Artificial intelligence may take your job. Some lessons from my grandmother Posted on : Apr 14 - 2022

My grandmother, Claire Hastings, was born in the 1920s on a farm in Armidale, northern New South Wales. That was a relatively common thing, with just 43% of the population living in cities, compared with more than 70% now.

She lived in a small wooden hut, with a chicken coop out the front and fields out the back. When she and her siblings came home from school, they helped plow the fields with a horse-drawn plow until sundown.

Little did she know this life would soon disappear. The "second industrial revolution" (of mass production and standardization) was creating machines to replace human and horse power. A plow pulled by a tractor could do in hours what took Grandma and her siblings a week.

By the time she left school, age 17, she wasn't needed on the farm. So she instead went to college, became a teacher, got married and raised a family. Now 93, she lives in a comfy suburban four-bedroom home, enjoys dining at restaurants, and loves going to the theater and on ocean cruises.

Her story is far from unique. Around the world industrialization has reduced farm employment enormously. In the United States, for example, 40% of the labor force worked on farms in 1920; now it is about 2%

The loss of those jobs, and their replacement, is worth remembering as we now confront the "fourth industrial revolution," with robots and artificial intelligence tipped to take up to 40% of the jobs now done by humans within two decades.

The hit list is long, from drivers and call-center workers to computer programmers and university lecturers like myself (we face being replaced by AI avatars, delivering animated content online).

But just as disappearing farm jobs didn't lead to permanent mass unemployment, nor should we fear this next stage of technological development.

Improving quality of life

While industrial farming was not universally embraced as progress, the huge reductions in farming labor over the 20th century were key to a better life for most people (though poverty and glaring economic inequality still exist).

To cite just one measure, when my grandmother was born the average life expectancy in Australia was 60 years. Now it's more than 80.

The underlying forces driving such advances are twofold.

First, the mechanization of farming made food cheaper. US data shows the price of a common basket of groceries is now about 80% cheaper than a century ago. Similar trends exist for virtually every other consumable product. View more