"The safest job from AI may be writing"

What's this about?

An argument that writing — the serious kind — is more defensible against AI than most knowledge work, which produced 157 comments of mostly economics.

What is the "zero-sum" argument being made?

The lead comment distinguishes two things. Workaday copywriting was already dying and is now finished. Prestige literary writing is zero-sum — success is relative position, not absolute output — and therefore eternal, because when everyone gets the same tool nobody gains an advantage. The analogy offered is equities trading: LLMs gave no trader an edge because every trader has them.

What's the community saying?

1. The analogy immediately gets contested: equity trading isn't zero-sum, because real businesses with real cash flows sit behind the shares.
2. The refinement that survives: business-building isn't zero-sum, but trading is, and its social function is providing liquidity.
3. A further correction — derivatives genuinely are zero-sum because contracts expire with a winner and a loser, while equities have dividends, buybacks and spin-offs.
4. The thread's most useful observation drifts far from writing: markets have been engineered to be positive-sum, but can be negative-sum over a generation, and Japan is the example everyone reaches for.