IT broadly speaking is ~4.5% of the workforce in the US, 5% in the EU, last time I checked.

Do you think IT is the only field threatened by AI?

Must not spend much time talking to people in other fields.

Ad hominem, unfounded inference, condescension/snark, and mind-reading, all in your last 11 words. Impressive!

Hard to respond to two assumptions stacked upon each other. First that my 40%+ figure was referring to IT (which should be self-evidently a category error), then that you were correcting that number down to 1.9 million.

> which could not have possibly have employed more than 0.01% of people at its peak.

I was refuting your made up statistic.

Oh I see, you're claiming that 1.9 million people in the US were engaged in printing.

You're referring to a NAICS code set that includes both printing and the entire publishing apparatus around it.

At printing's peak, there were 70,000 people employed in actual printing in the US. There were lots more engaged in the business around printed goods, but those jobs weren't threatened by desktop publishing. In fact there are more of those people today than there were at the peak of printing, drawing a clear empirical line between those jobs that were destroyed by printing tech improvements and those that were not.

At its peak in the late 90s, printing was 0.025% of US people or 0.05% of the workforce, which (being unbelievably wealthy) would obviously be the extreme high end of print employment globally.

0.01% was obviously a complete finger in the wind estimate, but turned out to be a pretty good guess!

https://whattheythink.com/articles/52978-desktop-publishings...