Through most of the 20th century, the typist was a real
profession with real status. Companies built typing pools.
Workflows were designed around them. The role existed
because of three constraints: errors were expensive
(a typo meant retyping a page), revisions had to be
managed manually, and formatting was bounded by
the physical typewriter. The typist bundle held those
three constraints together.
Word processors arrived in the late 1970s. At first they
looked like a productivity tool - typists would just be
faster typists. That framing missed it entirely. The
constraints the role was bundled around collapsed
simultaneously: edits cost nothing, revisions became
instant, formatting became automatic.
Typing didn't disappear. It became something every knowledge
worker absorbed into their own work. The task survived. The
bundle dissolved because the constraints that held
it together dissolved. No amount of reskilling - “become a
faster typist,” “learn shorthand,” “specialise in
formatting” - would have saved the role, because the
problem wasn't the typist's skill. The problem was that the
system no longer needed a role organised around that task.
The pattern repeats every time a coordination layer
collapses an old constraint. AI is the coordination layer
collapsing dozens of constraints across knowledge work at
once.