> It’s a weird experience to spend ten years becoming excellent at something only to watch a 22-year-old produce a suspiciously solid version of it in 14 minutes
> Which forces a much more uncomfortable question: if your identity was tied to being good at X, what happens when X gets automated?
I've been grappling with the same thing the last few weeks. It's easy to say "don't put your job at the center of your sense of self" but I've been writing software professionally for twelve years now and I like to think I've gotten pretty damn good at it. It's part of who I am. What happens when the value of the thing you're best at decreases sharply?
The answer is, in the Darwinian sense, adapt or die. Same as it ever was.
Wrong author. Darwin wrote about physiological changes in animal populations over generations. What you're describing is the alienation that the worker is subject to under a legal and political system built by capital owners. You want to read Marx about it, not Darwin.
> Which forces a much more uncomfortable question: if your identity was tied to being good at X, what happens when X gets automated?
I've been grappling with the same thing the last few weeks. It's easy to say "don't put your job at the center of your sense of self" but I've been writing software professionally for twelve years now and I like to think I've gotten pretty damn good at it. It's part of who I am. What happens when the value of the thing you're best at decreases sharply?
The answer is, in the Darwinian sense, adapt or die. Same as it ever was.