The difference is that one of those things actually happened, and the other one is your hypothetical extremist/exaggerated/worst possible case of what might happen this time.
The comparison is useful. Printers had decades to pivot and hence the anxiety didn't exist like it does today. Today's capital allocated wants this to happen within a decade.
-Sam Altman “whole classes of jobs going away”
-Mustafa Suleyman "So white-collar work, where you're sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person — most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months."
-Jim Farley “Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers.”
-Dario Amodei predicted that AI could eliminate up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years
-Arindam Paul has said that 40-50 percent of white-collar jobs in India could cease to exist because of AI, and an Anthropic researcher had predicted that AI would be able to automate any white-collar job by 2028.
Here:
> You can argue about whether the obsolescence is real or not, but if it is [emphasis in source], the plight of the printers is totally incomparable.
"It hasn't happened yet" is a non-sequitur at best, but obviously the goal of such a "contribution" is to chill discussion. The same "contribution" can be made to any conversation about any possible future events. So long as everyone already knows they're talking about the future, it is not helpful in any way.