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Comment by Zanneth | Hacker News Reader

> The problem we have as a species is that we’ve been so effective at optimisation that we have eliminated the need for anyone to exist. A few farmers can feed the country. A few automated production lines could produce the goods.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. Human labor is still desperately needed throughout the world in order to keep things running. It’s not just farmers. You also need drivers, clerks, mechanics, accountants, etc. And that’s just to get food into your local grocery store.

Nothing in modern life is free, even though it may seem easy for most of us living in the developed world. All of this stuff exists only because people are working really hard to keep it that way.

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Yes, human labor is critical for subsistence. But let's look at how many people are employed by industry in the US: https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-...

About 2% of people in the US work in agriculture/forestry/animal handling/etc. If you include transportation workers, that's still about 5% of US workers. And if you include wholesale workers and utilities workers -- that's still < 10% of the US population.

All of this work is critical and necessary (to your point). But I think the BLS data is evidence toward OP's point that we've automated and optimized a lot of the work necessary for subsistence.

I think you have to include a lot of "Retail Trade" and/or "Leisure and Hospitality" in those numbers, though I'm not sure where grocery and food service workers fall exactly. Meat packing, prepared foods, etc are a lot more manual than agriculture itself. Most people do not want to eat raw field corn/wheat/soybeans.

Using the USA as an example of labor distribution in this regard is disingenuous. Like most leading countries, we are supported by an external labor class operating extremely cheaply and exporting critical goods into our system. Agriculture work in the USA would be much more prevalent if 13% of the Mexican population wasn't directly involved in agriculture. In fact ~78% of Mexico's exports go to the USA. Its a vassal state, supplying the USA with cheap and largely unregulated human labor critical for our subsistence. You say we optimized our work, I say we imported $40 Billion in food from China last year.

It's not some magical automation though. The farmers, in order to be that efficient, need constant input of fuel and fertilizers and pesticides and machines (as they break down and wear out). Digging deeper, they also need financial and physical infrastructure and basically very many components of our advanced civilization, or they wouldn't achieve anywhere near the efficiency they have now.

>It’s not just farmers. You also need drivers, clerks, mechanics, accountants, etc.

Also the regulatory apparatus which does a pretty good job of ensuring that food doesn't have dangerous chemicals or pathogens in it, and the law enforcement without which the regulatory apparatus would be toothless, and the people who maintain the communications infrastructure that the regulatory apparatus and the law enforcement rely on to be effective, and so on.

As with most things, the truth is in the middle. This is obvious hyperbole but for the purpose of making a point. There are a __lot__ of useless jobs out there.

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