Yes, and even in prehistoric eras people could attempt to compete with the wind at blowing air, but I've restricted my above description of "labor" to activities in which I was not already outcompeted to the point where I couldn't hope to make a living. So I've written off the once-profitable career of "calculator" from the get-go.
Slaves at least still need to be fed and housed, but I'm sure they were tough competition indeed for independent laborers.
> I've restricted my above description of "labor" to activities in which I was not already outcompeted
Then you've constructed a tautology. Humans remain competitive in various applications of their labour, broadly defined, despite entire categories having become uncompetitive. If we exempt those categories then the historical record looks static. But only because we defined away the change.
> Slaves at least still need to be fed and housed, but I'm sure they were tough competition indeed for independent laborers
I believe there is evidence for this all over the place. By analogy, however, AI is orders of magnitude less power efficient than humans. This places a floor on the price of AI and thus human labour that competes with it. (Though that floor, as with pre-information age floors, is well below almost everyone on this forum.)
> By analogy, however, AI is orders of magnitude less power efficient than humans.
It is both more and less power efficient, depending on the task. When a coding task is easy enough that an LLM can actually do it, I've seen e.g. Claude do a week's worth of human labour in a few hours of wall-clock time for what amounted to 0.25 euro of subscription cost. When it can't, it will churn as many tokens as you've got and leave a big ball of mud behind, as seen with the recent attempt at a vibe-coded browser.
When Stable Diffusion is good enough, the energy cost per image output is comparable to the calorific consumption of a human living long enough to type the prompt. When Stable Diffusion isn't good enough, no amount of re-prompting gets you something it can't do.
My point of concern is that this domain may shrink to the empty set. There is no law of economics that says this will, with certainty, not happen.
And while AI might be less power efficient than me on some tasks, power is cheap enough that I don't think the energy price floor affords my continued survival.
Slaves at least still need to be fed and housed, but I'm sure they were tough competition indeed for independent laborers.