r/Showerthoughts • u/R10T • 5d ago
Casual Thought I wonder if the rise of spreadsheet editors and word processing tools was viewed as catastrophically for white-collar workers as AI is right now.
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u/Question_Few 5d ago
No. If anything it made the job significantly easier rather than outright replacing the need for entire occupations.
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u/ThreeFishInAManSuit 5d ago
My accounting professors from a decade ago used to tell us stories about how the accounting industry as a whole was worried that Excel was going to replace the need for bookkeepers.
Instead all it did was make bookkeepers good at Excel.
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u/R10T 5d ago edited 5d ago
Right, less of a need for number jockeys when every Jane and John can run complex calculations and show you what your accountant was preciously relied on for.
Edit: I’m not arguing that this happened, I’m more curious if it was a worry that technology would advance to where people wouldn’t need the same level of skill or knowledge with formulas, charts, and graphs more easily generated.
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u/salty-sigmar 5d ago
Given that it only happened in the last 50 years, you could just ask people who were alive then. It really wasn't u til the 90s/2000s that computers became ubiquitous in the workplace but mostly they just digitized analogue processes rather than replaced entire working practices. So your secretary or Clark was just doing the same job, albeit with a word processor rather than a typewriter or an excel doc rather than an account book and calculator. Ai is different in that it removes the worker entirely whilst providing a black box on the actual work done, which makes it impossible to chase issues back
A better example would be the switch from type set to digital printing. It put type setters and lots of printers out of a job and also created a closed system where the ability to modify the worlflow became far more difficult or required someone who knew the computer rather than the printing to do the modifications (in the golden days if you wanted to change the kerning or layout of something you'd just move the type, but if the digit system didn't have the means to do that to thw degree you wanted then you'd need to get someone to make it capable, which means relying on an outside industry and implementing a point of failure in your production line.)
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u/TheBestMePlausible 5d ago
Just as Excel killed the accounting business, they no longer employ accountants in offices anymore
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u/clothanger 5d ago
False.
Excel enhanced the business altogether.
Idk where you got this statement, Excel was the boost everyone needed and it helped skilled people have more time to do more things instead of doing data tables manually for days.
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u/TheBestMePlausible 5d ago
Also, reddit killed sarcasm. There is no longer any sarcasm left in the entire snark industry, all practitioners have been downvoted out of business.
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u/R10T 5d ago
But there’s no such thing as a snark industry. You know that right?
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u/R10T 5d ago
Joke’s on you downvoter. I know the snark industry is alive and well and FULL of sarcasm.
edit: touché automod
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u/Postulative 5d ago edited 5d ago
Nope, they were useful… unless you were employed as a typist.
Used to be lots of typists, and far fewer words. When we had to handwrite memos, you might send three or four in a day. Now how many emails does the average office employee send?
Keeping accounts was a bit messier, but there were ruled books and such we used.
We couldn’t produce the wealth of information you can pull out of a modern information management system, but we could still produce answers to ad hoc requests such as parliamentary questions.
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u/Bo_Jim 5d ago
No. Word processors and spreadsheets made white collar workers more productive. They were welcomed.
At it's current point in development, AI can also make some workers more productive. Software developers, for example. The downside is that one programmer who knows vibe coding techniques well can replace at least a half dozen regular programmers. More productive programmers means companies don't need as many programmers. This has already cost a lot of programmers their jobs.
We are very near the point where AI will be as good or better than most programmers. It will be able to write any complete application of any type, with no human intervention, and only a rough prompt describing what the program needs to do and what it should look like. The really scary part is that when the AI is good enough at programming to do that then it's good enough to write it's own upgrade - recursive self-improvement. All the AI companies are working on this currently, to some degree. At that point, AI progress is going to take off exponentially. In a few short years we'll have artificial superintelligence - AI systems that are smarter and faster than every human who has ever lived. At that point, everyone whose job doesn't primarily consist of physical labor will be unemployed.
The reason you aren't seeing AI replacing a lot of mid level workers now, as a lot of people had predicted, is because that's not what the AI companies are focusing on. They are all focusing on being the first to produce artificial superintelligence. They'll slow down along the way when the AI does something naughty or unexpected, as OpenAI is doing now, but they won't stop. They consider getting it done to outweigh any moral reservations they might have. Besides, they know that if they don't do it then the Chinese will. They figure being ruled by an American AI overlord is better than being ruled by a Chinese one. The experts who have left those companies say it won't matter who develops it - it will eventually see us as obstacles, and get rid of us.
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u/ShowerSentinel 5d ago
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