India has the problem with farming that the US is starting to have with AI. Farming in India is still far too labor intensive by world standards. 43% of workers still work in agriculture. [1] For the US, that number is under 2%. China is at 22% as of 2023, and dropping steadily.
This inefficient agricultural system is not by accident. It is supported by heavy subsidies. Attempts to cut the subsidies resulted in riots.[2] Trouble is ongoing.
Comments from someone who knows more about this than I do would help here.
The US and most of the EU went through that transition over several generations, and farming is still heavily subsidized in both areas. The transition happened faster in China, and a hukou system was put into place to prevent people from migrating from farms to cities faster than the cities could absorb them.
Looking at how countries coped with a fast transition from labor intensive agriculture to an urban society gives hints on how an AI transition may look. All the Asian countries that went from poor to rich in a generation did this, with different approaches. How that took place may provide more useful info than philosophy.
I liked reading "The Box" about the transition to container shipping.
It was interesting to see this totally-unrelated-to-our-times process from the outside.
From our place in time, container shipping is obvious.
At the time, to people who wanted to ship something, it was ridiculously hard and expensive and risky.
If you were shipping something from cleveland to paris, you might just give up.
Say you were shipping alcohol - only part might arrive, the rest would disappear.
The shipping industry had all KINDS of forces at work to keep the status quo. trucking companies, trains, shipping companies, freight forwarders, longshoremen, stevedores, unions, people with older non-container boats, etc.
In all fairness, this is exactly why insurance was invented: unreliable shipping. You just took out a policy, and the shipment didn’t make it you took the payout.
It creates a system that diminishes risk, but simultaneously diminishes incentives for improvement.
>The industrial revolution was enabled by more efficient agriculture feeing labour to do other work
you're not wrong, but that's not exactly what happened. Agriculture itself was mechanized by the industrial revolution, affordable tractors (tillers, farrowers, etc.) and harvesters. mechanized railroads put more perishable agricultural goods "closer" to urban areas, etc.
if you look at the growth industry before that, it was mercantilist overseas trade.
The big productivity gains of the Agricultural Revoution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolutio... started considerably before the Industrial Revolution, though naturally the Industrial Revolution in turn fed back into agricultural productivity, in time.
Yea, the first few percentage points are underrated.
Dropping from 90% of the population being ~farmers to 80% of the population being farmers doubles the amount of time people can spend doing everything else including research, manufacturing, education etc.
In many ways it was equivalent to the drop from 51% being farmers all the way down to 2%. However, it wasn’t nearly as obvious because 90% farmers looks a lot like 80% of the population being farmers and the transition was relatively slow and unevenly distributed.
Seems like this and parent are referring to two different waves of improvement. Pre-IR improvements in plowing and cultivation (still draft and human traction), followed by post-IR mechanization for harvesting and transport?
Farm labor demands wax and wane with the seasons with harvest typically being the most labor intensive; so, it was actually stationary motors that did the most to reduce labor demands. Tractors mostly helped farmers eliminate the need for horses on a farm.
One of the leading economic history theories of why the industrial revolution happened was that it was largely a result of the Black Plague.
The theory is roughly that before the Black Plague, the population was stuck in Malthusian dynamics at the top of the logistic curve - population had expanded to the level that land could support.
The massive deaths allowed the remaining population to only farm the most productive land, leading to a massive surplus. The elite were able to capture that surplus and fund things like art, science, etc. Some of those scientists were able to create technology that led to further efficiency gains, so that technology could make the economy grow faster than population growth could catch up.
There are a ton of things that allowed that surplus to translate into technology and economic growth. But AFAIK the leading theory is that without the massive shock from population decline due to the bubonic plague, that surplus would have never existed to begin with, so how it was allocated would have been moot.
The first technology wasn't the steam engine, it was eating beef instead of just grain, and having cattle pull plows. We don't think of that as a huge technological revolution, but it was a dramatic efficiency gain at the time. It wasn't a new invention, but there wasn't enough surplus to deploy it widely before that.
Anything can be anything if you stretch definitions far enough. But normally industrialization is seen as distinct and antagonistic to artisanal culture.
There was a very marked change in the growth rate, which is why economic historians focus on that.
Yes, there were multiple further steps that needed to happen, as you note. But the black plague got the population "unstuck" from a local minimum that they could not grow from, to being able to have cattle plow the fields and eat meat that allowed them to have some surplus to capture the further gains.
It's not that the later gains were inevitable, but that they never would have otherwise happened, and the growth rate started with the plague.
It's like saying the current AI boom started recently, there's no way the steam engine was related. It is a clear causal chain, even though many things had to happen in between.
But before the black plague, at least the "western world" was stuck in Malthusian dynamics where there was no growth in technology or income.
The economy went from 0% growth for 100s of years to 3% growth that lasted many hundreds of years.
Yes, at each step keeping the 3% growth needed things to keep going, but the big thing was unleashing the nonzero growth rate, to get unstuck from the local minimum.
I will try to steelman watwut, a lot of people presume compound exponential economic growth is basically inevitable as a law, so you can always go back to some point in time.
However, economic growth was basically flat before the Black Plague, and increases were basically random events that went back to Malthusian dynamics.
Only since the Black Plague has the world enjoyed exponential economic growth.
Most people talk about the industrial revolution, a lot of other comments talk about the british agricultural revolution before that, but economic historians have identified the inflection point at the black plague - that's where compound interest really started to be a driver of growth, it barely existed before that, at least on long time scales.
The Justinian Plague was as bad or worse, but rather than result in flourishing it ushered in the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire and the start of the so-called Dark Ages. So maybe the Black Plague was an important element, but if so also had to have happened at the confluence of other critical events.
According to William Rosen in "Justinian's Flea," this plague also led to an agricultural revolution and population explosion in Western Europe.
<quote>
One cannot, of course, “know” this in the same way that one can know the date of the battle of Poitiers; applying economic analysis to the spotty record of commerce during late antiquity is a tricky business. However, as can be seen in a subtly reasoned 2003 paper by two development economists, Ronald Findlay of Columbia and Mats Lundahl of the University of Stockholm, it is compelling, as well, despite its reliance on a number of simplifications.
</quote>
If we are limiting causes to things that would lead to an event every time no matter what other conditions exist, then we aren't going to ever have any causes.
This would be like saying "well drunk driving doesn't cause accidents because I drive drunk once and didn't get in a crash"
That's a super interesting question and I agree! I am only saying the modern period of compound economic growth clearly started at the black plague with good explanations as to why.
Why other events did not have the same effects are very interesting questions for economic history.
Doesn't this article contradict your earlier comment? It claims that wages increased (elite were unable to capture the surplus) and as a result, workers were able to move from growing crops to farming animals, with resulting efficiency gains (i.e. they were able to acquire capital rather than pay all their surplus as rent).
It's a long arc, and as sibling comments say, there are many books about it.
The elites being able to capture some of it was what allowed for science and the enlightenment to happen, which eventually led to the technology that inspired the industrial revolution.
The big picture was it was the beginning of compound interest. This was a many step process over hundreds of years.
The events happened, but the mechanisms are subject to debate. Every school of economic thought has strong opinions on this time period. You've actually listed a source that contradicts your original argument (which came from where, out of curiosity?)
Basically, one common version is 'pro-elite' and blames the stagnation prior to this period on 'Malthusian dynamics' (over population beyond the productivity of the land). Another version is 'anti-elite' and blames the stagnation on the capture of all surplus by the landowning elite (who are not motivated to invest it other than the bare necessity to maintain status quo).
While there is considerable room for nuance and disagreement, Malthus is considered largely discredited by modern economics. As the population increased, so did the productivity of the land. Regardless, the fact people lived bare subsistence lives under feudalism does not imply the max population had been reached - they are still paying excess as rent. Peasants paid 1/2 their crop in rent, consumed 1/4 and replanted a 1/4 (crude approximation). This is very similar btw to modern US - there are 100M renters and the median rental household pays 50% of gross income to rent + tax.
Compound interest and capital investments predate the medieval period by thousands of years. There are cuneiform tablets documenting these kinds of financial arrangements.
'AFAIK the leading theory is that without the massive shock from population decline due to the bubonic plague, that surplus would have never existed to begin with, so how it was allocated would have been moot.' This is highly dubious/contentious.
I mean sure we can trace the causality chain of industrial revolution back to the asteroid that wiped the dinosaurs. How useful that formulation is another question.
Societal changes are slow beasts, they may very well take several centuries to develop. Nation-states were a direct consequence of the printing press, yet they didn't arrive until XIX century.
I thought the aftermath of the Black Plague also allowed people to charge a lot more for their labor and services, since most of the laborers, well, died.
I mean all part of the surplus - you weren't struggling to barely survive so could do other things with your time, and some of the people used that surplus to invest in efficiency.
Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom. That's kinda the opposite of people starving to death. A lot of agriculture historically and in poor countries like India today is subsistence agriculture, yeoman farmers living off what they grow directly. More efficiency allows them to sell their surplus and to invest the proceedings, kicking off economic growth.
Yes, but the AI that is metaphor is comparing to does not create more food. More to the point, it may not create more jobs.
After a few decades of turmoil the industrial and agricultural revolutions netted out far more jobs. The verdict is still out on AI, but I wouldn't bet on it.
It also doesn't destroy food. Right now, we have enough food. After the AI revolution we have more food and more free labour and fundamentally more effective administrators to run a welfare system. I don't want my society to be the first one to try it, but if we can move the average administrator from an ordinary human to something that is a little better at math than Gauss with infinite clones to get into the details ... there is a chance that we can run an effective centrally planned welfare system.
It is really hard to see how the AI revolution would lead to any issues with food shortages. It looks more like previously unthinkable upside than anything else.
Your analysis is greatly under estimating the risk that the capitalists that control the system use it to build cheap, automated weapons to guard their cheap robots and lock everyone of us out, just because they can. They're far more likely to be narcissists and sociopaths than the average population, empathy isn't their strong suit.
> Yes, but the AI that is metaphor is comparing to does not create more food.
Mostly because food is incredibly cheap, so it's not the main focus of present-day economies. AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life. The most natural and most cost-effective use of AI is arguably in helping answer simple questions, not really in cranking out tokens to somehow help write complex software. And other service work is perhaps in the middle of this range.
> But the answers it gives are not reliable. They sound plausible if you don't know anything about the subject, but they're not reliable.
Do not underestimate the utility of having a starting point overview on a topic you know absolutely nothing about. It may be immensely valuable even if some details are off. That's what made the XVIII's Encyclopedia such a valuable tool for civil society.
By the time you get to the point where those wrong details become relevant, you have gotten a basic understanding of what the overall topic is about, so you're prepared to get a second opinion from a different source - and this time you may know enough to start asking relevant questions, rather than starting from full ignorance.
> Do not underestimate the utility of having a starting point overview on a topic you know absolutely nothing about.
Perhaps, but we already had that in the form of search-engines and primers and how-to guides and Wikipedia. The actionable questions already had answers.
Adding an obsequious device that dynamically hallucinate half of a conversation with not-necessarily-true dialog is (if not a detriment) only a marginal improvement.
Hallucinations are not a matter of some "details" being off. They are a matter of plausible, confident-sounding claims that are just plain wrong. They don't help anyone to get a "basic understanding". All they "help" with is getting a wrong understanding, that the poor person who's asking can't tell is wrong, because it sounds plausible and is stated with such confidence.
When humans do this, we call them "bullshit artists", and we don't view them favorably. Why should AIs get a pass?
> Hallucinations are not a matter of some "details" being off. They are a matter of plausible, confident-sounding claims that are just plain wrong.
This is no worse than Wikipedia, or the original encyclopedia for that matter. Those contain dubious claims that you'll need to verify on your own too.
LLMs help because they have a gigantic amount of compressed knowledge, and they are able to find relevant information and present it incredibly fast. You wouldn't trust the ten first results of a Google search either, but you wouldn't say that having a search engine is totally useless and in no way an improvement over your local library, would you?
> the poor person who's asking can't tell is wrong, because it sounds plausible and is stated with such confidence.
True, but having to learn how to use a tool properly doesn't make the tool useless, even if it can hurt those who use it carelessly.
> you wouldn't say that having a search engine is totally useless and in no way an improvement over your local library, would you?
A search engine that just indexes the web and gives me results is of course a great improvement over my local library.
But LLMs are not the same as a search engine. LLMs don't give me links. (Well, sometimes they do, and sometimes the links don't even exist, or if they exist, they don't actually say what the LLM said they say. At least with a search engine it's just the link, with no claims about what I'll find if I click on it.) They give me authoritative-sounding text. That's what they're for. And no, that text is not coming from "compressed knowledge". Text is not knowledge. Knowledge requires connections with the real world. LLMs don't have that. All they have is text.
A comparison I've used before is between LLMs and Wolfram Alpha. If I ask an LLM what's the distance from New York to Tokyo, the LLM has no idea that New York and Tokyo are places on the Earth, that the distance is a physical distance that can be measured, and that there is a right answer to the question. LLMs just generate text based on what their algorithm spits out as the most likely text to follow my prompt. The LLM doesn't even have any concept of what's happening if it gives me a wrong answer and I tell it the answer is wrong. It will spit out text saying, oh, yes, you're right, that's a wrong answer...and then spit out more text that might contain a different wrong answer, or even the same wrong answer. It literally has no concept that I am trying to extract meaning from its text.
Wolfram Alpha, on the other hand, if I ask it what's the distance from New York to Tokyo, figures out that I'm asking for a geographic distance, looks it up in its database of geographic distances (which has been curated by humans using actual geographic data from actual measurements on the actual Earth), and formats the answer in readable text. That's still a very simple connection to the real world outside of text, but at least it's some connection. LLMs have none. And that is what makes them useless as tools for trying to learn actual knowledge.
> AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life.
Not yet. Like, not at all and there is a constantly expressed threat we will all become poorer and unemployable because of it. I dont believe it, but AI did not made life better ... and its creators claim it will make life worst for most of us. That is their literal sales pitch.
Comparable being the key word there. AI marketing is threatening to eventually eliminate most white collar work. The exact high paying jobs (at least in the US) that enable upward class mobility and fuel the consumption based economy.
Take those away and tell everyone "sorry, go do physical labor now for half or worse of the salary" and that's a big problem.
Automation is a boon when it automates physical labor, not when it automates away knowledge work.
The emphasis there should be on "marketing". The actual state of things is that white-collar work is alive and well, and if anything is being helped by AI.
Interesting there is a possible implication here. If salaries drop from more people doing physical labor instead of white collar work then the automation of physical work may be delayed even longer. It may be cheaper in the short term to pay humans than machines due to an oversupply in physical labor.
> Automation is a boon when it automates physical labor, not when it automates away knowledge work.
Says the knowledge workers, who have collectively spent the last 50 years talking down to the physical laborers with a smug "should have gone to college!" attitude.
You'll be fine. Automation of any kind is a boon for everyone. We massively over-allocated human talents to office jobs over the past few decades and stopped building anything in the physical world (like houses, infrastructure, etc), this is only the pendulum swinging back to reality. Graeber wrote about this astutely in his original 2013 Bullshit Jobs essay, long before AI was a thing.
How many people do we actually need sitting in meetings about meetings about powerpoint presentations for future meetings....or implementing react components into a dashboard UI in a slightly different way for the 3,000,000th time? Even without AI, this was bound to happen.
In the early 1900s there were literally hundreds of different automobile manufacturers globally. We didn't need that many, just as we don't need 1,000,000 people working on 100 slightly different versions of the same CRUD project management software. Humans will human. We'll find new stuff to do, as we have done since the dawn of humanity.
Funny you make this statement without giving examples of timeframes, what this looked like in real terms for real peoples lives living back then, nothing. Just 'between 1880 and 1950 we found new stuff to do'. It's all selling magic and hopium based on nothing.
Real example: 75% of the global workforce were farmers in 1880, most on a subsistence basis. The people who left the farm for the factories during that time period weren't forced to. They chose to, because working in a factory was better than staying on the farm. Just like a generation of rural Chinese people made the same choice more recently.
In fact, there's nothing stopping you from buying a farm and living like its 1880 today.
You can quite literally go out and start living a subsistence farmer lifestyle tomorrow. The average person in 1880 did not have the tools needed to cultivate a large parcel of land, so you'd approximate their lifestyle quite easily with a tiny parcel of arable rural land which is extremely cheap to acquire in most countries.
It's not magic and hopium, its simply automation and increased productivity via leverage. AI is the assembly line of the digital revolution.
You need 0.5 to 1.5 acres per person for non-mechanized industrial argriculture. Nowhere with land that is truly arable enough for that is going to _sell_ you 1 acre at a time. In the U.S., you buy at least 40 acres at a time. In the U.S. Midwest, that's going to set you back (on average) $379,000. That's before you buy the equipment you need to be able to farm the land in the first place. Unless you industrialize and grow crops to sell to other people, you will not be able to afford the property taxes on the land to be able to keep it, either.
So, no, you cannot just go out and buy an acre and garden.
What? Yes, you absolutely can buy half an acre. You think in 1880 people went on Zillow to buy land?
You're just going to have to do this the 1880 way.
Knock on the door of a land owner and offer to buy/rent half an acre so you can farm. You'll find takers. My extended family literally has this arrangement with many people who farm different crops during different seasons.
Too hard to to do it that way? Welcome to 1880! Most people weren't land owners on the land they farmed back then and didn't have 'Perfectly arable' plots, and this was pre-fertilizer.
Oh and you'll have to use horse and buggy to get around to find land owners (no evil automobiles from those evil factories full of automation!) who will allow you to farm their land, just like 1880. So good luck.
I don't know how many times I need to explain this to tech doomers: nobody forced people out of subsistence farming. They chose to leave it. It was not a utopia.
Why is you're 'real example' 100% hypothetical? Give me real examples. Or at least real information from places like Manchester at the time. Not this hypothetical stuff the implies much ignoring things got worse for generations.
If you read up on the industrial revolution, those people that moved became less healthy, less happy, forced into dorm style housing. Give me real examples of what 'working out' looked like in the past. Because from my research, 'things worked out' meant worse outcomes for quite a long time (like generational timeframe). Give me examples please of what this successful transition in the past looked like for real individuals.
The other big worry is, what if it just doesn't do what is promised and these trillions of dollars that were spent assuming magic would happen were all for nothing? I mean, other than to make a handful of extremely wealthy individuals even more wealthy at the expense of everyone's retirement funds.
Fiber buried in the ground in 1996 is still useful. Servers from 1996, not so much outside of the retrocomputing community. The bulk of those trillions of dollars on AI is not going into useful long term infrastructure. It's going into equipment that will only be useful to scrappers after its initial life is over in three to five years as the sorts of places that can handle the heat load of 25 clothes dryers on high stuffed into 3.5 cu ft of space aren't going to run second hand machines. They aren't useful as in-office developer machines unless your office has 1000A of power to dedicate to that one single machine and the air conditioner need to keep the room the server is in from bursting into flames.
> The other big worry is, what if it just doesn't do what is promised and these trillions of dollars that were spent assuming magic would happen were all for nothing?
Honestly? That's the best case scenario for humanity.
When AI can replace knowledge-based work, capital has no need for humans anymore. That's almost an ELE.
There is a basic problem with framing though. Why does the labour need to find somewhere to go, but capital doesn't? Why can't the increase in productivity be captured by labour and denied to capital?
Do you mean to imply a political/social revolution? In any other scenario I can think of when my boss gets a new machine, he captures the value from my increased productivity or the machine eliminates my job entirely.
Changing the tax system to tax capital rather than labour would probably get you 90% of the way there without great societal upheaval (capital would fight back though).
If you focus on writing ricketty software or overblown emails then no it isn't real. But if you think of e-gates instead of border officers then it is.
There are precedents for a lower workforce. It was not so long ago that women did not participate much in formal labor, but rather spent their creative energies improving their families and homes. That might not be an empowering choice today, and I'm not advocating for it, but it shows that the economy has in the past and probably still can get along perfectly well with a lot of sidelined labor capacity. The important thing is that the sidelined labor find some useful purpose outside the workplace rather than simply consuming welfare: in the past, domestic work like childrearing and social/emotional work like building community soaked up excess labor capacity and still had pro-social effects.
Just because they weren't paid doesn't mean women were not doing economically valued labour. The washing machine is probably the greatest productivity unlock since the steam engine.
> Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom. That's kinda the opposite of people starving to death.
not necessarily. you're inadvertently conflating things. just more people alive doesn't mean they aren't starving. a population boom can be had in the starving population too.
While you are not wrong, it is still historically correct to say that "more efficient agriculture meant a population boom". We don't know what they were doing for birth control back then (because this was a woman's job and they didn't write history), but there is plenty of evidence they must have been doing something that was effective (rhythm is more than good enough to explain this, and so likely what they were doing). People had a good idea of how much the farm could support and they tried to get just enough kids to ensure it would pass on - with enough spares for war, infant mortality and the like.
> more efficient agriculture meant a population boom
More efficient agriculture meant a more efficient population. In cases where environmentally possible this obviously encourages a population boom but they're not necessarily synonymous.
Or we take some small portion of that new surplus in productivity and share it among everyone by divorcing the need to work from the need to not starve.
Living off redistributed surplus is exactly what happens when you don’t work.
I’ve been there: no job = food pantry + food stamps.
I live in a nice area. Since we are wealthy, our local economy has quite a bit of surplus. The food pantries regularly have organic and high end food. Plenty of people with money go there just because - why not?
The poorer parts of the county don’t have as much surplus, so they’re food pantries had old cheese and peanut butter.
You are simply selecting new elites to be from the redistributor class (vanguard party, Nomenklatura, secret police etc), instead of the entrepreneural class.
Works well if you are the one redistributing stuff from "rich to poor", but it ends up as creating a new elite class, every single time
All modern Western-like societies involve some amount of indirect redistribution already. Outside of extremely peculiar places like Singapore or the Gulf states, it's just not seen as desirable or even sensible to have extreme wealth alongside people living in extreme poverty on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day. This actually used to be relatively common in the 19th century, it was the actual kind of widespread pathology that early social reformers railed against.
It is still extremely common today, if you look at the demographics along the Atlantic Coast of the US. The richest zip codes always have poor ones nearby.
By the standards of underdeveloped countries today or historical poverty in general, these "poor" people are nonetheless living in outright opulence: their genuine plight is mostly one of social marginalization, that can't really be solved by purely economic means. That's partly the effect of new technology (developed by capitalism) but partly redistribution in action.
Doesn’t seem like it did it in Norway. Or the Us from the new deal until the 1970s. Or the vast majority of western Europe. This red scare stuff is tiring.
This is a genuine problem indeed and part of the appeal of an UBI. The idea being that if the rules of redistribution are dead simple, then that helps minimize the potential for grift, which in turn minimizes the potential danger of a redistributor class.
That said, it is fundamentally important that nobody has too much power, and that power changes hands on a regular basis.
At a global scale, this necessitates taking power away from the capitalist class.
Ideally that power just doesn't go to anybody, but to the extent that it has to go somewhere, it almost doesn't matter where. Or perhaps it's better to say that there are many options that are acceptable and better than allowing power to continue to accumulate unchecked.
UBI has been tried experimentally around the world many places including the US and did not have that effect "the money people had received was not squandered on frivolous products such as drugs and luxury goods": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots
Which experiments were successful depends on what your desired outcomes were, but none were as bad a you suggest, I would say many succeeded.
I do not know how COVID support worked in the US, but one of the things you refer to seems to be loans to businesses, which is very different from UBI. Were people given a fixed and guaranteed income stream not linked to earnings during COVID?
My impression is that China has a pretty high standard of living. They have been extremely successful in reducing poverty over the last few decades. You should see how shiny even some of the third tier cities are.
I wouldn't use the COVID economy to understand anything except "What happens to an economy during a pandemic?" People had more money, but there was a lot less to spend on for a while. Not to mention the psychological effects of lockdowns, restrictions, or quarantining.
The fundamental problem is that power and resources are always captured by Cluster B types, and Cluster B types are poison to every form of social organisation.
So it's true it almost doesn't matter, because you can absolutely guarantee you're going to have growing inequality, political instability, and a culture of dishonesty, abuse, and contempt, unless you keep Cluster B types far, far away from resource dominance, strategy, and enforcement.
I don’t think that power and resources are always captured by Cluster B types, and that statement is doing a lot of load-bearing in your argument. You’re going to need to back it up somehow.
> it is fundamentally important that nobody has too much power
> taking power away from the capitalist class
An obvious and apparently irresolvable contradiction.
Capitalist power is inherently anarchic and isn't power at all. It's simply order emerging from the anarchy of the market. But the ability to take that power away from them, no matter how you measure it, itself falls into the category of "too much power" with wide margin. And with this amount of power there will be no change of hands that hold it.
You fundamentally misunderstand UBI. it does not stop anyone working, and where it has been tried people continue working because they want more than a minimal income. its not a universal high income, its a universal BASIC inome.
It seems obvious to me that a complex society needs a privileged class to function, but I don't think it's self evident that every kind of elite class would behave in the same way.
No, it's much better for an elite class of superhumans to hoard all the wealth. After all they guided us to our current utopia, the least humanity can do is give them the vast majority of wealth.
This is a false dichotomy, brother. People can, and do, pool their resources to give to those who have less. Most humans aren't so cold hearted that they are ok with others starving. So no, the options aren't just "trade for food" or "force people to give you food".
> People can, and do, pool their resources to give to those who have less.
Voluntarily, yes. If you want to make my list complete, you can add charity as a third option: if people judge that you're worth helping, they can voluntarily choose to help you.
But charity only works if the people doing it have things to give. Which means those things were produced. Somebody produced them. And the people who have them to give, through charity, got them one of the two ways I described. So it all still bottoms out to those two ways. Yes, some people can be helped out with charity. But you can't have an entire society all being helped with charity, because then nobody is producing anything that can be used to help them.
Not really. Automation is a tool that amplifies human productivity. It doesn't replace it--humans still have to be involved.
AI, it is claimed, will eventually make humans completely unnecessary in the production process. I'll believe it when I see it. AI is an automation tool--possibly a more sophisticated one than previous ones, but still a tool. It will still need humans to be involved.
Even if you don't believe it, it's the basic premise of the article and the conversation that we're having about the "dead economy". You don't have to believe it in order to have a conversation about it as a hypothetical, and that's the conversation that is happening here.
So if full automation doesn't happen, we have the status quo, which everyone understands already. If it does happen and production decouples from human labor completely, how do we allocate the fruits of that production?
Only with respect to some kinds of production. The article is talking about AI replacing "cognitive labor", which it defines rather vaguely. But, for example, the article does not seem to be claiming (nor are AI proponents claiming) that AI will be able to fix your car or your plumbing or your HVAC when it breaks, or cut your hair, or produce food, or many other things. So it is not talking about AI decoupling all forms of production from humans.
The article does then go on to talk as if the decoupling is for all forms of production, when it talks about the political crisis that would produce. But that just means the article is going way beyond its premise at that point.
There is a better and more realistic premise that the article briefly mentions, but then skates on by:
"[F]irms are deploying...“excessive automation,” using AI to kill jobs without generating significantly lower production costs, while imposing substantial social costs. The technology, in many applications, isn’t good enough to justify the displacement it causes."
In other words, a bubble, that takes up a large enough segment of the economy to cause a serious disruption when it pops. And the pop is not about allocation of what gets produced: it's about production crashing because of misallocation of capital. But the crash in production won't be in the sectors that produce material goods like food: as I said above, AI proponents aren't claiming that AI will decouple that from humans. The crash will be in sectors where a lot of the "value" produced is already questionable anyway. It will cause disruption because there are many people whose on-paper wealth is tied up in the notional value assigned to those things, which could evaporate overnight if it turns it that it was all a bubble and the bubble pops. But there's any easy way to avoid that: don't be one of those people. Or, if you can't avoid being exposed to that risk because of whatever particular area you work in, hedge against it by not having all of your wealth tied up in the notional valuations of those things. Which is a prudent thing to do anyway.
Do you think they should be left to starve if they did not work for many years?
In most developed countries even someone who has been never worked in their life will get enough to live on (although they might get less than someone who has worked all their lives).
> Do you think they should be left to starve if they did not work for many years?
I think that we need to be clear about what's going on. The post I originally responded to in this subthread (which was not by you) said that whether or not work is done is "completely orthogonal" to whether people starve to death. My point is that it is not: food has to be produced, so somebody has to do the work to produce it. The question you are asking, and the claim I was originally responding to, completely ignore that part of it, and only focus on the person who needs food, not the people who are producing it.
I'll take the US as an example. The US population is well over 300 million by now, but let's take 300 million as a round number. I think about 1 in 20 people in the US are involved in food production in some way. That means 15 million people in the US are producing food.
There are indeed a substantial number of people in the US who have never worked in their lives but who are being given at least some sort of income by the government. I'll take SSI as a rough proxy for that since it's explicitly for people who have no work history. From what I can gather, there are about 6 million people in the US on SSI. That's about 2 people in 1000.
(Of course, we produce many more things than food. But food is the focus of this subthread, so that's what I'll talk about.)
So if 2 people in 1000 are on SSI, i.e., are getting fed at taxpayer expense without ever having worked in their lives, then about 2 in 1000 of the 15 million people producing food in the US, or about 30,000 people, are working to produce the food that those people in SSI eat. So 30,000 people are producing food for 6 million--the same 1 to 20 ratio we saw before.
At this level, of course, it seems obvious that this is not a serious problem. The 30,000 people producing food for the 6 million SSI recipients are getting paid, they're just getting paid by the taxpayers in this case instead of the people consuming the food. (We'll leave aside all the issues about whether they get paid a fair price, the various perverse incentives at work in the US food production system, etc., since those apply to all of us, not just those on SSI.)
But still, it's important to recognize that there are 30,000 people producing food in the US for people who produce nothing in return. We can say that's a small enough number that we can deal with it, and I don't disagree; we as a society have decided that we can afford to support 0.2 percent of us that way, and that's fine. But it's tempting to just round that number to zero, as if the food the SSI recipients eat just appeared by magic, for free, without anyone having to work to produce it. And that temptation needs to be resisted.
Why does it need to be resisted? Because the intuitive sense that "we can afford it" does not scale. We can afford it at 2 people per 1,000. That doesn't mean we can afford it if that percentage goes up. Nor does it mean we can afford it if we keep adding more and more things to the government's largesse, and not just for people who have never worked and can't work.
Oops, two of my numbers were off by an order of magnitude: 6 million is 2 in 100, not 2 in 1000, and there are 300,000 people producing food for those 6 million, not 30,000.
Was the pension supposed to be their entire support in retirement? Or were they expected to also put by additional retirement savings on their own? (Note, for example, that the US Social Security system is only supposed to provide about 40% of a retiree's expected necessary income in retirement.)
If my family isn't eating and society is cool with that I could not care less about a label that such a society gives me.
Again, society can get ahead of things, or let it be decided later. The harder you make option 2, the more people will pick option 1. Society can figure out how to keep option 2 working if society prefers that. If society fails to do so it will deservedly get option 1.
> The harder you make option 2, the more people will pick option 1.
I think you have the options mixed up. Option 1 is voluntary trade. Option 2 is violence.
You appear to be saying that people would prefer voluntary trade, but that they will resort to violence if they see no other option. Which historically I think is largely true.
I am shocked you think letting people starve is OK. The word you are looking for is "revolution" or "uprising" - people will fight for the right to live if you deny them food.
The post you replied to specified young people so 70M is the wrong denominator. The UK currently has far more than 1 million working age adults unemployed and the denominator for that is still less than 70M because Britain has plenty of retirement age adults too.
I chose the denominator of a society of 70 million to match the data link I posted.
It’s possible the unemployment rate among you adults is historically high, but I haven’t seen data on that. I doubt it, based on the overall unemployment rate.
edit: looked up the current data. Age 16-24 unemployment excluding trainees and students is 12.8% which is about double the current overall unemployment rate. Haven't found historical data on this cohort yet. We might expect youngsters to be less employed than experienced people, but double does seem high on the face of it.
I think it's important to put numbers in historical context when saying or implying that we're in some kind of crisis.
Youth unemployment sucks for the people involved and the people around them. Every one of them has my sympathy. We are not in a period of unusually high youth unemployment, according to the UK government data.
> Found it. Youth unemployment is currently at about the (eyeball) median rate for the last 32 years.
It is currently there. The economy doesn't seem to be getting friendlier to the youth though. That median also seems pretty heavily skewed by a seven-year jump in youth unemployment after 2008, which seems like a bad omen.
>The flipside is that there must be other work to be done or people starve to death
false. people are not helpless and jobs are not fixed in number nor social welfare gifts. Human creativity and industriousness can be put to task to produce things that other people want. In an absurd example, you could live next door to a new efficient sweater mill, and you could still knit handmade sweaters, customized with people's initials, etc., and their sale would measure the value of your output in. dollars. People don't do this very often because such an economy produces more lucrative jobs than that.
doomers have foreseen the end of the world in every generation going back. The bad speculations have never come true, but there have been some very negative outcomes of fearful people believing the doom and gloom, look no further than the seeds of Marxist revolutions, Fascism, and Naziism, they all start with people feeling economic uncertainty.
I'm not sure I understand your point. Someone who attempted to support themselves by hand knitting sweaters almost certainly WOULD be impoverished. So doesn't that support what you are calling "doomers"?
I said "but people don't do that because there are better alternatives".
I also said "with monograms" for example, i.e. there are irl handmade sweaters made today because people don't necessarily want a factory product.
I pointed it out because it illustrates a hint of the principles of "comparative advantage" which concepts are useful for analyzing more than international trade, analysis the majority of people aren't familiar with.
Comparative advantage falls flat on its face in the circumstances being described, though. It’s based on an assumption of opportunity cost that no longer holds true.
the principle of comparative advantage does not ever fall flat on it's face. An entire country can be worse at manufacturing/growing everything compared to the US, but they can still manufacture and grow things, and engage in trade.
an individual can be inferior to other individuals at every single job skill, but can still get a job and live a full life with family.
you don't know what you are talking about, at all.
Yes, that is a description of comparative advantage. You must ask yourself this, though: why can a country be worse at manufacturing/growing yet still trade with the US? The answer is, of course, opportunity cost, as I said above. And, as above, then you must ask yourself what would happen to comparative advantage if there were no opportunity cost?
That is indeed an absurd example, as any number of failed Etsy stores - and failed businesses in general - confirms.
Trad econ makes no distinction between creative profit, which produces new jobs and new opportunities, and extractive profit, which destroys jobs and opportunities while trashing the planet's carrying capacity.
Both can make stonks go up, but one has a predictably limited life before it ends in catastrophe.
Unfortunately that life is defined in centuries, not years. In the meantime everyone gets used to normalcy bias, the extractive types own the main social communication systems, and when their backs are against the wall they will simply lie about what's really happening.
The collapse is always a huge surprise to most of the population when it finally happens.
And in the lead up to that it gets harder and harder to start a viable small business, because the resources needed to make it work keep going up, and the resources that are actually available to most people keep going down.
Etsy is a successful business, and the people who engage with it come back and reengage, and separately read up on Schumpeterian creative destruction
when you learn physics (e.g. Newtonian mechanics) you idealize concepts like "frictionless" because it teaches you valid concepts that you can carry forward, and you don't soil your diapers at every step of learning. Do the same with economics if you want to actually learn it, don't think "what's wrong with this", think "what's right with it, what can I learn from it?" Look at history, what economics explains is what happened.
you can't learn classical mechanics from a few paragraphs, but that's how long an HN comment needs to be. I will promise you this, if you reject what I wrote and remember most of the doomer dreck here, you will not learn economics at all.
The problem with Newtonian mechanics, especially idealized frictionless versions, is that it gives you a wrong impression of how the world works. Much better to understand and accept friction, because it leaves you with an accurate understanding, instead of an easy-to-learn version supported by fundamentally flawed concepts.
Within physics, there are much, much, much better models than Newtonian mechanics for conceptualizing economics.
Man. You live in a world of fantasy driven by a pathetically shallow knowledge of some mainstream economic cliches that people like you love to repeat as if you really even knew the mathematical models, much less their limitations.
That's not how things have been happening for quite some time. Productivity gains have been absorbed almost by the capital for the last 40 years. Wages have mostly estagnated and whole industries and their jobs disappeared without a direct replacement for the ones who lost their jobs now for more than 20, 30 years. Auto industry automation jobs? Gone, and the people who had those jobs? Mostly in worst jobs if lucky.
Why the fuck do you think Detroit is a hell hole? Why the whole rustbelt is a hellhole of poverty and opioid addiction?
And don't you dare think you're immune just because you are a little above the masses. A few millions, even a few tens of millions in the stock market and on a cardboard/gypsum McMansion could vaporize in a trading afternoon if we end up in a 29s style crash.
It won't be one large one, it will be thousands of little ones.
Every time this happens throughout history (and I mean going all the way back way past industrial revolution, to dawn of agriculture, to the earliest documented history, to the mitochondria, to the earliest stars exploding...) the result of a better way to get work done is more complexity and more diversity in work done (processes for increasing entropy).
The author said not to confuse laws of nature with observations of history, and I take issue with the implication. My perspective is grounded deep in physics, chemistry, biology and anthropology and after spending 10 years fretting over what AI would do to our civilization this decade I am not worried about labor displacement.
What I am worried about is power struggles and brainwashing.
Note that several of your historical examples didn’t involve humans, and presumably most future occurrences of better work enablers won’t involve humans either. The contention isn’t whether there will be an increase in diversity and amount of work done, it’s whether any of it will be done by us. Which would only be the case insofar that there exists categories of work we do better than AI at that juncture.
> Which would only be the case insofar that there exists categories of work we do better than AI at that juncture.
I'm pretty sure this is incomplete.
It's more like whether people find the work rewarding enough to be worth doing.
In some cases it can be rewarding for reasons other than money. Even when the primary reward is money, there could be a lot of demand for human work that is worse than AI when the AI is significantly more expensive. Some customers may just prefer the human do it for any number of reasons.
It's very possible we can have a rich prosperous economy and culture with lots of AI and people working together. It's just not clear how we get there, and its not popular to take the idea seriously right now. Fear propagates faster and easier than inspiration, at least in this cultural climate.
We're less likely to get what we want if we don't aim for it.
The point is more that you can well imagine a future where AI is both better and cheaper than humans at basically all types of work, leading to a situation where we would be entirely unable to fight back in the eventuality that machine owners, or the machines themselves, were to repurpose the resources used for our sustenance to other ends. And this would still fit in the universe-old pattern you've observed.
To put it bluntly, if the economic value of human labour drops to zero, or below the value of human sustenance, it is plausible that the consequence of that, from the cold perspective of cosmic logic, would be the extinction of humans. That's not to say there isn't any way to keep the genie in the bottle and create a utopia for ourselves (I very much doubt it), but that would be against the grain of nature. Call me a pessimist, but if we ever get outperformed in our own niche, our days are numbered.
On a long enough time scale my opinion is "of course humanity will go extinct", but the interesting and very speculative answers are in exactly how and when. It's highly plausible to me that humanity goes extinct via evolution into something else, and on a long enough time scale that you and I won't have any clue within our lifetimes.
Where I think we still differ is the "outperformed in our niche". Our biology is ridiculously optimized. Like 6-7 orders of magnitude more energy efficient than current day AI/computation stack. It's plausible that AI can never outperform us at what we do best because we are already at the limit. I believe biological brains are around 3-4 orders of magnitude less energy efficient than the theoretical physical limit, but the ~99.9% of energy that's not being used for straight computation is allocated to redundancy and resiliency.
So overall my point is if you zoom out far enough yes humanity may get erased by way of evolutionary pressures, but on the timescale of our lifetimes we don't need to worry about that, and on the timescale of our careers we don't need to worry about an AI driven unemployment apocalypse.
What we do need to worry about now is AI being used in media to manipulate people into doing what's not in their best interest.
> Our biology is ridiculously optimized. Like 6-7 orders of magnitude more energy efficient than current day AI/computation stack. It's plausible that AI can never outperform us at what we do best because we are already at the limit.
I do tend to agree with you on that, but with lesser confidence. It doesn't necessarily matter whether they outperform us at "what we do best" if they perform well at doing things that we didn't evolve to deal with. For example, we drove many animal species to extinction, not because we were better than them at anything they were good at, but because we were a novel threat outside their adaptive range. AI could very well do to us what we did to these animals, by acting aggressively enough in a direction that challenges our capacity for adaptation. Basically we have to both perform in our niche, and maintain the relevance of the niche itself in the face of whatever completely unforeseen BS these new technologies may bring about.
Communism, or more accurately, mechanised collective farming practices in the early 1900s in Russia resulted in revolutions and world wars. When tens of millions of inefficient farmers were replaced by tractors needing only a fraction of the labour force the excess population was disposed of.
Sorry, bad phrasing!
They were put to work in new roles enabled by technological advancements:
wielding mass manufactured rifles and operating artillery.
This has played out over and over throughout history whenever a large fraction of the population suddenly becomes surplus to requirements.
They never get to enjoy utopia. They are expended in warfare or low value forced labour until the labour pool once again matches the requirements.
You don't even need to look at the Soviets. Life for the average person in Britain became worse between 1760 until about 1920. That meant about 3 generations of people were lost.
I'm super happy about this idilic AI future my great grandchildren will enjoy...
If anything, it will be the trades. We're still a solid time away from being able to replicating what muscles and skin do - and fundamentally, there will always be a need for someone to run cable, terminate wiring and unclog a sewer pipe. At the same time, the trades are desperate for staff after the "academization" push of the last decades.
That's true for a while. But shelf restocking and order picking will probably start to go robotic within a few years. That's a manipulation problem within reach. All those mass produced humanoid robots have to do something, and that's something they can do.
Having to do manual labor ruined three image of manual labor. Fathers and mothers with broken bodies. Backs, knees, just physically wrecked after decades of laying tile and into crawlspaces and sweating all day out in the heat or freezing in winter. There's something to be said for an honest days work, but let's not over romanticize it.
> Looking at how countries coped with a fast transition from labor intensive agriculture to an urban society gives hints on how an AI transition may look. All the Asian countries that went from poor to rich in a generation did this, with different approaches. How that took place may provide more useful info than philosophy.
There's only one problem with comparing urbanization with the AI transition: there were still jobs that the workers moving from farms to urban centers could do. Instead of planting and harvesting, they made things in factories or became professionals.
The idea of the GenAI bet that most companies are making is that you just don't have people doing work anymore. There aren't any jobs for the laborers to do anymore, at least not ones that are likely to fit their skillset and provide a standard of living that they're used to. If you're a software engineer - one of the higher-paying fields of the last half-century - and get laid off because the c-suite thinks AI can do your job for less, you're going to contract your spending.
The article mentions this, but it doesn't take into account that there will be some work (mainly manual labor) that will face at least some resistance to automation for the next decade. These people will try to get into those jobs, because they have bills to pay. It won't pay six figures. It very well might pay less than it is now due to the glut of candidates who are desperate to make any income at all.
The person who went from catered meals and foosball at the office to framing a house when it's 20 degrees F for a third of the money, none of the future, and a lot more body aches is going to be angry. In a society like the United States, it's the kind of angry that you can't solve with an internal passport system. It's going to mean violence.
Eventually, they'll figure out how to do more manual labor with automated systems. That means that there will be even fewer opportunities.
This is nothing like anything we've seen before, and no one wants to acknowledge that.
> There's only one problem with comparing urbanization with the AI transition: there were still jobs that the workers moving from farms to urban centers could do. Instead of planting and harvesting, they made things in factories or became professionals.
Mostly for export, in the case of the Asian tigers and China. Once wages reached developed world levels, an export-driven economy gradually became harder to sustain, because there was no longer a labor cost advantage. This is why Party leadership talks about "dual circulation", building up domestic demand within China, and about obtaining a technological edge that continues to make exports profitable. There's been considerable progress on both goals, especially in consumer electronics and the auto industry.
> The person who went from catered meals and foosball at the office to framing a house when it's 20 degrees F for a third of the money, none of the future, and a lot more body aches is going to be angry.
Yes. That happened to Egypt, where the government paid for college and then hired the graduates. Then the oil ran out.
It's called "elite overproduction" when new college graduates can't get jobs that actually use their education. Already, in the US, about half of college graduates have jobs that don't really need a college education.
That greatly depends on how much handholding is required and for how long.
The difference between mostly right and actually useable without supervision is why self driving cars still aren’t ready. When someone says AI can do job X, they rarely mean it’s good enough for anyone to blindly trust the results of it doing that job.
Agricultural subsidies exist primarily due to lobbying, the "we don't want to starve" argument is nothing more than an excuse used to justify the fortunes handed out to corporate-scale farmers.
You can't just use percentages for this kind of thing.
Barring a very good cause that the vast majority of the population can get behind, there will be riots when the bananas and coffee disappear.
We grow enough in our garden that I could probably reach "100%" pretty easily if shit hit the fan, but I'm about tired of eating radish greens right now even that being related to a national crisis.
In the case of something like a world war, which is the type of scenario we're talking about here, I think people would begrudgingly accept that bananas and coffee are unavailable or very expensive.
It depends a bit on your crop mix, yield, and of course, family size.
You'd be surprised how much some crops can yield in small areas. (Oh god, I used to actually like pickles before I realized how many cucumbers we were churning out last year.)
Where it gets space-intensive tend to be grain crops, which we don't currently grow because the ROI is so low, but have space to if life forced it on us. Protein can also be a little tricky depending on what your expectations are, but if you're okay with mostly beans and eggs, you'll be alright on well less than an acre for a small family.
> Agricultural subsidies exist primarily due to lobbying,
That's mostly true, but it's also true that we don't want to starve. There are 330 million hungry mouths in the US and we've got to keep production way above that level or it becomes a big political problem real quick.
If we just let the market set prices, in years where farms are all producing bumper crops, oversupply would push profits way down. This would force many producers to sell their farms (most likely to corporate-scale farmers) and leave the sector. Subsidies keep a nonzero number of producers producing independently. Granted, the corporate-scale farmers (who also accumulate funds via subsidies) can buy out producers who want to sell, but with subsidies, more producers can afford to say no and stay independent.
You're moving the goalpost from "prevent starving" to "fully self-sustaining".
You don't need 99% variety of cuisine in case of a big war, you need calories. A lot of calories.
UPDATE: and BTW, if world population is growing (no global starvation), then it's clearly self-sustaining, no? So some countries must be self-sustaining just by math. At least one country must produce more than it consumes, otherwise, if everyone produced less, then we would have global starvation.
Again, you can grant this and a huge number of agriculture subsidies still aren't justified.
People have an instinctive defensiveness over farms/farmers, but anyone who has studied farm subsidies in any depth knows there's no way to rationally justify huge swathes of them. I don't know anyone with the requisite knowledge who wouldn't agree with that including farmers and lobbyists (because they generally only like a subset of the subsidies themselves).
I’m from a historically agricultural state, and live in the farming area. Government interventions are regularly mocked
- always have been.
Demand for food plummets when it is no longer fresh. Throwing food away is politically toxic. This creates major problems.
As people get richer they don’t want more food, they want better food. Fresher and more meat based. Which is fine. But means the food when you talk about food “that which prevents us from starving to death” you are quite divorced from actual demand.
People don’t price food based on its anti-starvation capabilities.
Either they follow traditional diets, or they buy for convenience (highly processed), or they are health nuts who live off rice, beans, and kale.
Nobody is trying to maximize calories. Very few people are trying to match their food intake to their amount physical exertion.
All these ontological and teleological models are divorced from how food is actually valued: market “taste” is insanely important under normal circumstances.
Our agriculture sector won’t succeed if it’s based around preventing famine.
It is also the only alternative to a granary system to smooth out the variability of yields each year that might not average out for anything less than 10-15 year spans.
And the granary system regularly still resulted in shortages and famine. While crop subsidization has a bullet proof record of surplus.
You have to look at the population split between urban/rural. In China it is 67/33 and India it is completely reversed at 30/70. And agri continues to be the number one occupation.
Additionally, lack of opportunities is also a problem. India has been focused on services and trailed behind on industrialisation. The current government has been pushing for more industrialisation but they are behind in the curve.
Note that China is where it is because of efforts to do this, on purpose, over decades. 20 years ago, their urban percentage was somewhere in the 40s. We are even seeing more migration to cities in Europe and the US, even though it's unplanned, and it leads to big changes in cost of living thanks to this lack of planning.
So if China took 30 years, give or take, to get to where it's at, with its state capacity, I suspect India will take quite a bit longer.
> 43% of workers still work in agriculture. For the US, that number is under 2%. China is at 22% as of 2023, and dropping steadily.
Don't you have to contrast these figures with import and export of produce, and environmental/ecological factors? Technology is one thing, but increasing yields by wasting resources (e.g. water, phosphorous, soil erosion, ...) may increase nominal productivity, but not efficiency. Not saying the conclusion is wrong, but I think your numbers are not necessarily causally linked to productivity/efficiency. I mean, the US also has a declining domestic fabrication percentage, but that's not merely indicative of productivity, but mostly outsourcing/loss of capabilities, I think.
In the US case the large industrial farms are the ones more concerned with things like soil erosion and fertilizer runoff. Both are things we measure and put a number on what is washing away. Smaller farmers know it can be measured but either are stuck in their ways, or just see that they are making money so they don't care.
My point was the possible disconnect of productivity/yield, and efficiency. A small potato and a large potato likely need the same amount of harvesting work. Now, if you dig up finite reservoirs of phosphorous in Morocco to increase yield in the US, you are not increasing efficiency. That's just planetary debt for a wasteful sprint. I think, in the US this is most evident with water usage, where now many aquifers and reservoirs are spent. Hardly indicative of desirable outcome. Sustainable farming usually has much lower yields inherently. And of course, soil quality and erosion dynamics naturally differ greatly across the globe.
When you pull a potato off a field, you're taking with it a bunch of phosphorus. That is why we have to have a replacement for that. I'm not sure how to solve the problem long term. I agree. Morocco wasn't the right answer, but what is?
The solution is easy: Recycle poop and pee. All that sweet nitrogen and phosphorous that has been DNA, ATP and protein is right there in the bowl. The problem is humans flushing all the good stuff down the toilet and into the ocean. With today's knowledge, using human excrement as fertilizer can be done safely. At least recover the phosphorous.
> Farming in India is still far too labor intensive by world standards. 43% of workers still work in agriculture. [1] For the US, that number is under 2%. China is at 22% as of 2023, and dropping steadily.
Question about farming in India. How much of the process of mechanizing and scaling up agriculture in India is predicated on something like the more widespread use of diesel or other oil/fossil-fuel powered tractors? To replace manual hand labor. If energy costs continue to rise as they are, and all-electric/battery based systems remain costly and out of the reach of the purchasing power of many small to mid sized farmers, what will happen?
Most land holdings are very very small. 1 acre to 5 acres maybe the vast majority. These are all odd sized and shaped and most likely doing different crops based on water availability. To leverage the benefits of mechanization, we need larger land holdings. The farmers have no other ability or income sources, so they hang on it it. Electricity is free. There is no income tax on farming. Govts provide many incentives to get farmers votes. Each state does different things, but they end up copying each others schemes and it gets worse and worse.
Farmers in most regions are no longer poor. Land prices exploded 100 - 500x in a 100 - 150 km diameter around metro areas. Most farmers are now millionaires, yes millionaires in USD. They held on to their land because they didn't know better, the land was useless (no water) and nobody bought it. Now they are going to HODL.
There are mechanization instruments suitable for 5 acre plots, but manufacturers are limited and the potential gains are smaller. Its the same problem as small cheap consumer cars, big investors and capitalists don't want to put money into high volume low margin business with limited market cap. And without mass production costs are significantly higher. Thats why people still maintain 70 year old farmalls and planters and shit spreaders and plows, modern replacements are either crap to be cheap or expensive from low volume.
One difference though is that the agriculture transitions had somewhere for labor to go: factories, construction, urban services, export manufacturing, etc
The optimists will tell you this is just productivity gains. The economy has absorbed automation before; agricultural employment collapsed from ninety percent of the American workforce to two percent and civilization continued. David Autor at MIT has shown that roughly sixty percent of today’s jobs didn’t exist in 1940. New technologies create new categories of work. True. But there’s a difference between an observation about the past and a law of nature, and the optimists consistently confuse the two. The agricultural transition took a hundred and forty years. Carl Benedikt Frey at Oxford has documented that the Industrial Revolution took seventy years before wages and employment recovered for the workers it displaced. In the interim, wages stagnated, the labor share of income collapsed, profits surged, inequality skyrocketed, and the political consequences included the Chartist movement and widespread social upheaval. As Frey puts it: “Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”
I disagree with the implication the author is making with this though:
"But there’s a difference between an observation about the past and a law of nature, and the optimists consistently confuse the two"
For one, laws of nature are understood through observations. That's how science works. Secondly, I can point at many examples across history way past the industrial revolution, agricultural revolution, mitochondria, all the way back to the earliest supernovas...
Through a physics lens... With respect for the meta patterns that transcend emergence and exist in the relationship between complexity and entropy, there is a relevant law of nature.
When a method to do work more efficiently comes to be, and propagates at scale, an explosion of diversity of new kinds of work emerges.
> When a method to do work more efficiently comes to be, and propagates at scale, an explosion of diversity of new kinds of work emerges.
... work that can be done better, and cheaper, by AI.
That's the goal. The idea is not for the people who have invested trillions into AI to find another way to give you money. They think they've given enough money. Now it's time for them to make money. They do that by telling your boss that you're dead weight and that their AI agents can do the same work for a fraction of the cost without vacation days, sleep, office space, or any of the other things associated with humans.
And it's a law of nature that we have people in our species who will gladly take short-term financial gain over long-term social stability. If you can't observe that, then you're not looking very hard.
the USA already went through this when we opened up trade to China and displaced manufacturing workers in USA, the mfg centers in USA that could not adapt withered away. https://www.npr.org/2025/12/29/nx-s1-5660865/why-economists-...
We also did this to a lot of Mexican farmers when the first NAFTA deal went through and small farmers in Mexico were displaced by cheap US farm imports. We keep repeating this, it’s not quite crisis theory of capitalism but workers and small businesses bear the brunt of losses every time.
It doesn't. If it did there'd be massive unmet demand for labor in $sector. There is no value for $sector that is currently reporting being short roughly 100 million headcount. So unless you're counting currently non-existence social safety programs or CCC-style government make-work programs that light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.
Ricardian models of trade seem to hold well in real life, and they'd work well too if a lot of work was done by not just AI, but robots. As long as there's limit to the production capacity of the high tech population, there's something that is worth doing where the disadvantage of doing it by hand is lower. It does lead to lower wages there though, and that would basically require investment as to make real necessities dirt cheap, like they are in places where labor isn't worth much.
There's still the fact that claiming to be the owner of the automation, while other people aren't, will be untenable in a world with sufficient inequality. We've seen that happen before when the only justification for the difference in wealth was basically inheritance. Nobles losing land and rights, churches being dispossessed an such things. It'd be a likely outcome if 5% of the people claim to own all automation ever. But that's not about having everyone be unemployed because nobody has any economic value: That's what is unlikely.
Whenever a method to do work more efficiently comes to be and propagates at scale an explosion in diversity of work emerges. This happens at every level of abstraction in nature and has recurred throughout history all the way back to the dawn of life.
Just because I can't predict exactly what work people will do doesn't mean they won't do work. I can take a stab at a few guesses, surely others have more prescience, but the thing about complexity and fractals is it's easier to predict meta qualities than it is specific manifestations.
There is no guarantee that this transition will lead to any type of desirable or meaningful job.
Around the time "Bullshit Jobs" was published, more than a third of people said they believed their job was not meaningfully contributing to the world. Graeber goes as far as saying that more than half of white-collar jobs are actually harmful and kept around only because people associate work with self-worth. There is no way that this number will go down with increased automation.
It's not uncommon to hear Boomers say things like "kids these days don't want to work hard anymore. Everyone wants to be an youtuber, no one wants to be a teacher or a doctor or an engineer". Well, guess what? We are heading to a world where being an youtuber might be the only option.
I mean oddly enough being a Youtuber I would say is not a bullshit job. The demand for entertainment is both genuine and necessary for our well being: soldiers in war play card games and see shows, since ages past the role of entertainer has always existed.
Cranking out some online commerce app looking for margin versus providing something which by definition can't be machine replicated sure doesn't look like a meaningless pursuit to me. The devil is very much in the details.
Large population countries / economies reach point where there are more people than jobs, excess people gets dumped into subsistence farming or other inefficient sunk cost make job programs so angry horde doesn't burn it all down. You can replace 95% of subsistence farmers, i.e. billions of people with machinery. Probably replace 95% of knowledge workers, i.e. 100s of millions in OECD with AI, but maybe it's just better/stabler for political serenity for horde to keep generating useless make work email chains. Smaller pop countries can probably meander through for a while specializing in a few high value sectors, larger countries will have to deal with disproportionate idle hands, but also more are in favorable position to exploit / consolidate industrial / resource advances.. Hopefully end game dwindling demographics supported by fully automated luxury communism within sustainable carrying capacity. But there's a lot of probably violent steps between draw some circles and draw the rest of the owl. Ultimately we're likely entering period of placating surplus people and managing demographic relative automation / ai progress.
There's no manufacturing sector to employ them if you displace them from agriculture. They'd be displaced into gig economy. This would just increase the population of a handful of metropolitan cities which are already congested. India should fix its cities first.
This inefficient agricultural system is not by accident. It is supported by heavy subsidies. Attempts to cut the subsidies resulted in riots.[2] Trouble is ongoing. Comments from someone who knows more about this than I do would help here.
The US and most of the EU went through that transition over several generations, and farming is still heavily subsidized in both areas. The transition happened faster in China, and a hukou system was put into place to prevent people from migrating from farms to cities faster than the cities could absorb them.
Looking at how countries coped with a fast transition from labor intensive agriculture to an urban society gives hints on how an AI transition may look. All the Asian countries that went from poor to rich in a generation did this, with different approaches. How that took place may provide more useful info than philosophy.
[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/indicators...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024%E2%80%942025_Indian_farme...