While I agree that increasing LLM use will, unfortunately, cause disruption and reallocation in job roles, this has always happened whenever technology enables automation. It predates computers going back hundreds of years. A friend of mine has a doctorate in 'History of Technology' and wrote his thesis on the massive employment and societal disruption steam power and railroads caused in the 1800s. The disruption inevitably consolidates roles in some areas while creating new jobs elsewhere. While the directly attributable new jobs are sometimes fewer in number than those lost, they usually have meaningfully higher average compensation.

Although there are a few exceptions, so far the vast majority of these disruptions have, on decadal timescales, resulted in significant economic growth, expanded labor productivity and higher standards of living overall. This has held since Gutenberg's movable type displaced manual scribes, steam shovels displaced dangerous mining jobs and Hollerith's punch card mechanical tabulators replaced huge rooms full of human calculators engaged in mind-numbing manual calculation. Since I generally like humans, I'm glad when fewer of them are forced to feed their families at the cost of black lung in a coal mine, crippling arthritis at 50 or the soul-crushing tedium of paper-pushing. This is part of gradually transitioning to a post-scarcity world where fewer but higher-paying jobs, which are far more productive and engaging, "pay for" more leisure, education, child-rearing, early retirement and unleashing more creative joy by artists, musicians, poets and dreamers. We can't get to 'post-scarcity' by somehow keeping everything the same and one day at 9am flipping a switch. Big changes that matter, whether for better or worse, have always been disruptive.

Individually, disruption is still disruptive and uncomfortable. I get it. No one likes change and uncertainty being forced on them. For hundreds of years each of these transitions has been especially hard on those who are end-of-career or otherwise unwilling to re-skill, learn and transition to new work. And it might be tougher for the current end-of-career generation (including myself) because we're the last generation who will ever have entered the workforce with the expectation we could work for >40 years and retire without ever re-skilling.

While you might think that LLMs are so damn BIG that "this time it's different", there's ample evidence that every generation before us thought that too and I've personally seen different disruptions happen several times in my four decade career, and heard worried claims in the '80s and '90s of "...but it was never like THIS before." It's true the rate of large technological disruptions has been steadily increasing for at least the last 200 years and their size is bigger in absolute terms but not bigger relative to the size of the overall economy, which has grown orders of magnitude. That's why it feels different and bigger to every generation, but it's still the same directional trend you read about in textbooks, except it's now happening to you and all around you. Schumpeter called it "Creative Destruction" for good reason. These are the labor pains and contractions that have always birthed the future.

I truly feel for those personally experiencing uncertainty, discomfort or displacement and being forced into figuring out an uncertain future. I don't know of a way to stop change, and even if there were, there's no point in the past I'd pick as being better than today. And I think our children will probably feel the same and not want us to stop progress today, even if we could. Renaissance Faires are lovely fantasies reimagining a past in which most humans lived short, brutal lives. And it's worth pointing out that even the possibility of NOT being under relatively constant threat of uncertainty, discomfort, or displacement has only ever existed at large scale in all of human history for the last hundred years. Before that, well... the old adage about wishing on someone "May you live in interesting times" was literally considered a curse. Now, and forever after, everyone alive and all their descendants will be both privileged (and doomed) to enjoy (and endure) interesting times. While there will inevitably be digressions in certain regions and in certain decades, on average and over the long run, I believe the outlook for more humans, in more places, to live more of their lives in happiness is better than it's ever been.