’s left with very little disposable income.

The first time she received her paycheck, it was the most money she’d ever seen in one place. UP is infamous for having higher school dropout rate among girls compared to other parts of the country. Its not exactly the safest place for girls either. Her father had invested in her education and kept her in school. And it had paid off. Sending your first salary back home is one of the proudest moments in a young Indian’s life, and that was the case for Priya also.

Priya has a bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology and works as biomedical data curator. Her job is to go through scientific papers that publish RNA sequencing data. She understands the design of the experiment and cleans and annotates the data accordingly. (Here’s an example of a publication she would annotate). Her work requires just enough domain expertise that it is been non-trivial to automate (until now).

I think you know where this is headed. The day I got off the GPT4 wait-list I asked it to do what Priya does on a daily basis. It got the answer wrong in the first try, but some chain-of-thought prompting and boom. GPT4 gave the correct answer in 1/10th the time it would take Priya and cost a lot less.

I doubt that she will have a job in six months. It is already challenging for biotech graduates in India to find employment. Priya has tried to learn coding, but she has struggled. Not that she gets a lot of time to do it either. Our company is not particularly easy-going with the bio-curators it employs; they are consistently overworked and work longer hours than most software engineers in the company.

She’ll be forced to move back home after this. The same way that sending money back home is the proudest moment in an Indian’s life, going back home after you’ve been laid off is rock bottom.

I have spent the last few weeks in a very turbulent mental state. My initial excitement and awe this technology has slowly turned into a crisis about my own career. What’s worse is I don’t have anyone to share it with. Very few people truly understand the implications of this technology. Most people haven’t had a chance to try it yet.

I don’t see a long-term career in software anymore. Any dreams I had of earning decent money as a software engineer are slowly fading. Lex Fridman in his podcast said “if you’re anxious about GPT4 its probably because you’re a shitty programmer”. I mean, I’m not the smartest in the room but I have generated value with the software I’ve made. And was convinced that I’ll make decent money as long as put in the work. I’m just not that sure anymore.

What is the economic impact of LLMs? Idk (openAI has published some lengthy paper about it). What I do know is that some rich bloke in the US will get a few million dollars richer and Priya will lose her job.