In my line of work (programming) they absolutely do not have a 52% failure rate by any reasonable definition of the word “failure”. More than 9/10 times they’ll produce code at at least a junior level. It won’t be the best code, sometimes it’ll have trivial mistakes in it, but junior developers do the same thing.
The main issue is confidence, it’s essentially like having a junior developer that is way overconfident for 1/1000th of the cost. This is extremely manageable, and June 2024 is not the end all be all of LLMs. Even if LLMs only got worse, and this is the literal peak, it will still reshape entire industries. Junior developers cannot find a job, and with the massive reduction in junior devs we’ll see a massive reaction in senior devs down the line.
In the short term the same quality work will be done with far, far fewer programmers required. In 10-20 years time if we get literally no progress in the field of LLMs or other model architectures then yeah it’s going to be fucked. If there is advancement to the degree of replacing senior developers, then humans won’t be required anyway, and we’re still fucked (assuming we still live in a capitalist society). In a proper society less work would actually be a positive for humanity, but under capitalism less work is an existential threat to our existence.