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Cool analogy, but there's another possibility: software is uniquely suited for being boosted by LLM-based coding agents. That's not to say LLMs are useless in other domains, but they may not yield as much benefit. Software creation tools have been worked on for decades to keep fallible human coders out of trouble as much as possible. Starting with compilers that enforce or at least encourage coding style humans can understand. Compilers embody formal definitions of language syntax. Lint and other static analysis technologies contribute by identifying problematic patterns in code. Leak detectors identify memory management problems. Profilers identify performance problems. Few other endeavors have this much tooling that serendipitously happens to help help LLM-based agents be more useful and less error prone. A lot of discussion around AI is very high-level and abstract. It helps to dig in and identify the characteristics that actually make a domain more or less amenable to being boosted by AI.

And whole repositories with commit history that provides step by step training on how to code. AI could probably write decently if every scraped book had all the revisions to create it embedded within or art had every brush stroke documented. As it stands programming is the first to be trained. The rest will take some more time.

I can't speak for everywhere else, but here in the Bay Area (California), pretty much all hospitals use AI for transcription, summarizing, and some other stuff that I'm not fully aware of (I should really listen to what my Nurses say before agreeing to being recorded).

> As an example, take a factory that was built around hyrdo-power like a grain mill. You can't just take an electric motor and drop it in in place of the water wheel. Your chosen example is rather more fitting for the opposite case. Dropping an electric motor is pretty easy, you just attach it to the other side of the axle. But there is really no point in doing that. The sole benefit for that mill, will be that there is the cheap power from the water. It's also the sole reason for the current position of the mill, for the electric motor, you hence need to add long cables first. The size and operation mode of the mill is also not fit at all for the electric age. There is really no point, you are better of just building a new mill in a completely different location. But you can do that independently of the old mill, since there is hardly any capital to be taken from the old to the new mill, short of maybe the office supply. So you just build a new mill, completely independently. But there is also no reason to decommission the old at the same time, the only reason is to shut it down when is no longer economically viable. But that also might be at a different point in time than building the new mill.

> You can see a similar history with electrification. It took a massive amount of new infrastructure for electricity to benefit people. Lines had to be run, houses and businesses had to be wired, new light fixtures and appliances had to be purchased and installed. LLMs can currently be accessed and used everywhere instantly by everybody right now and at any moment day or night. Rich and poor alike can take advantage of it. There's nothing holding back anybody. If everybody without electricity could have pulled a small rectangle out of their pocket and pressed a button to instantly have electric lights and power, the positive impact of electrification would have been immediate. This is not even close to a "same thing now" situation.