> But certainly the positive supply shock was not great news for farmers, many of whom lost their jobs. In the case of AI, I'm asking us -- programmers -- not to make the mistake of saying "this is not a benefit for me, therefore it's not a benefit for society".

I'm not sure about that - farming kind of sucks. I think what the transition away from farming generally looked like was people who had some kind of small family farm, where multiple generations had worked hard all their lives to make a living growing crops, having kids who left the farm to work in some other industry, and making more money that way and having better working conditions (at the price of living a more urban lifestyle foreign to their family back on the farm). When their parents' generation got old and was ready to pass the family farm along, the urban worker generation decided they'd rather not quit their jobs and go back to the family farm; so (perhaps with some feeling of guilt), they sold the land to a large farming conglomerate; and then the next generations who grew up in an urban area doing white-collar jobs simply forgot that their ancestors had ever been farmers.

Something like this happened in my own family - about one hundred years ago, my great-grandfather owned a farm on what was then the outskirts of the bay area. He sold the land when he retired, no one else in my family ever did agricultural work, I only know the story, and the land that farm was once on is now incredibly valuable bay area real estate that is not being used for any agricultural purpose. I have no desire to work in agriculture.