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Comment by goldenshale | Hacker News Reader

"Imagine a world... where farmers start using tractors to plow and seed their fields. First the tractors will roll slowly, and they will pretend to be driving straight as they are told. Soon farmers without tractors will realized they need to have them to in order to be competitive, and before you know it everyone will have these gas guzzling beasts rolling across the lands. Farmers will be out of a job because of all of this greed, and lust for money and power. Eventually only a few people will do all of the farming with an army of tractors, and everyone else will be lying in poverty begging for food."

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The number of U.S. farms continues slow decline: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...

Note the relatively constant amount of farm land and corresponding increase in farm size. See e.g. https://time.com/5736789/small-american-farmers-debt-crisis-...

"Many small family farms are struggling under crippling debt, and failed payments and farm bankruptcies are rising. To make things worse, the prices paid to farmers for commodity crops (agricultural crops grown in large quantities for sale in the global market, such as corn, soy, cotton, and wheat) and subsidies are falling because of increased supply due to technology and globalization." https://foodrevolution.org/blog/small-family-farms/

Yes, that actually happened, but - was it a bad thing? Supply is through the roof apparently. The operators of small family farms can wind them up, and use their skills somewhere else. Or pivot to a more profitable niche like all the people looking for local organic food, or rustic wedding venues, or agritourism, etc.

It sure seems to be a bad thing, given the crippling debt and the environmental degradation.

there is a further problem: a lot of the profits instead go to the too big distributors they sell their produce to.

> Eventually only a few people will do all of the farming with an army of tractors, and everyone else will be lying in poverty begging for food.

The first half of this happened. The number of farms in the US dramatically decreased from ~1930 to ~1970 due to automation, and of the remaining farms, most are small but most production comes from large farms.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...

Farm harvesting vehicles look like this now: https://www.deere.com.au/assets/images/region-4/products/har...

Umm, I know you’re trying to joke, but your scenario is kind of exactly what has happened..

Except at the time “farmers will be broke” would have meant “everyone will be broke” because most of the labor force was farming. Instead, farmers became a tiny part of the economy while food became increasingly abundant. Tractors were a good thing, on balance. The commenter is saying that a similar shift will happen.

I tend to think that if alignment can be solved, AI will improve the wellbeing of humanity in a way nothing ever has. But I don’t know if we can solve alignment and it might kill us all.

What is this quoting? Maybe I'm missing the point, but is your last sentence meant to describe the way modern farming has gone? Because tractors and general technology have made calories wildly abundant and cheap

> "Eventually only a few people will do all of the farming with an army of tractors, and everyone else will be lying in poverty begging for food."

I mean 1) yeah kinda and 2) I feel like this is unironically an argument against capitalism.

If it was an argument against capitalism, it is a clearly erroneous argument, since we can see that Americans are not lying in poverty begging for food relative to the past, despite the fact that farms have been largely mechanized with tractors.

> "If it was an argument against capitalism, it is a clearly erroneous argument, since we can see that Americans ..."

Yes because the USA has pure capitalism and not anything like small farm subsidies or food stamps or school lunch programs or any social welfare programs.

I never said the USA has pure capitalism. In fact, what society has pure capitalism? Do we need an argument against a system that has never and probably will never be implemented in the world?

You're right, no pure capitalism is possible and therefore arguments against the bad aspects of capitalism are invalid.

Anyway, maybe the reason "Americans are not lying in poverty begging for food relative to the past" (to whatever degree that is true or not) would be because of the aspects of American government that aren't capitalist.

If you are on board with analogies, consider like a government system called "orphan crushing" with two main pillars: one is that they crush every orphan and the other is that they give free lunches. Imagine that someone says that maybe we shouldn't crush orphans. Then someone rebuts that by saying, well everyone likes the free lunches we get here so the "orphan crushing" system of government must be good. Besides, a pure "orphan crushing" government has never been implemented and never will be, so do we really need an argument against it?

Is there a clear connection between orphan crushing and free lunches, like there is between industrializing farming and abundant food availability?

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