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Comment by sthkr | Hacker News Reader

Automation is such an old concept invented back in the 1st century AD. Furthermore, I don't see people hating the CEOs of Siemens, Honeywell, Schneider Electric, ABB, Yokogawa, Emerson, Allen Bradley, GE Fanuc, Kuka, Hyundia, Mitsubishi etc. They've been automating entire industries & manufacturing with their controllers (PLCs, DCS etc), SCADA, HMI & systems for decades. The first PLC was invented by General Motors back in 1968. China has entire dark factories making phones and their electric cars. The media is only crying now because their cushy office, journalism and art jobs are slowly going away.

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I don't come down on anyone for failing to foresee how the web 2.0/social-media/streaming eras would evolve to be used against us more than for us. I'm as guilty as anyone. But in 2026 there's no excuse for failing to apply lessons from the last decade or two to extrapolate where AI is going.

I'm honestly tired of these comments as they fail to understand what is happening today is not the same as what happened 50 years ago.

For the past few decades people have been told over and over: no more factory? no problem! that was backbreaking work better done by robots anyway. go to college, study really hard, get a degree and you'll get a better paying job that leverages your cognitive skills. Remember all those "I was a metalworker and transitioned to web developer" stories?

And now, all of a sudden they're being told, "oops, those jobs that leveraged your cognitive skills are going away too now" (and not because we're saving humanity or some noble reason, but so rich tech companies and their share holders can get richer), and "no, we have no idea what, if any, new jobs will emerge for you".

Even to whatever extent this is what's happening, a stopped clock is right twice a day applies.

Yes, and when they replaced the manual slow looms with fast machines, people lost jobs, people went homeless, families were destroyed.

Unless there is a mechanism to convert the extra revenue from machines back to humans, the money just filters to the top 1% of the 1%. Unfortunately, that has effectively never been the case in history. Job displacement is the real late stage capitalism.

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