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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

The problem is the interconnectedness of "practicing a discipline" and "surviving". The modern economic system irreparably entangles the two concepts, so that if you want to survive, your discipline better be economically viable. Horse-breeding stopped to be something that can be done by anyone but a minuscule section of the population; same for painting and clock-making. LLMs are poised to do that to large swaths of professions that were based on writing.

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This is true, and this has been happening for all of time. Computerization eliminated hosts of jobs, lest we forget "computer" used to be a job title a century ago. Elevator operator also used to be a thing people did to support a family. It would be naive to think this professional evolution would stop in our lifetime.

I don't disagree, but it clashes with what has been preached by western societies for almost half a century. When factory workers first experienced the brutal reality of advanced automation, the societal answer was "become a knowledge worker instead! Robots can't do creative things!". A few people knew (and said) that it was a delusion, but the necessary technology was somewhat slow to appear, so it looked like the principle held.

I suspect we're going to quickly re-evaluate a lot of '70s political and philosophical works over the next 5-10 years.

That's a good point. I wonder how many of those '70s theorists of technology would have predicted that, 50 years later, UPS driver and plumber would be (seemingly) harder to automate than knowledge work. Not really to blame them; it's only obvious in retrospect. But I agree we may need to rethink some of the established analysis that was based on different assumptions.

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