But the food needs (and other needs) have expanded 10x. It makes no sense to look at the absolute numbers instead of the percentage. If there had been no technological advancements at all, the workforce would have still expanded (in absolute numbers) to match the population.
Without machines and technology, we would need far, far more people today in agriculture. The need for all those jobs has been destroyed by technology.
When one job becomes obsolete, this frees up labour and people gradually move to other jobs. This increases production, since we're still producing agricultural products (using fewer people), and there's more people now producing other things. Agricultural jobs were destroyed, but there were always other jobs people could do, that weren't done before simply because agriculture sucked up so much labour.
This pattern will continue for a while. When human labour is no longer the best tool for one job, that labour will be reallocated to something else. There's still plenty of things we'd like more of.
But the video is talking about what happens when humans are no longer the best tool for any job. It's happened many times in history that some job has become obsolete. We haven't yet made a machine that's better than humans at every job.
One way to look at this is to compare the basic capabilities of humans and machines. The human list remains roughly constant, but the machine list increases over time.
Actually, what's happening in automation is not what people expected. We still don't have good robot manipulation in unstructured situations. Machine learning gave us automation of "higher" functions first.
The current result is a growth in really dumb jobs, like Amazon warehouse pickers. The computers do almost all the thinking. Humans just pick up things where told to do so and put them somewhere else. Such jobs have no promotion path.
This is the "machines should think, people should work" revolution.
Without machines and technology, we would need far, far more people today in agriculture. The need for all those jobs has been destroyed by technology.
When one job becomes obsolete, this frees up labour and people gradually move to other jobs. This increases production, since we're still producing agricultural products (using fewer people), and there's more people now producing other things. Agricultural jobs were destroyed, but there were always other jobs people could do, that weren't done before simply because agriculture sucked up so much labour.
This pattern will continue for a while. When human labour is no longer the best tool for one job, that labour will be reallocated to something else. There's still plenty of things we'd like more of.
But the video is talking about what happens when humans are no longer the best tool for any job. It's happened many times in history that some job has become obsolete. We haven't yet made a machine that's better than humans at every job.