Well, sometimes innovation does destroy jobs, and people have to adapt to new ones.

The plough didn't make everyone poor, but people working in agriculture these days are a tiny percentage of the population compared to the majority 150 years ago.

(I don't think LLMs are like that, tho).

Touching on this topic, I cannot recommend enough "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger" which (among other things) illustrates the story of dockworkers: there were entire towns dedicated to loading ships.

But the people employed in that area have declined by 90% in the last 60 years, while shipping has grown by orders of magnitude. New port cities arose, and old ones died. One needs to accept inevitable change sometimes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)

By the same logic, people working in transportation around the time Ford Model T was introduced did NOT diminish 100 years later. We went from about 3.2 million in 1910 (~8% of the workforce) to 6–16 million in 2023 (~4–10%, depending on definition). That is the effect of a century of transportation development.

Sometimes demand scales, maybe food is less elastic. Programming has been automating itself with each new language and library for 70 years and here we are, so many software devs. Demand scaled up as a result of automation.