The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil

A useful way of quantifying this progress is crop density: how much food can be grown in a given area of land. For example, corn production in the United States uses land more than seven times as efficiently as a century and a half ago. In 1866, US corn farmers averaged an estimated 24.3 bushels per acre, and by 2021 this had reached 176.7 bushels per acre.[252] Worldwide, land efficiency improvement has been roughly exponential, and today we need, on average, less than 30 percent of the land that we needed in 1961 to grow a given quantity of crops.[253] This trend has been essential to enabling the global population increases in that time and has spared humanity the mass starvation from overpopulation that many people worried about when I was growing up. Further, because crops are now grown at extremely high density, and machines do a lot of the work that used to be done by hand, one farmworker can grow enough food to feed about seventy people. As a result, farmwork has gone from constituting 80 percent of all labor in the United States in 1810 to 40 percent in 1900 to less than 1.4 percent today.[254]