7 ms·

Did you type in an additional zero there?

Retric 1y ago
Nope, where a family might struggle to efficiently manage 50 acres under continuous cultivation even just a few hundred years ago, now it’s not uncommon to see single family farms with 20,000 acres each of which is several times more productive. 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.
- _heimdall 1y ago
  For those 20,000 acre farms, by what measure are they more productive? 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.
  - Retric 1y ago
    We’re looking at hours of labor per lb of food. 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.
    - _heimdall 1y ago
      If that's the metric, sure we have gotten very good at producing more pounds of food per human hour of labor. 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).
      - Retric 1y ago
        > 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 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.
        _heimdall 1y ago
        What are you claiming is widely wrong exactly? The estimate of comparison between the amount of energy in a barrel of oil and the average amount of energy a human can produce in an hour?
        Dylan16807 1y ago
        You were comparing amount of energy between human labor and a barrel of oil? That's such a baffling metric that neither they nor I realized that's what you meant. It's not like you can replace a human with a solar panel, but if you could that would be astoundingly impressive and not diminished toward "horribly unproductive" by the fact that the solar panel is delivering more watts to do the same thing.
        _heimdall 1y ago
        I'm not sure where that confusion lies. 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.
- anticensor 1y ago
  Well, my comment was on the 100 years to replace programmers.
  - Retric 1y ago
    “in well under 100 years” 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.

Nope, where a family might struggle to efficiently manage 50 acres under continuous cultivation even just a few hundred years ago, now it’s not uncommon to see single family farms with 20,000 acres each of which is several times more productive. 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.

_heimdall 1y ago
For those 20,000 acre farms, by what measure are they more productive? 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.
- Retric 1y ago
  We’re looking at hours of labor per lb of food. 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.
  - _heimdall 1y ago
    If that's the metric, sure we have gotten very good at producing more pounds of food per human hour of labor. 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).
    - Retric 1y ago
      > 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 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.
      - _heimdall 1y ago
        What are you claiming is widely wrong exactly? The estimate of comparison between the amount of energy in a barrel of oil and the average amount of energy a human can produce in an hour?
        Dylan16807 1y ago
        You were comparing amount of energy between human labor and a barrel of oil? That's such a baffling metric that neither they nor I realized that's what you meant. It's not like you can replace a human with a solar panel, but if you could that would be astoundingly impressive and not diminished toward "horribly unproductive" by the fact that the solar panel is delivering more watts to do the same thing.
        _heimdall 1y ago
        I'm not sure where that confusion lies. 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.
anticensor 1y ago
Well, my comment was on the 100 years to replace programmers.
- Retric 1y ago
  “in well under 100 years” 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.