When I read articles such as this one I still see a lot of hype. I'm not a Luddite or anything, bu I think the future of sustainable, productive agriculture li

When I read articles such as this one I still see a lot of hype. I'm not a Luddite or anything, bu I think the future of sustainable, productive agriculture lies in agronomic science, not laser-robot overlords or the next OGM fad. If driving a car is less demanding than driving a tractor, let alone a tractor coupled with equipment, since we're still some years away from generalized self-driven cars, what can we say about farming in general? There's a lot of work to be done that would make agriculture sky-rocket in terms of efficiency and environment protection. The last great changes in agriculture have been to lock away the farmer from the equipment, managing software, and crops they use, and to make it easier for large companies to guarantee sales and futures markets to gamble on predicted yields. In the past, the food industry was in between farmers and consumers. Now it seems independent farmers are the middle man corporations want to remove: an annoying part of the chain of production. So this has nothing to with technological advances, but in feeding the hype that everything can be automated with ease. This is a publicity stunt for the zeitgeist of the AI dream. And, by the way, pest and weed control is not a triviality. Not if you want to do it right. Automation is not the mere substitution of humans: it's also the adaptation of the chain of value so that it can be automated. It always comes with a cost that is sometimes underestimated.