The printing press did displace the manual copying of manuscripts, which had insanely low bandwidth and generally kinda sucked for everyone involved. But for several hundred years after, until the industrial revolution and the mass production of mechanical typewriters, pretty much everything printed on a printing press was originally authored by hand. Even with typewriters handwriting lingered for quite a while, since they were very demanding in terms of skill, and all mistakes were permanent.
Arguably it's not until digital writing tools emerged handwriting was truly displaced. That made typing on a keyboard accessible enough that anyone with working hands can do it fairly easily.
One thing that strikes me about these discussions is just how awful the metaphors are.
We're constantly being told that jobs designing and building skyscrapers are close to obsolete because some yokel made a factory that manufactures yurts.
Writing hand crafted code for the sole use of an individual never happened. Writing hand crafted code to be run by millions of people is routine. You can't compare it to a spinning jenny, a printing press, the motor car or indeed any other technological invention that scaled production. It is nonsensical by definition.
I think a lot of people just dont want to hear that LLMs are a step change and not actually revolutionary. Theres too much invested in them being world changing at this point. Blockchain was the same.
Also hard to overstate the sheer impact of a tool like Excel, which in many ways is an ad-hoc programming tool so intuitive that anyone can learn to use it. Even though it sees more jeer than celebration, and is often something techies seek to liberate users from, it's likely one of the most economically impactful inventions of the 20th century, already delivering many of the things we hype AI for.
Factories making canned or microwave meals killed chefs. Why would anyone cook food themselves if they can get food ready made only missing heating. Cooking and being chef is dead. Factory produced slop is the new future...
The printing press did displace the manual copying of manuscripts, which had insanely low bandwidth and generally kinda sucked for everyone involved. But for several hundred years after, until the industrial revolution and the mass production of mechanical typewriters, pretty much everything printed on a printing press was originally authored by hand. Even with typewriters handwriting lingered for quite a while, since they were very demanding in terms of skill, and all mistakes were permanent.
Arguably it's not until digital writing tools emerged handwriting was truly displaced. That made typing on a keyboard accessible enough that anyone with working hands can do it fairly easily.