32 ms·

India has the problem with farming that the US is starting to have with AI. Farming in India is still far too labor intensive by world standards. 43% of workers

• graemep 5mo ago
  The industrial revolution was enabled by more efficient agriculture feeing labour to do other work.
  • vitally3643 5mo ago
    The flipside is that there must be other work to be done or people starve to death.
    • zozbot234 5mo ago
      Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom. That's kinda the opposite of people starving to death. A lot of agriculture historically and in poor countries like India today is subsistence agriculture, yeoman farmers living off what they grow directly. More efficiency allows them to sell their surplus and to invest the proceedings, kicking off economic growth.
      • andrepd 5mo ago
        > Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom. But also a precipitous drop in life expectancy. Life in industrial towns in 1800s England was grim. Make of that what you will.
        • SpaceNoodled 5mo ago
          Pollution.
          • harvey9 5mo ago
            In the towns yes. A wealthy city man could expect to live fewer years than a labourer in the countryside.
          • andrepd 5mo ago
            Surely a factor, but hardly the sole explanation; malnutrition rose, that should give you some pause.
          • oblio 5mo ago
            Pollution, malnutrition, maiming by industrial or mining equipment (huge percentage at the start).
      • showerst 5mo ago
        Yes, but the AI that is metaphor is comparing to does not create more food. More to the point, it may not create more jobs. After a few decades of turmoil the industrial and agricultural revolutions netted out far more jobs. The verdict is still out on AI, but I wouldn't bet on it.
        • zozbot234 5mo ago
          > Yes, but the AI that is metaphor is comparing to does not create more food. Mostly because food is incredibly cheap, so it's not the main focus of present-day economies. AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life. The most natural and most cost-effective use of AI is arguably in helping answer simple questions, not really in cranking out tokens to somehow help write complex software. And other service work is perhaps in the middle of this range.
    • slg 5mo ago
      Or we take some small portion of that new surplus in productivity and share it among everyone by divorcing the need to work from the need to not starve.
      • shimman 5mo ago
        No, it's much better for an elite class of superhumans to hoard all the wealth. After all they guided us to our current utopia, the least humanity can do is give them the vast majority of wealth.
      • bijowo1676 5mo ago
        who will redistribute stuff? You are simply selecting new elites to be from the redistributor class (vanguard party, Nomenklatura, secret police etc), instead of the entrepreneural class. Works well if you are the one redistributing stuff from "rich to poor", but it ends up as creating a new elite class, every single time
        • atq2119 5mo ago
          This is a genuine problem indeed and part of the appeal of an UBI. The idea being that if the rules of redistribution are dead simple, then that helps minimize the potential for grift, which in turn minimizes the potential danger of a redistributor class. That said, it is fundamentally important that nobody has too much power, and that power changes hands on a regular basis. At a global scale, this necessitates taking power away from the capitalist class. Ideally that power just doesn't go to anybody, but to the extent that it has to go somewhere, it almost doesn't matter where. Or perhaps it's better to say that there are many options that are acceptable and better than allowing power to continue to accumulate unchecked.
          • TheOtherHobbes 5mo ago
            The fundamental problem is that power and resources are always captured by Cluster B types, and Cluster B types are poison to every form of social organisation. So it's true it almost doesn't matter, because you can absolutely guarantee you're going to have growing inequality, political instability, and a culture of dishonesty, abuse, and contempt, unless you keep Cluster B types far, far away from resource dominance, strategy, and enforcement.
    • fsckboy 5mo ago
      >The flipside is that there must be other work to be done or people starve to death false. people are not helpless and jobs are not fixed in number nor social welfare gifts. Human creativity and industriousness can be put to task to produce things that other people want. In an absurd example, you could live next door to a new efficient sweater mill, and you could still knit handmade sweaters, customized with people's initials, etc., and their sale would measure the value of your output in. dollars. People don't do this very often because such an economy produces more lucrative jobs than that. doomers have foreseen the end of the world in every generation going back. The bad speculations have never come true, but there have been some very negative outcomes of fearful people believing the doom and gloom, look no further than the seeds of Marxist revolutions, Fascism, and Naziism, they all start with people feeling economic uncertainty.
      • harimau777 5mo ago
        I'm not sure I understand your point. Someone who attempted to support themselves by hand knitting sweaters almost certainly WOULD be impoverished. So doesn't that support what you are calling "doomers"?
        • fsckboy 5mo ago
          I said "but people don't do that because there are better alternatives". I also said "with monograms" for example, i.e. there are irl handmade sweaters made today because people don't necessarily want a factory product. I pointed it out because it illustrates a hint of the principles of "comparative advantage" which concepts are useful for analyzing more than international trade, analysis the majority of people aren't familiar with.
          • Starman_Jones 5mo ago
            Comparative advantage falls flat on its face in the circumstances being described, though. It’s based on an assumption of opportunity cost that no longer holds true.
            • 5mo ago
    • tim333 5mo ago
      Not necessarily. In the UK: > Over one million young people in this country are now neither employed, in education nor in training... yet no starvation. I'm not sure it's a good situation but it is what it is.
      • robotresearcher 5mo ago
        For context, the UK unemployment level is pretty low compared to the last 55 years of history. https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotinwork/unemployment/timeseries/mgsx/lms https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin... One million is a lot of people, but that's from a population of ~70 million.
        • harvey9 5mo ago
          The post you replied to specified young people so 70M is the wrong denominator. The UK currently has far more than 1 million working age adults unemployed and the denominator for that is still less than 70M because Britain has plenty of retirement age adults too.
          • robotresearcher 5mo ago
            I chose the denominator of a society of 70 million to match the data link I posted. It’s possible the unemployment rate among you adults is historically high, but I haven’t seen data on that. I doubt it, based on the overall unemployment rate. edit: looked up the current data. Age 16-24 unemployment excluding trainees and students is 12.8% which is about double the current overall unemployment rate. Haven't found historical data on this cohort yet. We might expect youngsters to be less employed than experienced people, but double does seem high on the face of it. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn05871/ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn05... edit 2: Found it. Youth unemployment is currently at about the (eyeball) median rate for the last 32 years. https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotinwork/unemployment/timeseries/mgwy/lms https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin... I think it's important to put numbers in historical context when saying or implying that we're in some kind of crisis. Youth unemployment sucks for the people involved and the people around them. Every one of them has my sympathy. We are not in a period of unusually high youth unemployment, according to the UK government data.
    • SpaceNoodled 5mo ago
      No, people must be given food or they starve to death. Whether or not work is done is completely orthogonal.
      • pdonis 5mo ago
        > Whether or not work is done is completely orthogonal. No, it's not, because food requires work to produce. Someone has to do that work. If you yourself are not one of the people who works to produce the food that we all need, you have only two ways of getting it: (1) Trade something else of value for it; (2) Force the people who do produce it to give it to you. Option #1 is a free market. Option #2 is tyranny. There are no other choices. Which do you pick?
        • tonyedgecombe 5mo ago
          Is it tyranny that my 84 year old parents get free food (via the state pension)?
          • pdonis 5mo ago
            Did they earn the pension by working for many years?
            • graemep 5mo ago
              Do you think they should be left to starve if they did not work for many years? In most developed countries even someone who has been never worked in their life will get enough to live on (although they might get less than someone who has worked all their lives).
              • pdonis 5mo ago
                > Do you think they should be left to starve if they did not work for many years? I think that we need to be clear about what's going on. The post I originally responded to in this subthread (which was not by you) said that whether or not work is done is "completely orthogonal" to whether people starve to death. My point is that it is not: food has to be produced, so somebody has to do the work to produce it. The question you are asking, and the claim I was originally responding to, completely ignore that part of it, and only focus on the person who needs food, not the people who are producing it. I'll take the US as an example. The US population is well over 300 million by now, but let's take 300 million as a round number. I think about 1 in 20 people in the US are involved in food production in some way. That means 15 million people in the US are producing food. There are indeed a substantial number of people in the US who have never worked in their lives but who are being given at least some sort of income by the government. I'll take SSI as a rough proxy for that since it's explicitly for people who have no work history. From what I can gather, there are about 6 million people in the US on SSI. That's about 2 people in 1000. (Of course, we produce many more things than food. But food is the focus of this subthread, so that's what I'll talk about.) So if 2 people in 1000 are on SSI, i.e., are getting fed at taxpayer expense without ever having worked in their lives, then about 2 in 1000 of the 15 million people producing food in the US, or about 30,000 people, are working to produce the food that those people in SSI eat. So 30,000 people are producing food for 6 million--the same 1 to 20 ratio we saw before. At this level, of course, it seems obvious that this is not a serious problem. The 30,000 people producing food for the 6 million SSI recipients are getting paid, they're just getting paid by the taxpayers in this case instead of the people consuming the food. (We'll leave aside all the issues about whether they get paid a fair price, the various perverse incentives at work in the US food production system, etc., since those apply to all of us, not just those on SSI.) But still, it's important to recognize that there are 30,000 people producing food in the US for people who produce nothing in return. We can say that's a small enough number that we can deal with it, and I don't disagree; we as a society have decided that we can afford to support 0.2 percent of us that way, and that's fine. But it's tempting to just round that number to zero, as if the food the SSI recipients eat just appeared by magic, for free, without anyone having to work to produce it. And that temptation needs to be resisted. Why does it need to be resisted? Because the intuitive sense that "we can afford it" does not scale. We can afford it at 2 people per 1,000. That doesn't mean we can afford it if that percentage goes up. Nor does it mean we can afford it if we keep adding more and more things to the government's largesse, and not just for people who have never worked and can't work.
    • RajT88 5mo ago
      In unrelated news, we are expelling our agricultural and service industry workforces at the moment.
    • singpolyma3 5mo ago
      Only if we tie being fed to "working" which is a rather inhumane and untenable thing to do
  • ambicapter 5mo ago
    What's the point of this comment? It's just a basic fact that everyone agrees with that wasn't put into contention by parent comment.
  • fsckboy 5mo ago
    >The industrial revolution was enabled by more efficient agriculture feeing labour to do other work you're not wrong, but that's not exactly what happened. Agriculture itself was mechanized by the industrial revolution, affordable tractors (tillers, farrowers, etc.) and harvesters. mechanized railroads put more perishable agricultural goods "closer" to urban areas, etc. if you look at the growth industry before that, it was mercantilist overseas trade.
    • hunterpayne 5mo ago
      The mechanization of the ag industry took place 100 years after the industrial revolution. Try again.
      • petesergeant 5mo ago
        > mechanization of the ag industry ... was not what produced the British Agricultural Revolution.
      • wil421 5mo ago
        The Cotton gin was created in the 1700s. Maybe you mean this one, Green Revolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
      • hdgvhicv 5mo ago
        Other way round
    • delichon 5mo ago
      The first London coffeehouse opened in the 1650s and the industrial revolution started in ~1760. It just took a while for the habit to catch on.
    • leoc 5mo ago
      The big productivity gains of the Agricultural Revoution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolutio... started considerably before the Industrial Revolution, though naturally the Industrial Revolution in turn fed back into agricultural productivity, in time.
  • TimByte 5mo ago
    What is the next large labour-absorbing sector supposed to be?
    • FloorEgg 5mo ago
      It won't be one large one, it will be thousands of little ones. Every time this happens throughout history (and I mean going all the way back way past industrial revolution, to dawn of agriculture, to the earliest documented history, to the mitochondria, to the earliest stars exploding...) the result of a better way to get work done is more complexity and more diversity in work done (processes for increasing entropy). The author said not to confuse laws of nature with observations of history, and I take issue with the implication. My perspective is grounded deep in physics, chemistry, biology and anthropology and after spending 10 years fretting over what AI would do to our civilization this decade I am not worried about labor displacement. What I am worried about is power struggles and brainwashing.
      • jiggawatts 5mo ago
        Communism, or more accurately, mechanised collective farming practices in the early 1900s in Russia resulted in revolutions and world wars. When tens of millions of inefficient farmers were replaced by tractors needing only a fraction of the labour force the excess population was disposed of. Sorry, bad phrasing! They were put to work in new roles enabled by technological advancements: wielding mass manufactured rifles and operating artillery. This has played out over and over throughout history whenever a large fraction of the population suddenly becomes surplus to requirements. They never get to enjoy utopia. They are expended in warfare or low value forced labour until the labour pool once again matches the requirements.
        • oblio 5mo ago
          You don't even need to look at the Soviets. Life for the average person in Britain became worse between 1760 until about 1920. That meant about 3 generations of people were lost. I'm super happy about this idilic AI future my great grandchildren will enjoy...
  • boring-human 5mo ago
    Indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-sector_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-sector_model
  • morkalork 5mo ago
    In industrial revolution analogy we are more like the horses and oxen. How did being replaced by machines go for them?
• deepsun 5mo ago
  Every country subsidies their agriculture for national security purpose. You don't want an enemy to starve you in case of a big war.
  • Matticus_Rex 5mo ago
    Even if one grants this, it does not make the case that any particular set of subsidies is justified by that reasoning.
    • phkahler 5mo ago
      You want to have stable food prices so people don't have to worry about basic survival.
      • Matticus_Rex 5mo ago
        Again, you can grant this and a huge number of agriculture subsidies still aren't justified. People have an instinctive defensiveness over farms/farmers, but anyone who has studied farm subsidies in any depth knows there's no way to rationally justify huge swathes of them. I don't know anyone with the requisite knowledge who wouldn't agree with that including farmers and lobbyists (because they generally only like a subset of the subsidies themselves).
        • pyuser583 5mo ago
          I’m from a historically agricultural state, and live in the farming area. Government interventions are regularly mocked - always have been. Demand for food plummets when it is no longer fresh. Throwing food away is politically toxic. This creates major problems. As people get richer they don’t want more food, they want better food. Fresher and more meat based. Which is fine. But means the food when you talk about food “that which prevents us from starving to death” you are quite divorced from actual demand. People don’t price food based on its anti-starvation capabilities. Either they follow traditional diets, or they buy for convenience (highly processed), or they are health nuts who live off rice, beans, and kale. Nobody is trying to maximize calories. Very few people are trying to match their food intake to their amount physical exertion. All these ontological and teleological models are divorced from how food is actually valued: market “taste” is insanely important under normal circumstances. Our agriculture sector won’t succeed if it’s based around preventing famine.
• maxglute 5mo ago
  Large population countries / economies reach point where there are more people than jobs, excess people gets dumped into subsistence farming or other inefficient sunk cost make job programs so angry horde doesn't burn it all down. You can replace 95% of subsistence farmers, i.e. billions of people with machinery. Probably replace 95% of knowledge workers, i.e. 100s of millions in OECD with AI, but maybe it's just better/stabler for political serenity for horde to keep generating useless make work email chains. Smaller pop countries can probably meander through for a while specializing in a few high value sectors, larger countries will have to deal with disproportionate idle hands, but also more are in favorable position to exploit / consolidate industrial / resource advances.. Hopefully end game dwindling demographics supported by fully automated luxury communism within sustainable carrying capacity. But there's a lot of probably violent steps between draw some circles and draw the rest of the owl. Ultimately we're likely entering period of placating surplus people and managing demographic relative automation / ai progress.
• TimByte 5mo ago
  One difference though is that the agriculture transitions had somewhere for labor to go: factories, construction, urban services, export manufacturing, etc
  • FloorEgg 5mo ago
    This transition does too. It's just not clear to most where yet.
    • forgetfreeman 5mo ago
      It doesn't. If it did there'd be massive unmet demand for labor in $sector. There is no value for $sector that is currently reporting being short roughly 100 million headcount. So unless you're counting currently non-existence social safety programs or CCC-style government make-work programs that light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.
    • koalaman 5mo ago
      Is it a secret you can't share with us? I see this transition as more like what would happen to livestock if they banned eating meat.
      • FloorEgg 5mo ago
        Whenever a method to do work more efficiently comes to be and propagates at scale an explosion in diversity of work emerges. This happens at every level of abstraction in nature and has recurred throughout history all the way back to the dawn of life. Just because I can't predict exactly what work people will do doesn't mean they won't do work. I can take a stab at a few guesses, surely others have more prescience, but the thing about complexity and fractals is it's easier to predict meta qualities than it is specific manifestations.
      • hibikir 5mo ago
        Ricardian models of trade seem to hold well in real life, and they'd work well too if a lot of work was done by not just AI, but robots. As long as there's limit to the production capacity of the high tech population, there's something that is worth doing where the disadvantage of doing it by hand is lower. It does lead to lower wages there though, and that would basically require investment as to make real necessities dirt cheap, like they are in places where labor isn't worth much. There's still the fact that claiming to be the owner of the automation, while other people aren't, will be untenable in a world with sufficient inequality. We've seen that happen before when the only justification for the difference in wealth was basically inheritance. Nobles losing land and rights, churches being dispossessed an such things. It'd be a likely outcome if 5% of the people claim to own all automation ever. But that's not about having everyone be unemployed because nobody has any economic value: That's what is unlikely.
• jijijijij 5mo ago
  > 43% of workers still work in agriculture. For the US, that number is under 2%. China is at 22% as of 2023, and dropping steadily. Don't you have to contrast these figures with import and export of produce, and environmental/ecological factors? Technology is one thing, but increasing yields by wasting resources (e.g. water, phosphorous, soil erosion, ...) may increase nominal productivity, but not efficiency. Not saying the conclusion is wrong, but I think your numbers are not necessarily causally linked to productivity/efficiency. I mean, the US also has a declining domestic fabrication percentage, but that's not merely indicative of productivity, but mostly outsourcing/loss of capabilities, I think. Anyway, apparently India also doesn't score very well for food self-sufficiency: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-025-01173-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-025-01173-4
  • bluGill 5mo ago
    In the US case the large industrial farms are the ones more concerned with things like soil erosion and fertilizer runoff. Both are things we measure and put a number on what is washing away. Smaller farmers know it can be measured but either are stuck in their ways, or just see that they are making money so they don't care.
    • jijijijij 5mo ago
      My point was the possible disconnect of productivity/yield, and efficiency. A small potato and a large potato likely need the same amount of harvesting work. Now, if you dig up finite reservoirs of phosphorous in Morocco to increase yield in the US, you are not increasing efficiency. That's just planetary debt for a wasteful sprint. I think, in the US this is most evident with water usage, where now many aquifers and reservoirs are spent. Hardly indicative of desirable outcome. Sustainable farming usually has much lower yields inherently. And of course, soil quality and erosion dynamics naturally differ greatly across the globe.
      • bluGill 5mo ago
        When you pull a potato off a field, you're taking with it a bunch of phosphorus. That is why we have to have a replacement for that. I'm not sure how to solve the problem long term. I agree. Morocco wasn't the right answer, but what is?
• 542458 5mo ago
  From your Wikipedia link: > Demands: […] Government to ensure at least 50% profit over their overall cost of production. They demanded 50% guaranteed annual RoR on all farming activities? That’s a wild demand.
  • koolba 5mo ago
    [dead]
• thisisit 5mo ago
  You have to look at the population split between urban/rural. In China it is 67/33 and India it is completely reversed at 30/70. And agri continues to be the number one occupation. Additionally, lack of opportunities is also a problem. India has been focused on services and trailed behind on industrialisation. The current government has been pushing for more industrialisation but they are behind in the curve.
  • hibikir 5mo ago
    Note that China is where it is because of efforts to do this, on purpose, over decades. 20 years ago, their urban percentage was somewhere in the 40s. We are even seeing more migration to cities in Europe and the US, even though it's unplanned, and it leads to big changes in cost of living thanks to this lack of planning. So if China took 30 years, give or take, to get to where it's at, with its state capacity, I suspect India will take quite a bit longer.
• HoldOnAMinute 5mo ago
  System set in place to slow migration from farms cities can't absorb
• m463 5mo ago
  I liked reading "The Box" about the transition to container shipping. It was interesting to see this totally-unrelated-to-our-times process from the outside. From our place in time, container shipping is obvious. At the time, to people who wanted to ship something, it was ridiculously hard and expensive and risky. If you were shipping something from cleveland to paris, you might just give up. Say you were shipping alcohol - only part might arrive, the rest would disappear. The shipping industry had all KINDS of forces at work to keep the status quo. trucking companies, trains, shipping companies, freight forwarders, longshoremen, stevedores, unions, people with older non-container boats, etc. and they didn't want standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)
  • biztos 5mo ago
    They seem to have made their peace with standards, but now a lot of them don’t want robots. “Automation hurts families” is a common slogan. https://youtu.be/hr-isyMV1y8?si=grnJqn8AOEuIwkRw https://youtu.be/hr-isyMV1y8?si=grnJqn8AOEuIwkRw
  • pyuser583 5mo ago
    In all fairness, this is exactly why insurance was invented: unreliable shipping. You just took out a policy, and the shipment didn’t make it you took the payout. It creates a system that diminishes risk, but simultaneously diminishes incentives for improvement.
    • ForHackernews 5mo ago
      Ideally the incentives would be driven by the insurance companies: "Put a tamper-proof lock on your crate and get 50% off your theft insurance!"
      • pyuser583 5mo ago
        Fluctuating premiums based on risk factors defeat the purpose of a policy.
• bbor 5mo ago
  How that took place may provide more useful info than philosophy. Data is always nice, but empirical results are literally useless without philosophy to understand and apply them. That is unless 'we all move to south korea 20 years ago' is an option, I suppose!
• lenerdenator 5mo ago
  > Looking at how countries coped with a fast transition from labor intensive agriculture to an urban society gives hints on how an AI transition may look. All the Asian countries that went from poor to rich in a generation did this, with different approaches. How that took place may provide more useful info than philosophy. There's only one problem with comparing urbanization with the AI transition: there were still jobs that the workers moving from farms to urban centers could do. Instead of planting and harvesting, they made things in factories or became professionals. The idea of the GenAI bet that most companies are making is that you just don't have people doing work anymore. There aren't any jobs for the laborers to do anymore, at least not ones that are likely to fit their skillset and provide a standard of living that they're used to. If you're a software engineer - one of the higher-paying fields of the last half-century - and get laid off because the c-suite thinks AI can do your job for less, you're going to contract your spending. The article mentions this, but it doesn't take into account that there will be some work (mainly manual labor) that will face at least some resistance to automation for the next decade. These people will try to get into those jobs, because they have bills to pay. It won't pay six figures. It very well might pay less than it is now due to the glut of candidates who are desperate to make any income at all. The person who went from catered meals and foosball at the office to framing a house when it's 20 degrees F for a third of the money, none of the future, and a lot more body aches is going to be angry. In a society like the United States, it's the kind of angry that you can't solve with an internal passport system. It's going to mean violence. Eventually, they'll figure out how to do more manual labor with automated systems. That means that there will be even fewer opportunities. This is nothing like anything we've seen before, and no one wants to acknowledge that.
  • confidantlake 5mo ago
    The hope is the robot armies will keep the hordes away from the lords' manors. We will see if it works.
  • Animats 5mo ago
    > There's only one problem with comparing urbanization with the AI transition: there were still jobs that the workers moving from farms to urban centers could do. Instead of planting and harvesting, they made things in factories or became professionals. Mostly for export, in the case of the Asian tigers and China. Once wages reached developed world levels, an export-driven economy gradually became harder to sustain, because there was no longer a labor cost advantage. This is why Party leadership talks about "dual circulation", building up domestic demand within China, and about obtaining a technological edge that continues to make exports profitable. There's been considerable progress on both goals, especially in consumer electronics and the auto industry. > The person who went from catered meals and foosball at the office to framing a house when it's 20 degrees F for a third of the money, none of the future, and a lot more body aches is going to be angry. Yes. That happened to Egypt, where the government paid for college and then hired the graduates. Then the oil ran out. It's called "elite overproduction" when new college graduates can't get jobs that actually use their education. Already, in the US, about half of college graduates have jobs that don't really need a college education.
• walrus01 5mo ago
  > Farming in India is still far too labor intensive by world standards. 43% of workers still work in agriculture. [1] For the US, that number is under 2%. China is at 22% as of 2023, and dropping steadily. Question about farming in India. How much of the process of mechanizing and scaling up agriculture in India is predicated on something like the more widespread use of diesel or other oil/fossil-fuel powered tractors? To replace manual hand labor. If energy costs continue to rise as they are, and all-electric/battery based systems remain costly and out of the reach of the purchasing power of many small to mid sized farmers, what will happen?
  • thelastgallon 5mo ago
    Most land holdings are very very small. 1 acre to 5 acres maybe the vast majority. These are all odd sized and shaped and most likely doing different crops based on water availability. To leverage the benefits of mechanization, we need larger land holdings. The farmers have no other ability or income sources, so they hang on it it. Electricity is free. There is no income tax on farming. Govts provide many incentives to get farmers votes. Each state does different things, but they end up copying each others schemes and it gets worse and worse. Farmers in most regions are no longer poor. Land prices exploded 100 - 500x in a 100 - 150 km diameter around metro areas. Most farmers are now millionaires, yes millionaires in USD. They held on to their land because they didn't know better, the land was useless (no water) and nobody bought it. Now they are going to HODL.
    • AngryData 5mo ago
      There are mechanization instruments suitable for 5 acre plots, but manufacturers are limited and the potential gains are smaller. Its the same problem as small cheap consumer cars, big investors and capitalists don't want to put money into high volume low margin business with limited market cap. And without mass production costs are significantly higher. Thats why people still maintain 70 year old farmalls and planters and shit spreaders and plows, modern replacements are either crap to be cheap or expensive from low volume.
• _yy01 5mo ago
  There's no manufacturing sector to employ them if you displace them from agriculture. They'd be displaced into gig economy. This would just increase the population of a handful of metropolitan cities which are already congested. India should fix its cities first.
• xivzgrev 5mo ago
  What does that have to do with this article? One of the points was unlike past transitions this is hitting everyone. People move from a farm to the city. If there's no more white collar jobs where do we go for work? It's unprecedented
  • Retric 5mo ago
    That greatly depends on how much handholding is required and for how long. The difference between mostly right and actually useable without supervision is why self driving cars still aren’t ready. When someone says AI can do job X, they rarely mean it’s good enough for anyone to blindly trust the results of it doing that job.
• rfrey 5mo ago
  This time, there is nowhere to move to. And there is no interest in supporting the displaced people in any way.