Where does this agricultural labour point come from?

It's so common here and so obviously wobbly. That labour was displaced (and in most cases into way more gruelling and dangerous factory work).

The AI pitch is that the giant superbrain will do all the knowledge work and rapidly self-improve faster than humans (and therefore, do more future jobs we could do). That is a pitch for replacing human labour.

You can't simultaneously have a machine that is said to be likely to wipe out entire categories — not market sectors, categories of work — and then say that all those people will get jobs elsewhere. Because, where? The timescales they are talking about are short. Where's the work going to come from in time?

As far as I can tell many people, especially tech practitioners, are as a whole desperate to believe that there is an iron law of the universe that “technological progress” is always a net good. Maybe there are some bumps along the way, but you can’t make an omelette…

The next couple of years will see these people contorting themselves into increasingly complex knots to try and argue that AI is making the world a better place. The arguments will get far weirder, and far more detached from reality, than bad comparisons to agricultural labor.