Stats like this get thrown around a lot but it's worth considering that the ABSOLUTE numbers might not actually change that much over time.
With agriculture specifically, we can make some rough estimates that, before mechanization (say, 1760-1800 period), there was maybe 10^9 people on Earth and they were all employed in agriculture. So ~10^9 farm-workers.
As of 2024, FAO estimates of global agricultural workforce put the total at about 892 million; call it ~9x10^8. [1]
So, more precise (but perhaps not much more accurate) to say that mechanization put 10% of farm workers out of a job, not 99%.
Now, it certainly IS true that mechanization allows (or forces, depending on your perspective) 90% of the population of Earth to do something other than farming, which is the real point you were making - Technology DOES have a way of disrupting what we've been doing for generations.
[1] https://www.fao.org/statistics/highlights-archive/highlights...
> The agricultural sector employed 892 million people worldwide in 2022, which corresponds to 26.2 percent of total employment.
However, in the USA:
> Direct on-farm employment accounted for about 2.6 million of these jobs, or 1.2 percent of U.S. employment.[1].
The USA grows enough food to feed itself[2], so this indicates that either the rest of the world still hasn't mechanized farming (possibly due to poverty/cheap labor), or that crops in the rest of the world are particularly resistant to mechanization. If the rest of the world was at the same level of mechanization as the USA, the total number of people employed would be about 5% of what it you cited.
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/58282 [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6041859/
I don't believe this is true. High street banks are still common. 99% closed means we previously had 100 times as many, which would be absurdly high. It's probably closer to 50% closed.
It is nothing like the experience of growing up in the early 90's and what banks were then.
Consider that everyone did their banking in person and people dealt with a lot of cheques. Oh, and banks didn't tend to open at weekends, you had to find time during the week.
There was a need for a lot of tellers, and banks were incredibly busy places.
"99% closed" is obviously hyperbole, especially counting by branch, but if you were to count by tellers or by people visiting their bank, I could well believe it.
> Across the country, there are now barely 4,000 bank and building society branches, down 80 per cent in 40 years.
So, a big decline, but still 20x as many high street banks than what a 99% decline claims.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/10ce1086-a9ae-4851-92e4-3b6efc8a0...
A lot of people that I know would strongly prefer to go to some brick and mortar shop. The problem is: most of items that I buy on the internet (e.g. on Amazon) are simply not easily available in a shop in my town (and I am not living in a small town).
For example:
- lots of obscure scientific books that are written in German or even English (I live in Germany)
- similarly: lots of rather niche belletristic books (think into the direction: some obscure novel recommendation on HN) often in various foreign languages
N.B. It is true that an important reason why Amazon got big among early computer enthusiasts in Germany in the 90s is that it was one of the few ways for easily getting computer science textbooks delivered from the USA - though with long delivery times.
- 3D printing supplies (why doesn't there exist a brick an mortar store for this?)
- very niche indie games (they are by now basically all sold on Steam, GOG, Epic Store or itch.io)
- very specific parts for Maker projects
- ...
So, the situation is not that people necessarily want to buy on the internet or specifically Amazon, but rather that there exists barely any way to get what they want in a brick and mortar store in even large cities.
Because it is not cheap or available if its not made in China.
At least in the US, there are roughly the same number of bank branches today as 20 years ago. And I think you would have to compare to hundreds of years ago to find anything like a 99% decline in farm laborers.
I’d make a similar bet for assembly programmers. People say “no one programs in assembly anymore”, but I’d guess today there are more assembly programmers than when everyone programmed assembly.
Technology, like AI, is a force multiplier. A lever.
It's not "technology did this or that", humans did using technology.
Selling stuff to people without them understanding the consequences is a technology, too.
Society does indeed evolve over time, but it's only in 8th grade history surveys that it can be presented so simply as you take for granted above.
It's good to reduce pain, but not to kill everything. At least not in one fatal fell swoop.
Yet Ikea, H&M, etc are thriving. COVID was supposed to be the deathknell for brick and mortar retail but I'm fairly sure it's bounced back. Buying a lot of stuff will just always be better in person.
Since you're so certain of this impact "AI" will have, what "skills" do you "predict" are required on the human end of this?
I have to admit that's a rhetorical question to demonstrate the absurdity of your stance. Don't make my eyes roll out of my head by insisting that "AI is indeed an absurd change, but we must acknowledge... (blah blah)" or whatever and double down.
We've had years of these silly takes and we're all fed up with the mass-plagiarism machine. It's not science fiction. It's a big lookup table for sale and wrapped in lies, and no it's not equivalent to other computation by definition. I'm sure you could run some people out of business that way, but not all. When the job is done did we really achieve "AI", or just ruin the economy by taking advantage of the feeble minded?
Any politician has a massive opportunity here to enforce the law. It's only a question if they'll keep pretending to be blinded by the science.
Not Flere-Imsaho:
I think if one made a serious effort, one could easily find a well-founded answer to this question that is based on a solid rational foundation.
The problem rather is: people (often in decision positions, but also employees who fear for their jobs) don't act rationally on AI:
- For example, managers firing good programmers because programmers are to be replaced by AI. By now you can find many reports of companies who try to convince their programmers that they fired "because of AI" to come back.
- Similarly, panicking employees who demand irrational restrictions on AI. EDIT: with this I mean for example "legal restrictions on AI with on a pretense of say 'AI is too dangerous for the public'".
These very non-rational factors and irrational actions are very hard to predict.
What is so irrational about avoiding AI altogether? If the dev gets the same or higher quality work done in the same amount of time without it (oh, yes they can/do) what is the risk?
What kind of sweatshop has such a bottleneck with dev time that they require AI? If the dev is micromanaged to the extent that they are told which tools to use, that's something else already.
Let's meet in the middle and say most devs, regardless of the extremity of their stance on AI, probably at least read Google AI summaries and copy-paste that code from time to time. I've never heard of anyone complaining about that. Brother, let me tell you that's 99% of the productivity boost we're gonna see until this upcoming AI winter is over again. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional.