Depends on how long it takes for a middle manager to get someone to read it to them (and then explain it).

well it's a bit dehumanizing so I guess a fair amount of trouble

Ewww.........

Absolutely it is. Thats where we got the phrase "kicking them upstairs" from. Promote the useless guy to a position where they can't actually do any damage.

If AI succeeds in replacing a lot of those "positions", we're going to face a tsunami of idiots.

That seems like one of the more reasonable scenarios to expect "AI" to thrive, actually.

You have dozens to thousands of people doing the actual work, then you have one CEO or owner that asks the AI to summarize what all the workers have been doing and communicating. It then presents them with a list of suggested decisions with some metrics tied to them like chance of success and Net Present Value (NPV).

The AI wouldn't even have to do a good job! It would just have to get things wrong or make up bullshit whole cloth as much as human middle managers, or maybe even less!

I think this is a possiblity not because the AI will do a good job, but because the ONE thing that LLMs seem to be good at is mimicking what a random human might type, including humans who are often ignorant or wrong.

I disagree, mainly because there are a ton of jobs that are previously lost or made simpler due to automation already.

AI isn't replacing jobs. Managers and C-suite execs that understand neither the job nor AI itself are replacing jobs as a cost reduction measure. Which will be offset by the sudden need to re-hire those workers to fix what AI has broken.

It's not that AI can replace them. It's that LLMs can offer a hugely inferior version of what they do, and for a lot of people, that's apparently fine.

Quite a few fields that previously had only the options of "good, quality work" and "not having it", now have LLMs to offer the option of "substandard slop".

And people like copywriters, translators, illustrators and other fields are rapidly finding out there wasn't actually a huge demand for their good quality work, there was in fact a huge demand for "not nothing", and that demand is being filled by the mediocre slop produced by LLMs now.