If your passion was to plow the field by hand then I agree. Otherwise it is definitely not an equivalent.

Farmer protests are in the news at the moment, and the people quoted by the journalists are talking about farming as a passion.

The more the farms automate, the fewer farmer workers there can be.

Logic isn't part of these protests either: the farmers are being told "you're making more food than we need, please make less" and yet the placards are (in the local language) "no farms = no food".

No, I specifically meant if your passion was to plow the field by hand. All I want is not to put an equals sign between something that takes years of formal education and years of self study and development, and something you can master in a week or month. Being and engineer or doctor is who you (partly but permanently) become. The tractor didn't rob anyone of their farming passion. It did make plowmen become factory workers and if that was someone's true passion then an exception must be granted, but I really think the 1 to 1 comparison between something that can be mastered in a week vs years doesn't do anyone proper justice.

I'm not sure I follow you. The problem isn't that people lose their passion. The problem is that people lose their means of subsistence. The factory workers displaced by automation share the same plight as the farmers before them: how do I feed my family when I have no job?

Efficiency puts people out of work. They can be relocated to other useful pursuits, but usually they're left to do that on their own.

I agree. I simply claim that losing something you picked up in a week and losing something you dedicated your life to (in some cases, not all cases of course) is not exactly the same. It is also far easier in the former case to shrug off and maybe try plumbing, construction or anything else.

> you're making more food than we need, please make less

Dont know what country this is in but here in Germany farmers are mostly having an issue with prices being set too low by too big buyers, regardless of the demand.

It was either the UK, France, or Spain; the article covered all three.

What does passion have to do with anything in this context?

Nobody is talking about AI replacing people’s passion projects. The discussion was about jobs and economy.

The notion that people’s jobs are their passion isn’t true for the vast majority of the world.

People are still employed to drive tractors though.

90% fewer in absolute numbers compared to driving oxen across fields, despite a simultaneous ten-fold increase in the population.

In the grand scheme of things, definitely. But that didn't help out-of-work laborers and miners watching their children slowly starve.

Yea but it helped the arguably larger portion of the population which dont see their children starve anymore due to cheaper food.

Hopefully we can workout how to have this revolution without the kids starving bit this time eh?

In the grand scheme of things, definitely. I don't think we should slow down technological progress at all. But you're never gonna sell anything by saying "yeah, but only your kids will starve!".