I think maybe it is more like having access to services at one wealth level up.
People would hire fixers or agents to do the nitty gritty details of a transaction like this in the past.
People would hire fixers or agents to do the nitty gritty details of a transaction like this in the past.
It's the same with my taxes - this year I had Astra fully audit my tax returns vs just blindly trusting my CPA as I had in the past, and it both identified and thoroughly explained to me several discrepancies and filing nuances that I never before would have ever learned about.
I think the reality is such that today most people also don't learn or do that much and just abstract things away to more specialized humans at exorbitantly higher price points.
Now I want to do the same thing.
OTOH I have another friend who sent so many corrections to his CPA his CPA sent him a pissed off reply telling him basically never to do that again so ymmv lmao
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2022/Nov/do-you-trust-your-tax-...
I'm not in the least bit surprised it found problems. I don't think one even needs a frontier model.
Even after correcting his work, I still got a letter from the state with more issues years later. Never again.
Still what you're saying is very real. I'm reminded of the tweet that said that "in terms of cognitive impairment, [being a billionaire is] probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day"
As an example in my 110 year old San Francisco house, I recently attempted to do what I thought at first would be a very simple light fixture swap - but then it turned out the house was so old that 1. the wires were unlabeled, and 2. there was no ground, and 3. the wiring was so unconventionally done that I ended up having to grab a bunch of Klein Tools to diagnose things for hours to figure out how to actually safely replace the fixture.
Without LLMs, there's no chance I would have felt safe doing this myself - I'd never used a multimeter before and didn't even know about continuity testing, and when the continuity results from testing the fixture wires to the switch wiring yielded extremely aberrant results in that there was a 1:1 relationship in connectivity between each wire in the fixture to each wire in the switch vs a single expected hot connection and no neutral connection, I definitely would have given up without the LLM guiding me to attempting a hot to ground voltage check instead, which ultimately managed to work fine to get the fixture changed.
So all in all - LLMs have actually helped me feel more empowered to handle almost anything on my own vs historically feeling too far out of my domain in many fields to even attempt to try something on my own.
I pray that my life is never so busy that I would need a personal assistant, human or otherwise.
Sometimes, people just... like to do things themselves, or don't feel like it's too much of their "precious time" to learn something new.
Example: I still do my budgeting / taxes / financial management on my own. Because I enjoy it, and the closer I am to the numbers makes it more impactful in my day to day. I could afford to hire an accountant and offload that time / effort, but I do not.
> anyone who can afford an assistant has one
And that's just not true. I know some independently wealthy people who do not have an assistant / cleaner / lawn care professional. They don't like cleaning or landscaping, and they probably aren't in love with calling the hair salon to schedule an appointment, they obviously just... don't want an assistant.
Maybe my circle just isn't busy enough? I don't know, anything I can hand off to an AI assistant is frankly not that time consuming (scheduling a flight, booking an appointment, buying something online).
When AI can clean my house for $20/Month, I'll be on board.
My observation of people who hire personal assistants is that it's exclusively so they have time to make more money. Or, put another way, they have no more free time than I do, despite having the means to hire an assistant. It's just a really sad way to live.