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How Past Disruptions Predict Our AI Future: Assembly Lines for the Digital World
This article is based on materials I collected, my previous posts here and on social media, back-and-forth, cherry-picking, and feedback loops with ChatGPT.
I was playing around with a few AI coding tools recently — GPTEngineer, Replit Agent, and Vercel’s V0 — when Spider Sense hit me: these tools will become as common as calculators on our phones! It feels like we’re on the verge of something massive. Is this a major disruption? What will the future look like? How to answer that?
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As I sat there thinking about the possible future of AI, something else hit me. This level of disruption — it’s not the first time we’ve seen something like this, is it? I began to wonder:
What can we learn from past revolutions?
With that question in mind, I turned to ChatGPT to help me explore what kinds of disruptions have shaped human history before. What professions were eliminated? Which new ones were created? And how did these changes ripple through society, transforming supply and demand?
