What a great comparison; I've never thought of it this way. It's obviously not perfect since the automation is so temperamental shall we say, but this does give me more empathy for the countless workers whose jobs have been re-natured by technology.

From their prospective, the efficiency increases and more gets done, but the hours and wage stay the same and the number of co-workers may decrease.

I don’t even have to imagine it, you just described my job now that we have LLMs.

I believe that was the point

Reading it back now it does seem pretty obvious. That’s what I get for commenting right after waking up!

All good, it's a Monday morning

efficiency is the enemy of employment, no?

The amount of work expands to fill the available labour. All other things being equal, at least. Which they aren't, but it's a usefully wrong model.

There’s many praises to sing about efficiency, (and I don’t take your 1 liner as a position against it). That said, efficiency, job creation, and underemployment overlap quite a bit.

There’s far more scientists, programmers, and doctors today than farmers and stablehands.

At the same time, people who lost manufacturing jobs to automation and outsourcing, did not get jobs with equivalent pay and growth.

Human brains do not get retrained very easily, and so every technological revolution is a boon to those who grasp it, and a challenge for those who invested their time in skills no longer in demand.

Nursing massively expanded but they didn't want to take it.

You can't expect factory workers to magically turn into nurses. Sure, people can learn new things, but human skillsets are not entirely fungible.