Yes, but during those transformations, the CEOs of the companies selling the products involved weren't actively and aggressively marketing them as being able to replace all the humans they employ.

You can't have it both ways: either LLMs are an amazing, revolutionary technology that can replace many human jobs in unprecedented ways, or it's going to be a mild transition that really only helps people.

> the CEOs of the companies selling the products involved weren't actively and aggressively marketing them as being able to replace all the humans they employ

The assembly line was explicitly about replacing skilled with relatively unskilled labor.

It isn't the first time a new technology has been pitched to replace many worker's jobs, both successful and unsuccessful versions of the promise have come to pass several times.

I think what they are saying is "that something can replace a job does not inherently imply the next step is poverty". From that perspective, you can absolutely have it both (and many other combinations of) ways.

That was exactly what a great many things were marketed as, such as the jacquard loom and dynamite.

What actually happened in each case was that employment went up for a good long while, as the efficiency boost to the sectors touched made investment far more viable. Eventually successive rounds of automation did reduce employment in each of weaving and mining, but it wasn’t an overnight catastrophe as initially advertised or feared.

Do we want to be distracted by sewing shirts and writing Python scripts when the hardware can do the math for us?

Programmers (and other workers but this a tech centric forum) need to start to accept that programming was a necessary evil of the before times. We didn't have the theories. We didn't have the manufacturing techniques.

Before hardware was powerful enough to run models on a laptop we needed all that hand crafted custom state management to avoid immediate resource exhaustion. Or to hide the deficiencies of the chips of the day.

For all the appeals of tech workers to a lean into a high tech life, programming as humans did in the before times seems pretty outdated. Bring back rotary phones too, I guess.

If we don't have jobs we are free to:

Take up arms against an exploitative political and owner class minority.

Make sure grandma and the kids are ok. Everyone has enough to eat?

Free the sweatshop kids we exploit without giving them a choice of "the mines" or college, from obligations to our own meat suits

???? What else?

Whole lot of job culture too was just busy work to satisfy the beliefs of they who are generationally churning out of life. Bye grandpa; thanks for zero assurances but tons of obligations; you won't be missed!

Elon and such are not an immutable constant of the universe. Few more years and he'll be Mitch McConnelling out on TV. Especially with all the drug abuse.

Everyone under 50 needs to prepare for the future not LARP the past.