> What would keep you from addressing it technologically even when it is addressed with your so-called established institutions?

A fantastic question. Socialist protectionism can absolutely drive the cost of human labor down well beyond competitive price points of even the most cheapest and sophisticated robotic labor. Cuba is a fantastic example of this. (Which I suspect will be the last place to embrace robotic labor) The Castro's have established strict price controls, which means doctors or janitors can get $6 a day while bread costs a few pennies. They have the material utopia... which sounds good, until you realize the Castro's offer their nation's labor at $20 an hour to Europe. With a 48 hour work week, the Castro's pocket $19.375 dollars PER WORKER PER HOUR while the worker takes home $0.625 per hour. They've established a familiar aristocracy under the name of actual, functional socialism. Never underestimate the power of political organization to drive human value to subslavery price points.

> When tractors were widely available and cheap, did land-owners refuse to buy them, and kept hiring farm employees?

> Did they ask for established institutions to help them out, instead of buying a bunch of tractors, hiring a fraction of the previous number of employees for driving the tractors, and never having to look back?

For tractors to be widely available and cheap, this implies a juxtaposition with a time in which pre-tractor farming was expensive. The industrial age ultimately rendered traditional slavery too expensive compared to the common laborer due to unique combination of clever agricultural engineering, the birth of modern financial capitalism, and robust land availability via new gains in military conquest. Be it a slave, an immigrant, or a vagabond, the final price points didn't significantly affect yield, thus, the real cost of slavery (maintenance, security, lobbying, administration, etc.) was exposed and was no longer competitive. America, a major cotton exporter, fought a bloody civil war to protect that exporter status against Egypt and India, so yes, institutional assistance to preserve the previously profitable model was absolutely involved in both the enrichment of successful labor practices and replacing it with something more GDP efficient.

This transition took place in a world where the first steam tractors in the 1870s weighed 30,000 pounds![1] The technical maintenance of these beasts was impossible for the average farmer. It wasn't until Ford and the gasoline revolution that tractors finally took off and were make cheap enough. By then, human organization was also in the midst of the electric light bulb, doubling human productivity, and the steel highrise, linearly scaling the productivity of a parcel of land. This massive surge of productive capacity, when paired with growth-oriented industrial capitalism, created a tremendous labor shortage. Peak tractor production didn't occur until 1951, well after America established itself as the world reserve currency. I'd be suspicious of using the tractor as a valid analog for artificial intelligence.

When productive capacity skyrocketed due to these three technological innovations, farm owners did hire more employees, as did the rest of the aggregate productive forces of society.

> Are there farm owners out there who still long for the days established institutions solved their labor shortage problems so they don't have to buy tractors?

I believe you call them “southerners” and they are solving their labor shortages with institutional mandates (via globalization and NAFTA) that allow immigrant labor to be cheaper than native labor.

> Have you seen CGPGrey's Humans Need Not Apply?

I have. I'm deeply familiar with Baxter and it's ability to augment FoxConn. Notice I said augment, not replace. It's response times are still too slow, and even if it got a CUDA-powered GPU neural network, China can always engage in protectionist legislation that render all technological advantages moot. CPGrey doesn't address the ability of the Cuba's and the China's of the world to socially absorb actual labor costs due of political paranoia. I recommend studying the tale of William Lee[2] to see just how far back the political fear of automation goes.

[1] https://eh.net/encyclopedia/economic-history-of-tractors-in-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lee_(inventor)