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Comment by dtagames | Hacker News Reader

Good stuff. No one asked farmers to do less work after tractors were invented. I agree with this author after my own experiments with AI tools over the last three years. They're here to help people execute more work, faster. The human work will become deciding and controlling what they do.

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Just like with farms, success will be consolidated with a much smaller number of big companies vs the current staus quo.

Unlike with farms, there’s not an alternative way of life in the city to run to.

Sure there is. When your knowledge work is automated, go farm.

You mean the big cos that develop all those LLMs and robots that we give free pass for profiting by slowly killing programming/intellectual/creative jobs with ML trained on our work, you will be totally safe from them if you do farming? Why? If farming is safe from it then why intellectual/creative work isn't?

What alternate does farming have?

In the 20th century American farmers moved to cities as their jobs were displaced by increasing mechanization.

Yeah, and back then they didn't face the same barriers to entry that we do for most jobs today. If automation is really hitting hard, there won't be jobs to run to in the cities either.

What you wrote was already conveyed by my first comment.

That's not tractors so much as the benefit of owning a lot vs. a few risks.

One benefit of owning a lot is that we see the big players using self driving tractors, bigger machines, etc. The point was that farming has consolidated over and over during the past 100 or so years. The point was that "no one asked farmer to do less work", but now you need fewer farmers to do it. That means those jobs need to go somewhere. That's going to be true of the jobs supplemented by AI - they aren't going away, but you'll need fewer and they will likely be concentrated with the big players.

> No one asked farmers to do less work after tractors were invented

I'm so tired of this sort of take because it isn't the whole picture

Yes, an individual farmer still works just as many hours. Thanks to modern equipment they accomplish much more and can manage much larger properties

As a result there are fewer farmers

"No one asked farmers to do less work" isn't the problem

The problem is that there are less farmers and we don't know what to do with the former farmers that we don't need anymore

> The problem is that there are less farmers and we don't know what to do with the former farmers that we don't need anymore

The US is way past that point, being down to under 2% farmers. China is mostly past that point, at 17% farmers as of 2017 and dropping. India is being hit hard by that, with 43% farmers. Their farmers are fighting farm mechanization.

Keep in mind we're not actually talking about farmers right now

We are talking about every industry that will have "productivity increases" due to AI tools

Which it seems might be every industry

It sure seems like we might be looking at a massive "productivity gain" across a ton of industries that is going to leave a whole shitload on people unemployed and franky

I'm a little worried about what that is going to mean

...And also leave the people who own companies that see those "productivity gains" massively richer, explicitly at the expense of the people who are now unemployed.

We are seeing in real time right now what happens when inequality grows too stark. The people at the top abuse their disproportionate financial power to capture the government, and then start ensuring that the government can never threaten their economic dominance, regardless of the consequences for the 90% of people who do not share in it.

There are a number of potential solutions to this. Many of them involve violence. Among the least violent are various forms of UBI.

Closely related: Textiles. There's a reason those were the first two things humanity mechanized the crap out of.

It's hard for us to imagine nowadays exactly how much distributed domestic work went into simply keeping the family in clothes.

If you boil to the essence;

AI will reveal true desire, passion, resolve in any cluster of conscience.

Meaning... either an individual or group or organization will thrive... (and thats it)

(but the good, bad and ugly... at min it is the litmus of our current time)

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