We are currently a long way from that kind of change as current AI tools suck by comparison to literally 1,000x increases in productivity. So, in well under 100 years programming could become extremely niche.
We increased production and needed fewer farmers, but we now have so few farmers that most people have very little idea of what food really is, where it comes from, or what it takes to run our food system.
Higher productivity is good to a point, but eventually it risks becoming too fragile.
Screwworm, a parasite that kills cattle in days is making a comeback. And we are less prepared for it this time because previously (the 1950s-1970s) we had a lot more labor in the industry to manually check each head of cattle. Bloomberg even called it out specifically.
Ranchers also said the screwworm would be much deadlier if it were to return, because of a lack of labor. “We can’t fight it like we did in the ’60s, we can’t go out and rope every head of cattle and put a smear on every open wound,” Schumann said.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-02/deadly-sc...
A stroke of the pen will fix any and all political issues, if/when the political desire comes about.
Vs a problem with no solution - no pen will fix any of it, regardless of political will.
If the right person signs a change that magically fixes a labor shortage in a rural area we're right back to where we were, and much of the public would be up in arms about it.
(This doesn't actually reflect my opinion on immigration laws to be clear, just my view on where we are today in the US)
I’m not saying this parasite isn’t a potential problem, but it’s not existential by any stretch. There are a thousand more intractable and consequential problems facing us right now.
* The US is not producing enough food - it's now a net food importer
* The increasing problems we are seeing in the food supply chain are usually tied to producers cutting costs and padding margins
Matt Stoller has gone into this at length - https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/is-america-losing-the-abi...
So I mean it could depend on your definition of productivity, if anything that increases shareholder returns at the expense of a good product or robust supply chain is considered more "productivity," sure. Just as monopolies are the most "productive" businesses ever for their shareholders, but generally awful for everyone else, and are not what most people would think of as productive.
The human definition of productivity is - less inputs producing more and better outputs.
The cartel doublespeak definition is - the product got worse and the margins improved, which seems to describe US Big Ag at present
The US exports lots of cheap food and imports expensive foods like wine, beer, high end cheese, candies. In terms of calories / nutrition the US is a huge net food exporter but we like our luxury chocolates etc.
American companies love to setup cheap factories overseas even if they use US corn syrup to make a beverage the trade balance is based on corn syrup not the value of the manufactured soda. Meanwhile in the other direction we’re importing cans of soda manufactured in other countries.
- If people wish to consume expensive, luxury foods they will do so, and that's OK and valid, even during a political crisis. America endeavoring to produce more of these luxury products is good for the country's economy and makes self-sufficiency easier if a crisis arises.
- Maybe those factories should be on US soil, also good for self-sufficiency. Maybe not so good for international conglomerates - I don't care, they've had a great run, time for them to work for the people again.
Enjoyable food existed before the current era of globalization. The brands might change, but it will exist after that era is wound down. Let's not pretend otherwise.
I agree with you on the double speak though, really I think its just a lack of the public really understanding the meaning given to "productive" in the industry though. The industry doesn't hide what it means by the word, most just don't care about any version of productive that measures things like nutrient value, sustainability, soil health, animal welfare, etc.
Yes, but.
There are more jobs in other fields that are adjacent to food production, particularly in distribution. Middle class does not existed and retail workers are now a large percentage of workers in most parts of the world.
Food is just a smaller percentage of the economy overall.
I would have assumed that if 90% of people are farming its largely subsistence and any trade or happened on a much more local scale, potentially without any proper currency involved.
That said, there’s been areas where 90% of the working population was at minimum helping with the harvest up until the Middle Ages.
It’s somewhat arbitrary where you draw the line historically but it’s not just maximum productivity worth remembering crops used to fail from drought etc far more frequently.
Small hobby farms are also a thing these days, but that’s a separate issue.
In my experience they're very productive by poundage yield, but horribly unproductive when it comes to inputs required, chemicals used, biodiversity, soil health, etc.
The difference is so extreme vs historic methods you can skip pesticides, avoid harming soil health or biodiversity vs traditional methods etc without any issues here and still be talking 1,000x.
Though really growing crops for human consumption is something of a rounding error here. It’s livestock, biofuels, cotton, organic plastics, wood, flowers, etc that’s consuming the vast majority of output from farms.
Two things worth noting though, pounds of food say little about the nutritional value to consumers. I don't have hood links handy so I won't make any specific claims, just worth considering if weight is the right metric.
As far as human labor hours goes, we've gotten very good at outsourcing those costs. Farm labor hours ignores all the hours put in to their off-farm inputs (machinery, pesticides and fertilizers, seed production, etc). We also leverage an astronomical amount of (mostly) diesel fuel to power all of it. The human labor hours are small, but I've seen estimates of a single barrel of oil being comparable to 25,000 hours of human labor or 12.5 years of full employment. I'd be interested to do the math now, but I expect we have seen a fraction of that 25,000x multiplier materialize in the reduction of farm hours worked over the last century (or back to the industrial revolution).
Nah, it's not 100% but it says a lot about the nutritional value.
> inputs
You can approximate those with price. A barrel of oil might be a couple hours.
You likely get less useful work out of a gallon of gas in your car than it took to extract, refine, transport, and distribute that gallon of gas. Just as an example gas pumps use electricity that isn’t coming from oil.
This whole thread was about productivity in terms of hours spent by the last person in the chain, the farmer. They can do drastically more today in terms of food production because they can leverage the potential energy in oil to replace human labor, and in that metric all of the externalized costs are ignored.
Nope, what’s being replaced is animal feed used for animal labor. People didn’t pull a plow by hand and then suddenly swap to tractors.
For thousands of years farmers used sunlight > animal feed > domesticated animals, there’s nothing special about oil here.
Track the in oil energy for a tractor vs the sunlight to grow plants to feed a pair of horses and the tractor is using wildly less energy per year to get vastly more done. You can even make it more obvious by using solar panels in the same fields feeding horses 100 years ago to charge an electric tractor. Oil is cheap, but not necessary there was even wood and coal burning tractors in the early days.
PS: Horses can apparently digest the cellulose in sawdust from several types of trees. It’s unhealthy in large quantities but kind of an interesting fact.
That’s just wildly wrong by several orders of magnitude, to the point I question your judgment to even consider it a valid possibility.
Not only would the price be inherently much higher but if everyone including infants working 50 hours per week we’d still would produce less than 1/30th the current world’s output of oil and going back we’ve been extracting oil at industrial scale for over 100 years.
To get even close to those numbers you’d need to assume 100% of human labor going back into prehistory was devoted purely to oil extraction.
Burning food can produce more useful work in a heat engine than you get from humans doing labor so I’m baffled by what about this comparison seems to make sense to you.
Ignoring that you’re still off by more than an order of magnitude. 100% of the energy content of oil can’t even be turned directly into work without losses. You get about 10% of its nominal energy content as useful work, less if you’re including energy costs of production, refining, and transport.
Even if look at an oil well fire it’s incomplete combustion and not useful work.
A) If you want move a plow, you can grow some oats/grass/whatever to feed some horses then use those horses, or using the same land for oats/wood/whatever and burn in an early tractor, or use oil. Nobody in 1900 was getting 20 people to pull a plow. All of those methods are turning some amount of chemical energy to produce useful work. As such looking into the chemical energy in food vs oil makes some sense though sunlight vs oil is a better comparison as tractors are burning a far more expensive product not crude oil.
B) Alternatively, you can look at the amount of useful work from a barrel of oil after all losses and compare that to the work done by a horse or person after all losses. But again suddenly oil doesn’t look so hot.
What you tried to do is compare the energy content of oil with some amount of useful work which is a silly comparison.
The earlier comment or was talking about the massive reduction in the amount of human labor required to cultivate land and the relative productivity of the land.
That comparison comes down to amount of work done. Whether that work is done by a human swinging a scythe or a human driving a diesel powered tractor is irrelevant, the work is measured in joules at the end of the day. We have drastically fewer human hours put into farm labor because we found a massive multiplier effect in fossil fuel energy.
I'm not sure where solar panels came in, but sure they can also be used to store watts and produce joules of work if that's your preferred source of energy.
In particular, if we can make a machine that spends more joules than a human, but reduces the human effort by orders of magnitude, why would that be "horribly unproductive"? Most people would call that amazingly productive. And when they want to broaden the view to consider the inputs too, they're worried about the labor that goes into the inputs, not the joules.
(And if the worry is the limited amount of fossil fuels in particular, we can do the same with renewable energy.)
I'm still not sure why renewable are being brought up here. An earlier comment referenced solar, I never mentioned solar or renewables.
I only mention renewables because I'm grasping at straws to figure out why joules would matter.
When looking at joules its an attempt to compare something like a human cutting a field with a scythe and a tractor cutting it with an implement. The tractor is way more efficient at cutting it when considering only the human hours of labor cutting the field. But of course it is, a single barrel of oil has way more energy potential and even a small tractor will be run with fuel milage tracked by gallons per hour.
Back in the day, wood powered tractors beat the fuck out of horses, and horses beat the fuck out of human labor because they could digest cellulose. Oil is just very slightly cheaper. Even today people heat their homes with both wood pellets and oil, meanwhile there’s cheaper alternatives.
I really don't understand your use of the term "externalized cost" here.
I don’t think AI will let programmers be anywhere close to 1,000x as productive in 10 years. That wouldn’t just need AGI but deep changes to how organizations function.
Hitting 100+x in 30 to 90 years is much harder to predict.