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Comment by Neil44 | Hacker News Reader

My partner is / was a copywriter. She was already a bit fatigued by it even before the whole AI thing. She's still finding bits of work but is pivoting into AI herself now. I think of it like all the other jobs from yesteryear that you hardly ever see. Lamplighter, elevator operator, farrier. People used to form gangs and smash up the mechanical spinning looms.

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Usually the implication of this (very common) analogy is that people in the past were somehow behaving wrongly, despite the fact that anybody is right to fight savagely against dramatic disruption to the life they've built, regardless of what the best solution is theoretically. Though even beyond that, the comparison is thin. With AI disruption, the size of the total affected jobs in comparison to the entire economy, as well as the speed of the change, is much more significant.

> anybody is right to fight savagely against dramatic disruption to the life they've built

Yeah, I'd built a whole lifestyle around armed robbery, and the cops had the gall to arrest me. It was dramatically disruptive!

Seriously, you do not have a "right" to keep doing whatever you've been doing, even if it wasn't destructive. Nobody owes you that. People aren't your serfs.

I think they were behaving wrongly yes because the one constant in life is change whatever you do and whatever species you are. Adapt or die surely? The universe isn't a museum.

Understandable? Maybe. Right? Absolutely not.

The village blacksmith of 1934, it was clear, had to learn new skills to survive.

“The influence of the automobile has driven the horse from the city’s streets,” according to the article. “The blacksmith now earns his livelihood by straightening automobile axles, repairing broken springs and welding frames.”

https://www.americanfarriers.com/articles/8921-examining-the...

It's telling that you compare specialized creative work, like making art, to "jobs" like standing in an elevator.

Nobody would miss washroom attendants disappearing either. That is different from automating away the stuff that makes life interesting. Like AI startups telling you that their robot will spend time with your friends and family, so you don't have to. Being disgusted by that is not being a luddite, it's being a well adjusted human with aspirations beyond doomscrolling AI slop on tiktok/youtube.

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