alt Hacker NewsAnother parallel is type foundries and printing presses. At one point people operated these linotype machines which used molten lead. Of course this transitioned to photo typesetting which, to the dismay of everyone had poor results. Along came Donald Knuth and TeX to fix those deficiencies. NOTE: mechanical printing has a profoundly better result no matter what. It is the ink and the impression in paper that makes it superior (for letterforms and such).
So, if AI follows suit, we will witness the dumb (but very knowledgeable) AI start to supplant workers with questionable results; and then someone (or a team) will make a discovery to take it to the limit and it’ll be game over for large swaths of jobs.
TeX was predated by a family of macro-based document languages that began with RUNOFF and continued through roff, nroff, troff, ditroff, and groff. Plus tbl, eqn, and mm*. Some manual pages still use that stuff. Most Linux systems still install it by default. TeX has roughly the same concept, a macro-based layout language, but a better design with far less cruft.