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Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

The printing press replaced the need for scribes but introduced the need for typesetters.

Talented scribes did cool things with illustrations and flourishes that were lost in the transition, but ultimately spent quite a lot of their time stroking the letter "e" or "i" or whatever.

Meanwhile, typesetters found themselves in a whole new creative domain which was a different one than the scribes had been working in while also being informed by it and related to it. With their different workflow and this different domain, they were able to innovate in many ways unique to typesetting but also in ways that would circulate back to calligraphers and other inheritors of the hand-crafted letterwork tradition.

I'm personally not sold that we're soon to see LLM-based code generators replace software engineers anyway, but things are not so black and white as you suggest even were that to happen.

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I understand where you are coming from, but I think using the impact of the printing press to help predict the future of careers and AI is flawed.

I think AI is hard to compare against the past. A printing press replaced some jobs, but AI could replace way more jobs.

Maybe it is like the printing press, but without typesetters.

That's fine, but once one assumes the impact of this technology is wholly without precedent then they're left speculating about a future informed only by their own imagination.

They'll always be able to re-affirm their own preconceptions (fears) because its the "just so" fantasy future of their own making.

I don't see the point of coming to HN to trade those invented stories, as people here traditionally push to stay within the engineer's realm of how real things work, how they fit into the history of innovation, and what people might practically build with those things based on how they work.

There are countless speculative fiction communities better suited to idle "yeah, but what if the sky was purple tomorrow?" discussions.

eventually we will reach the limits of what can be discovered with physics. the same applies here. eventually the limit of what a human can improve on through a job will be done. is this that point? idk but there will be one time that "new jobs" arent made

Your reference would only be true if we could actually catalog, index, reference, retain, and absorb all there is to know about the physical world into a model so simple we can still comrehend it. That's... unlikely.

More likely is that progress, discovery, and improvement behave more like dispersing bits of fog in an intractably large cloud that's always creeping back in on the clearings your made previously. You can sustain positive progress but its asymptotic at best and there are always regressions eating away at what you've done in the past.

So don't worry, there's always going to be more kinds of work to do, just like there's always going to be more physics to study.

This is like saying that because the possible books that can be written are finite (assuming some max length) then eventually every books will be written and writers will have nothing to do. While mathematically true, the word "eventually" is doing a lot of work.

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