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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

I'm having a hard time squaring the "don't put this guy out of business because it will become a lost art" with the very real practical goal of "release a digital piano tuner for $2 on the App Store that will make every piano not tuned by this guy-- the ones in school theaters, churches, or sitting rooms, sound better. I can't even imagine what an exorbitant price to a concert hall means but for sure the high school production of Anything Goes can't afford it.

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It sounds like you haven't tuned an instrument with many strings.

Tuning one string will change the tuning of the rest.

The tuner might tell you the end state, but not how you get there, and it might not be the right tuning for how the piano will be played or the room it will be played in

I don't think this is the point of the article. In the TL, DR, they allude to the fact that the introduction of general AI into the world will accelerate this, because it will be "$2 app store tuner" on a larger, more intense scale.

Doesn't require much through to extrapolate this to different areas. Sure, it would be sad if the expertise on sewing and clothing construction was lost to automation, but it wouldn't be the end of the world. But every person has a hobby that they would be sad to see lose its complexity and art. It might be catastrophic, though, if the world's nuclear engineers began automating their right-tail knowledge away.

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