It's going to hurt when agriculture does not see the efficiency gains it has been receiving for the last century or so. We might be at the inflection or leveling off now.
It's going to hurt when agriculture does not see the efficiency gains it has been receiving for the last century or so. We might be at the inflection or leveling off now.
Could go either way. Advanced robotics + AI could finally break more agriculture free from the "tied to people's time" limitation. Or all the growable land could be in use, so that simply decreases prices a bit.
Expect world population leveling off will be the biggest determinant.
There are categories of foods (e.g. many vegetables) that aren't economical to grow because they (1) require manual labor and (2) the price of that manual labor must compete against alternatives (soybeans) that require less.
If robotics + AI provides working people-less solutions, then suddenly those crops become economically viable to grow again, which also opens up the land that might be unsuited for heavy-mechanized farming (flat, rectangular).
Instead for probably the first time in the history of computing devices as a consumer product, you're paying significantly more money to get the same thing you could have paid much less for months or years ago. If you bought a computer in 2025, it's unexpectedly an appreciating asset.