Economically valuable skills are complex skills.
However, it’s also true to say that very simple skills don’t command much economic value. If a new technology makes a task very easy and efficient, it can completely eliminate any economic value in providing the task. Suppose LLMs get so good that anyone can ask them about a legal issue and get a perfect answer. In that case, people are not going to pay someone a large hourly rate to ask the question for them! They’ll cut out the middleman and ask it themselves.
So a student who is typing an essay question into an LLM, handing the output to their teacher and justifying it on the grounds that “this is what professionals do in their day job” is not making a good argument.
If that really is all the professional is doing, their job is not going to be around for long.
Are LLMs really so good that they will make most current professional jobs obsolete?
In my previous post, I gave an example of a job that has been made obsolete by technology – ancient Greek marathon runners. No-one now employs runners to deliver messages. They send text messages or hire cars instead.