i think it's more who gets to judge whether we're gonna go with this LLM output or try again. the role of the human will be to brand outputs as something worth trusting, which is the historical role of social capital. 1/

what does it mean to say Larry Summers had a lot of social capital? lots of people would disagree about economic phenomena and ideas. most people's ideas were ignored or dismissed, some were treated as valuable and important, branding by Larry Summers could move an idea into the latter category. 2/

LLMs are the rest of us, coming up with our ideas, often I'd argue much stronger than Larry's. But there will still be a social need to distinguish the ones worth taking seriously from the noise. That's the input those with social capital will provide. 3/

(they may in fact have a talent for distinguishing good ideas from less good, or they may make terrible choices. our situation is we face an information problem, we collectively have no means of telling apart good from bad, so we can't, over a short run, distinguish a good from a bad Larry.) 4/

(we just choose our Larrys and we go with them. Maybe eventually they face some risk of accountability, if we have any means ex post or over time of distinguishing good from bad. and that too is a big if.) /fin