For 300 years a computer was a person: what that history says about which skills AI erases
r0ck3t23 · x · 2026-10-13
A long thread traces how "computer" was a job for 300 years — human calculators NASA relied on into the 1960s, when John Glenn insisted Katherine Johnson verify the IBM 7090's trajectory. The argument: a century of schools and hiring optimized for speed, accuracy and volume — skills clean enough to measure, and therefore to automate. Every exam was unintentionally a machine spec. The unmeasurable soft skills — judgment, taste, knowing when the right answer is the wrong thing to do — resist handover, and someone still has to live with the outcome.
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