That was the case before automation. Right now, though, humans are

1. under-bidding automation (this will be decreasingly successful)

2. politically suppressing automation (AKA "creating jobs")

…because nobody wants to abandon the "work = eat" rule.

I can buy 2[1], but what's your evidence for 1? I mean, look at the decline in U.S. agriculture jobs over the past century in inverse proportion to agricultural output.

Sure, China employs a lot of manpower to perform the kind of manufacturing that in more developed economies was automated long ago, and that's profitable for them (for the moment). But that's not in the guise of any "make work" scheme, it's because it's the cheapest thing they can do at their current phase of industrial development.

[1] Even this claim is a little suspect. I have heard that in places like France and Japan, the political pressure for stable, high-wage jobs at the exclusion of others has led to fairly inefficient automation to avoid the subsequent risk and expense of hiring.

> I can buy 2[1], but what's your evidence for 1? I mean, look at the decline in U.S. agriculture jobs over the past century in inverse proportion to agricultural output.

Machinery, automation, and corporate food production has a lot to do with why people work less on farms. However, overwhelmingly agriculture in the US uses migrant labor that is often paid very little wage when workers are needed.

What under-bidding means is: offering a cheaper price (in this case by accepting third-world wages). In other words, humans are working for less money than it would cost to automate. This will become less successful as the cost to automate goes down and automation tech gets more capable.

The sun generates nearly 400 trillion trillion watts per second but don't let that fool you into thinking there's such a thing as a free lunch for more than a few billion years.

And without someone doing at least some work, you will starve no matter how many of those watts warm your reclined body.

Sure, the amount of that work is going down, and has been going down for centuries, but that's not an inevitable, natural process: The technological innovation to make food easier and cheaper to produce also requires work.

Dividing work into:

1. stuff people would do for free, for patriotism, for fun, or for kudos

2. stuff it takes economic coercion to make people do

I can't offhand think of any #2 that couldn't in principle either be automated away, or harmlessly abandoned.

How does one go about eating the sun or the trillion trillion watts produced by sun? You need all that energy converted to something edible - that means there is at least one job, agriculture. If you can automate that, then there is the job of automation engineer. And so it goes...

It's called photosynthesis, and it requires zero human intervention.

Photosynthesis is ridiculously inefficient at anything but building physical materials. And it would require a whole lot of human intervention to capture more than the pinprick of insolation that happens to fall on the non-arctic, non-desert parts of planet Earth (rather than waste off into space).

Only 1.2% of the American labour force is in the agricultural sector. The remaining 98.8% of workers are not directly involved in food production.

It would probably had to be heavily subsidized by the state. If you could turn solar energy to food, cheaply and reliantly enough you could never have to starve, and food price would plummet.

Just plop a solar panel and eat your manufactured cucumber. Problem is that agriculture today doesn't create it reliably enough (drought, heavy weather can destroy your crops).