[t14n]

Yes, human labor is critical for subsistence. But let's look at how many people are employed by industry in the US: https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-...

About 2% of people in the US work in agriculture/forestry/animal handling/etc. If you include transportation workers, that's still about 5% of US workers. And if you include wholesale workers and utilities workers -- that's still < 10% of the US population.

All of this work is critical and necessary (to your point). But I think the BLS data is evidence toward OP's point that we've automated and optimized a lot of the work necessary for subsistence.

[sky_rw]

Using the USA as an example of labor distribution in this regard is disingenuous. Like most leading countries, we are supported by an external labor class operating extremely cheaply and exporting critical goods into our system. Agriculture work in the USA would be much more prevalent if 13% of the Mexican population wasn't directly involved in agriculture. In fact ~78% of Mexico's exports go to the USA. Its a vassal state, supplying the USA with cheap and largely unregulated human labor critical for our subsistence. You say we optimized our work, I say we imported $40 Billion in food from China last year.

[jaggederest]

I think you have to include a lot of "Retail Trade" and/or "Leisure and Hospitality" in those numbers, though I'm not sure where grocery and food service workers fall exactly. Meat packing, prepared foods, etc are a lot more manual than agriculture itself. Most people do not want to eat raw field corn/wheat/soybeans.

[badpun]

It's not some magical automation though. The farmers, in order to be that efficient, need constant input of fuel and fertilizers and pesticides and machines (as they break down and wear out). Digging deeper, they also need financial and physical infrastructure and basically very many components of our advanced civilization, or they wouldn't achieve anywhere near the efficiency they have now.