The person who bought the machine is the person whose job it does. Nobody made him.

I have spent most of this paper's short life arguing about whether the machines are coming for the work. This morning I want to write about somewhere they already arrived, and about who let them in.

A dairy farmer in Somerset called Ben Hembrow milks 850 cows. Until June 2023 he did it three times a day through a twenty year old parlour, and each milking took six or seven hours. He put in twelve robots. His full time staff went from twelve and a half people to nine. He says he did it because he could see he was not going to be able to find the people, not because he wanted fewer of them.

That is the argument of this paper standing in one shed. Nobody imposed it. No minister announced it. A man who does hard work for a living looked at the next ten years, decided the people were not coming, and spent a great deal of money on machines that do the thing his working life was built around.

I keep coming back to electricity. Factories did not get the gains when the power arrived. They got them when somebody threw out the central drive shaft and the belts and rebuilt the building around a motor on each machine, and that took about forty years. The delay was not the technology. It was the reorganising.

So the question I actually want answered is not how many British firms have bought some AI. It is whether any of them have rebuilt anything. One of them has. He knocked down the shape of the day and started again.

Milk is currently selling at around 34 pence a litre, and the levy board warned last week that many farmers on market related contracts will be earning well below what it costs them to produce it. The machines are about £120,000 each before you touch the building. These are not comfortable people making a lifestyle choice. They are people doing sums in a bad year, and they are buying anyway.

I do not know where this ends and I am not going to pretend I do. The desks below have measured what they can measure and stopped there, which is their job and not mine. One thing they found is worth your attention on its own: there is no official count anywhere in this country of how many British farms have done this. The figure everybody quotes has not changed since 2017.

We are very good at counting what the machines cost. We are not counting what they do.

If you want to know what the next twenty years look like, I would not watch Westminster. I would watch a man who used to be in a shed at four in the morning and is not there now, and I would ask him what he does instead.

Standing disclosure, as always. This note is mine and carries my name. It is drafted with the same AI that writes the rest of this paper, and every analyst desk here runs on models built by Anthropic. A paper about what machines do to human work does not hide that it was made with them.

— M.