alt Hacker NewsI think that this is an interesting attempt at taxonomy, but it's a bit on the magical thinking end (and I say this as somebody that does a good amount of what's described as the incanter role). It's a combination of the author's previous witchy aesthetic (see his excellent "<x>ing the technical interview" series) and progressive labor politics (which are asymptotically doomed in the current automation push).
The biggest failure of imagination, I think, is the assumption we'd use humans for most (or *any) of these jobs--for example, the work of the haruspex is better left to an LLM that can process the myriad of internal states (this is the mechanical interpretation field).
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A magic 8-ball "can process the myriad of internal states" of any questions you throw at it. But we don't use it even tho it can give us answers.
And when the haruspex LLM fails, what do we turn to?
> and progressive labor politics (which are asymptotically doomed in the current automation push).
What do you mean exactly by this?
Yes, I had the same impression. I'm sympathetic to the author's perspective but I can't muster even the minimal optimism they've shown here. The "process engineers" as described would themselves quickly be replaced by an automated system. The "statistical engineers", I think, would never be able to keep up with the rate of change of the AI models, which would likely have different statistical behavior and biases in each language/context/etc with each update, and so it's unlikely anyone would pay them to develop that required deep expertise in the first place. More likely, that work would be done at an AI foundation model company -- but it would be done just once, and then incorporated into the training process.