🔍 Read the full analysis: Could AI Change Society Like The Rise Of Farming? on ThorstenMeyerAI.com
Get business pricing on office and shipping supplies
- Business-only prices and quantity discounts
- Tax-exempt purchasing
- Multiple users, one account, clear invoices
TL;DR
A November 3 essay from ThorstenMeyerAI.com uses farming’s long decline as a share of employment to examine whether AI could transform work on a similar scale. The historical record shows agriculture expanded its output while employing a smaller share of workers, but the comparison does not establish how quickly AI will change jobs or what new work will emerge.
Thorsten Meyer argued in a November 3 essay for ThorstenMeyerAI.com that agriculture offers a historical comparison for considering how artificial intelligence could change work. The essay documents farming’s decline from about 73.7% of the U.S. labor force in 1800 to roughly 1.5% today, while stressing that this shift unfolded over generations—not in a single wave of automation.
Meyer’s central example is a major change in how people produce food. An estimate by economic historian Stanley Lebergott, later published by the U.S. Census Bureau, counts 1.4 million of 1.9 million U.S. workers aged 10 and older in agriculture in 1800. The figures before 1840 are estimates, and the count included about 530,000 enslaved people. Meyer therefore describes the result as roughly three in four workers, rather than treating it as a precise census tally.
The essay says agricultural change came through successive improvements: tools such as John Deere’s steel plough, chemical fertilizer made possible by industrial ammonia production, and higher-yield crop varieties. The Nobel Foundation’s account of the Green Revolution describes dwarf wheat developed around Norman Borlaug and introduced in India and Pakistan in the mid-1960s. India’s wheat harvest rose from 12.3 million tonnes in 1964-65 to 26.4 million tonnes in 1971-72, according to figures cited in the essay.
Employment shares and worker counts did not move in lockstep. Meyer cites U.S. farm employment reaching about 11.8 million around 1910, even as agriculture’s share of the workforce had begun to fall. The essay also reports that global cereal production increased 4.2-fold from 1961 while the world’s population grew 2.7-fold. Those comparisons illustrate the essay’s point: fewer workers in a sector do not necessarily mean less output. They do not, on their own, predict AI’s effects on jobs or production.
What Farming’s Shift Shows About Work
The agricultural record matters because it separates two questions often merged in discussions of automation: how many workers a sector needs and how much it produces. Mechanization and other innovations allowed agriculture to supply more food with a much smaller share of the workforce. That history gives readers a concrete way to think about AI: a technology could change tasks and labor demand without making the underlying goods or services less important.
But the analogy has limits. Farming’s transformation involved tools, seeds, fertilizers, infrastructure and markets, and it unfolded across roughly two centuries in the United States. Meyer’s suggestion that automation could affect as much as 90% of a sector within a decade or a few decades is explicitly his thesis, not an established forecast. The essay supplies no evidence that AI will follow agriculture’s pace, produce the same employment pattern, or create equivalent kinds of new work.
The stakes are practical. If AI reduces labor needs in some occupations, workers, employers and governments will have to contend with changes in job availability, training and the distribution of productivity gains. The farming example offers a historical reference point, not a timetable or a guarantee about who benefits.
Products Worth Considering
Samsung 27-inch Odyssey G5 QHD Gaming Monitor (G51F)
Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1100 17-Inch Professional Wireless Inkjet Photo Printer
Samsung 27-Inch Odyssey OLED G5 QHD Gaming Monitor
As an affiliate, we earn on qualifying purchases.
Two Centuries of Agricultural Change
The essay places the U.S. shift alongside estimates for other countries. It cites economic historians’ reconstruction that about 85% of Japan’s gainfully occupied population worked in the primary sector in 1872, a category that included farming, forestry and fishing. For Germany, an official occupational census recorded 43.4% in agriculture and forestry in 1882, though the essay notes that women’s work on family farms was undercounted.
Later records show that agricultural work remained widespread in countries at different stages of economic development. The essay cites China’s 1952 national series, in which 83.5% of employed people worked in the primary sector, and India’s 1951 census, where cultivators and agricultural laborers made up 69.7% of workers. It gives a 2025 International Labour Organization estimate of 928 million people worldwide working in agriculture, about one in four workers. These figures are not all directly comparable: they refer to different years, definitions and national statistical methods.
The U.S. pattern also reflects a long sequence rather than one invention. Deere & Company’s account dates a steel plough made by John Deere in Illinois to 1837. Industrial ammonia production followed the chemistry of nitrogen fixation: Fritz Haber filed a patent in 1908, and the first ammonia factory opened in 1913, according to the essay. Later machinery and crop breeding added to the changes. Together, these developments help explain why the agricultural comparison concerns a system of change, not a single machine replacing workers.
“My thesis, not a fact: automation could become a sector of up to 90% within a decade or a few decades.”
— Thorsten Meyer, ThorstenMeyerAI.com
How Far the AI Comparison Holds
The historical figures describe agriculture; they do not establish what AI will do. Meyer’s essay does not provide a specific model of which jobs AI may replace, how many roles could change, or how quickly firms and workers might adapt. Its proposed 90% automation figure is framed as a thesis, and the essay gives no sector-by-sector method for calculating it.
It is also unclear how much of agriculture’s experience transfers to economies where many jobs involve services, care, judgment or interaction with other people. The farming statistics vary by country and source, and some early figures are reconstructions rather than direct counts. Readers should treat the comparison as a historical lens, not as a direct numerical forecast for AI employment.
The Essay’s Next Historical Case
The piece is identified as Episode 2 of “Work After Work,” Arc 1, a series about how the economy is built. Meyer says the next episode will address mechanical reapers, threshers and tractors—the machinery that followed earlier changes in farming. That installment may add detail to the agricultural timeline, but the material provided does not set out a date or a forecast for AI-driven job changes.
For readers following the broader question, the key evidence to watch is not just whether AI tools can perform tasks, but whether employers adopt them at scale, how that affects staffing and output, and what new roles or industries develop. Those outcomes remain open.
Key Questions
What is the main point of the essay?
Meyer uses agriculture’s long automation to frame a question about AI and work. He argues that farming shows a sector can produce more while relying on a much smaller share of workers, but he does not establish that AI will follow the same path.
How many Americans worked in agriculture in 1800?
The essay cites an estimate that 73.7% of the U.S. labor force—1.4 million of 1.9 million people aged 10 and older—worked in agriculture. The pre-1840 figures are estimates, not census counts, and include enslaved workers.
Does the essay say AI will automate 90% of jobs?
No. Meyer describes automation reaching as much as 90% of a sector within a decade or a few decades as his thesis, not a fact. The essay does not offer a confirmed forecast that 90% of jobs will be automated.
How many people work in agriculture worldwide?
The essay cites an International Labour Organization estimate for 2025 of 928 million people working in agriculture, or about one in four workers worldwide. The figure refers to that estimate and year.
Source: ThorstenMeyerAI.com
