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The Machines will come to control our infrastructure through a series of small decisions that seemed like a good idea at the time. Computer control of farming
by manicdee 10y ago
The Machines will come to control our infrastructure through a series of small decisions that seemed like a good idea at the time.
Computer control of farming decisions such as watering and fertilising. Link that in with insolation and wind prediction to minimise waste or maximise productivity.
This happens in the cloud thanks to insolation prediction being tied into wide-area networks of solar farms.
More such networks evolve independently, then one day some bright spark realises that prediction and control in domain X can be combined with control and prediction in domain Y to produce greater efficiencies.
Linking reproductive health and food production to maximise water savings, for example.
Next thing you know the computers decide that human population is best maintained in the order of hundreds of millions rather than billions.
And then we find out that Terminator was actually propaganda from the human rebels who didn't like the computers telling them not to breed, and the nuclear war was Skynet protecting its desired humans from the rebels, not protecting itself.
- nradov 10y agoThe limiting factor in farm productivity is not decision making by human farmers. Anyone who has been farming for years already makes pretty close to optimal decisions based on the available data about crop prices, weather, soil status, labor rates, etc. The ones who make bad decisions end up bankrupt, and leave farming or work as hired farmhands. And there are so few decision-making farmers left anyway that automating the decision making part of their jobs won't achieve any meaningful cost savings.
- kpil 10y agoMaybe Amazon will own 90% of the farms because the have the cheapest robots and best algorithms and statistics.
- nradov 10y agoJohn Deere and their competitors are far, far ahead of Amazon.com in farm automation. There's a huge difference between warehouse picking robots and farm equipment. Being cheaper doesn't matter, it's ROI that counts.
- Danihan 10y agoExcept Amazon could easily acquire John Deere.
- ShannonAlther 10y agoJust briefly scanning the numbers on Wikipedia, Amazon.com could acquire John Deere, but it'd be highly unlikely unless they expected that a change in management would yield implausibly high returns.
- Danihan 10y agoI suppose my point is, they could acquire the knowledge needed to do cutting edge farm automation if that's something they wanted. And it should be something they want.
- nradov 10y agoI'm sure Jeff Bezos is eagerly awaiting your advice on Amazon.com acquisition targets. Farm automation is a great strategic fit with web services and online retailing, right?
- Danihan 10y agoIt's a rather straightforward step in controlling the supply chain when you are pushing something like Amazon Fresh. I suppose they also aren't a hardware manufacturer? Or a logistics company?
- alexwebb2 10y ago> Anyone who has been farming for years already makes pretty close to optimal decisions based on the available data about crop prices, weather, soil status, labor rates, etc. I'm not sure if you're including software analysis in your notion of "based on the available data", but if not, then this would absolutely not be true - unaided humans, even veteran growers who've been managing the same fields for decades, do not make anywhere close to optimal decisions. They make good ones, generally, and can be long-term profitable with relative ease, but it's absolutely not even close to what you get when you bring intelligent software into the mix.
- nradov 10y agoSure of course good farmers are taking advantage of the best available software analysis tools. The point is that those tools already work well enough that even if superhuman AI actually becomes available at some point (and that might never happen) it won't necessarily make any better decisions than what human farmers are already doing today.