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Comment by thierrydamiba | Hacker News Reader

Do professions really get destroyed? Or does the world just change?

I used to get paid to do OCR on tax forms. I used n gram models, BERT,etc and it took weeks to get the forms right. Now you can do it in seconds with an api.

I wouldn’t say the profession got destroyed. I just work with different tools now. Instead of running ngrams, I’m testing different apis or embedding models.

The old job doesn’t exist anymore, in many ways I am the classic example of losing your job to AI-but I wouldn’t say it destroyed the profession. People just use different tools today to get intelligence from PDFs.

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Of course professions get destroyed, and it can happen by the world changing. Not sure why they have to be mutually exclusive - You don't see people lighting kerosene lamps on the streets anymore, and I doubt those same types of people are working with streetlights now.

I might not see people lighting kerosene lamps but I see people climb big ladders to fix lamps that light up public spaces.

I assume the people doing that work might have been lighting lamps in the past.

The profession of "lamp lighter" definitely has been destroyed though. The person that can raise a burning stick to a kerosene lamp has to have a different skill set than the person fixing lamps in public spaces. I'm assuming you don't mean "screwing in a light bulb" type work, which would be close enough in skill requirements, that the person whose profession was destroyed could reasonably do the new profession without a lot of learning being required.

In the same vein, you doing OCR and now doing other work is not a profession change. You're still a computer scientist doing computer engineering work just on a different problem set.

Lamp lighter to cheese tapper is a profession change. A lamp lighter with bad hearing or attention to detail is not a problem per se. Tapping cheese to see if its ripe (and all the other skills that come with cheese making) will potentially be different enough.

Now the problem comes in, when lamp lighter is supposed to start doing OCR engineering work. Unless the lamp lighter was horribly over qualified, most lamp lighters will not be able to do OCR engineering or any computer scientist style engineering work at all.

Professions do get destroyed all the time. Hopefully while a new profession is born that has similar enough skill level requirements as the previous ones, just in different form. Like a lamp lighter might do well in an Amazon warehouse but not as an AWS software engineer.

"The profession of "lamp lighter" definitely has been destroyed though"

It's somewhat still held by the same people that somewhat-traditionally did the job. In some places, it used to be job of the night watch constable to light the kerosene lamps. Police now days just report a broken traffic light.

Even if someone can transfer from lamp lighter to street light technician people will have lost their jobs, because you no longer need enough people to make sure all the lamps get lit within a reasonable space of time, you just need maybe a dozen people covering maintenance and repairs on a city full of streetlights.

OTOH, no one likes "American Flavored Imitation Pasteurized Process Cheese Food".

The world is constantly changing, some professions are destroyed as the result. This is a tale as old as time. Mark Twain wrote about this on Life on the Mississippi when he was a river boat pilot before trains became common and destroyed the trade.

some professions spawn from viable hobbies and some hobbies spawn from unviable professions.

There’s no course to learn the niche skills and nuances of this trade; Alessandro accompanied and apprenticed with Renato and other experts for about 3 years, learning through firsthand experience how to assess each form.

“The particularity of this profession to me is that it’s like it was 2 years ago, and it’s a skill that’s handed down from dev to dev. You go around with the most expert, most experienced BERTitori, and you watch and listen to them, and slowly they start to give you the keyboard. You try with them next to you, piano piano, and gradually, you begin to do more on your own,” explained Stocchi. “It’s a big responsibility, you have to be really capable of doing it, you can’t damage the forms.”

This is probably my favorite comment ever. Bravo!

And even with the existence of those tools, the old professions continue for years, sometimes many years, in niches. For example, even today there are people who are paid to wake up others manually - a job that used to be called "knocker-up."

Knocker-up? I hardly know 'er!

People get paid to do this? I’m not doubting the veracity, I’m just surprised.

Our culture tends to embrace technological progress. But we don't have to. It's just something we do accept. And yes, many technologies have eliminated jobs. Some have created new ones sure, but it's not always 1 to 1. Not everyone replaced on an assembly line by a robot or machine, is needed to repair or build that new machine.

Our tendency to 'progress' doesn't have to be the case, we all could collectively decide to hold ourselves here.

Also, I don't think that all our technology has always been good for us either. But we are blind to the downsides mostly.

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