Summary
David Shapiro argues that most human workers face the same fate as horses did a century ago, and that economists who say otherwise are underestimating what AI can now do. The video opens with the history: American farms had about 26.7 million horses and mules in 1918, and horses supplied roughly 89% of farm draft power in 1920. Within a few decades, tractors and trucks replaced almost all of that work.
Shapiro lays out the numbers behind the transition, from the 440,000 Americans who drove horse-drawn wagons in 1910 to the tractor count rising from 246,000 in 1920 to over 4.5 million by 1960. He notes that drivers could retrain as chauffeurs and truckers, but horses could not, and he draws on a Nobel laureate’s 1983 prediction that machines would do to human labor what tractors did to horses.
He then engages the counterarguments, including MIT researchers who concluded that humans are not horses and a 2026 essay titled You Are Not a Horse. His response is that most paid work is routine, citing that eight of the ten largest US occupations pay below the average wage, and that new tasks increasingly involve thinking work, which AI is learning to do. He points to McKinsey’s November 2025 estimate that demonstrated technology could automate about 57% of hours worked.
šŗ Source: David Shapiro Ā· Published October 26, 2026
š·ļø Format: Opinion Editorial
