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Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

> Last I checked, the tractor and plow are doing a lot more work than 3 farmers, yet we've got more jobs and grow more food.

Not sure when you checked.

In the US more food is grown for sure. For example just since 2007 it has grown from $342B to $417B, adjusted for inflation[1].

But employment has shrunk massively, from 14M in 1910 to around 3M now[2] - and 1910 was well after the introduction of tractors (plows not so much... they have been around since antiquity - are mentioned extensively in the old testament Bible for example).

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A2000X1A020NBEA

[2] https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Farm_Labor/fl_frmw...

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That's his point. Drastically reducing agricultural employment didn't keep us from getting fed (and led to a significantly richer population overall -- there's a reason people left the villages for the industrial cities)

there's no reason to believe this trend will continue forever, simply because it has held for the past hundred years or so

But where will office workers displaced by AI leave? Industrialization brought demand for factory work (and later grew service sector), but I can't see what new opportunities AI is creating. There are only so many service people AI billionaires need to employ.

You realize this was the exact argument with the tractor / steam engine, electricity, and the computer?

No, you cannot ignore every argument by claiming someone else made it before. Make an actual response.

What new opportunities does the LLM create for the workers it may displace? What new opportunities did neural machine translation create for the workers it displaced?

In what way is a text-generation machine that dominates all computer use alike with the steam engine?

The steam engine powered new factories workers could slave away in, demanded coal that created mining towns. The LLM gives you a data centre. How many people does a data centre employ?

As models gain a deeper understanding of the physical world (e.g. Google world generator), I see nothing less than a new renaissance in our future.

Forget about data centers, all the little things will iteratively start getting a little better. Then one day we’ll look around and realize, “This place looks pretty good.”

I frankly hope so.

I'm not sure that's what they meant. Read like this:

> the tractor and plow are doing a lot more work than 3 farmers, yet we've got more jobs and grow more food.

it sounds to me like they mean "more job and grow more food" in the same context as "the tractor and plow [that] are doing a lot more work than 3 farmers"

But you could be right in which case I agree with them.

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