> 200 years ago, 95% of the workers in my country worked in subsistence farming. Today, only 2% are farmers.

Yes, it took some time to go from manual/animal labor (energy used is food) to mechanical labor (mostly oil energy). And oil is more energy dense than food, and tractors are more powerful than horses. And bonus points for the oil, it allowed to build fertilizers to boost productivity per acre. So, yes eventually we just need 2% to do what what 95% used to do in farming.

AI is promising to do the same but in virtually all industries (manufacturing, services, healthcare, etc.) and in a way shorten span.

Work used to be labor (human/animal) fueled by energy (food) + intelligence (human) fueled by energy (food), then labor (machine) fueled by energy (oil/electricity) + intelligence (AI) fueled by energy (electricity).

IF work is mostly done by AI/machines fueled by energy. Then work's price is mostly a function of energy price (assuming materials can be extracted/transported/transformed is also a function of energy).

If energy becomes abundant and cheap, then there is no reasons to not let AI do the work.

But then what happens to the rest of us, how the economy keeps humming ?

It was a bunch of small changes over the course of 200 years but yes that's perfectly comparible to the effects needed to justify the valuation put into all the AI companies right now... but I was talking about the issues with comparing it to singular inventions like the cotton gin or jacquard loom that DO largely only affect one industry.

I think it's weird there's so much pushback on the idea that if the hype proves true and it /can/ replace basically any knowledge worker (and potentially drive robots replacing physical laborers) that that would have a bit of a larger effect than inventions that affect some parts of some industries...

There's plenty of space to think it just won't happen (where I'm personally at, at least on the current LLM driven versions) but if it does work the broad spread of the impact would require a huge amount of change all at once.

There is no guarantee that this pattern will continue and that capitalism will always make enough good jobs for everyone who loses jobs to automation.