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This sounds like a much more efficient way to practice monocropping, enhance fragility, and capture economic value by increasing dependence on non-local food so

• jonas21 6y ago
  The use of this technology is orthogonal to whatever other issues you may have with modern agriculture. Despite growth in organics, 99% of farmland in the U.S. is still conventional. Anything that reduces chemical herbicide usage on that farmland is a good thing.
  • ReadEvalPost 6y ago
    The right way to farm is to work with other plants and the weeds themselves to regenerate the soil. The idea that weeds are pests that need to be eliminated at all costs is antithetical to proper regenerative farming. Anything that enables or propagates industrial farming is genuinely a bad thing that we should not support as technologists, it is not at all orthogonal! "A little bit less of a bad thing" still leaves us in a bad place.
    • hosh 6y ago
      Yup, agreed. Speaking to others listening in: some weeds are edible, and other functions as part of ecological succession. We could be using farming practices that goes with that, rather than against it. Instead, industrial farming is optimized to produce single crops conforming to consumer expectations, cost-efficient harvesting, and durability for long transports and storage. Industrial farming is not optimized for nutritional value, freshness, and resilience against environmental stressors. The system by which 8 billion people are fed resembles a Ponzi scheme in which we are borrowing against future generations ... and with the increased variability in weather and water rights wars, it is only going to get more, not less, fragile. Example is the dandelion. Besides having culinary and medicinal value, it acts as a pioneer species for depleted soil. Killing it with more roundup or zapping it with a laser, and then contaminating the land with more fertilizer will just encourage more dandelion growth. The land and ecosystem is signaling a fertility issue, and our present practices work against it. I say this even though the common mallow is the bane of my existence here in the lower Sanoren ;-)
• mssundaram 6y ago
  That was my thought as well. Thanks for sharing the interesting article
  • hosh 6y ago
    Yeah, this robot is an example of tech being utilized to extract value. The ML, CV, and robotic tech tickles my inner geek, but tech was not designed or deployed in a regenerative way. There are many things we can do to have more resilient, restorative, regenerative agriculture ... that often don't involve much high tech at all. So what is a more worthwhile use of high tech? Being someone in tech and having greatly economically benefited from it, I've recently been reframing what I know about software tech, startups, innovation with a regenerative paradigm. I am still making my way through Carol Sanford's work on regenerative paradigms and figuring out a lot of this stuff out. So far: (1) Christopher Alexander had introduced the idea of creating pattern languages for people living, working, and playing within building architecture so that they can modify and design their own living spaces. What we ended up with are cookie-cutter housing in suburbia. His work greatly influenced OOP and Human-Computer-Interface design (see his 1996 OOPSLA Keynote) ... and what we ended up with is the Gang of Four, Apple products, growth hacks, and "user engagement". What we don't have are individuals, families, and communities having computer tech that can customized by the users for what works in their local environment. Smalltalk was designed with that intent in mind, but our legacy from Smalltalk is the Gang of Four and OOP "design patterns". (2) There was a recent article posted here. It was a fictional interview, the premise being someone from a parallel world where software design was elevated on par with science and art, and not merely engineering. They start with a "design brief" rather than engineering requirements. I lost track of that article. Just some evolving thoughts.
    • mssundaram 6y ago
      > Yeah, this robot is an example of tech being utilized to extract value. The ML, CV, and robotic tech tickles my inner geek, but tech was not designed or deployed in a regenerative way. There are many things we can do to have more resilient, restorative, regenerative agriculture ... that often don't involve much high tech at all. I have this struggle often. Before software engineering, I was working on permaculture farms and apprenticed as a natural builder (cob mostly).
• canadianfella 6y ago
  Killing weeds means more food. There’s nothing wrong with that. 8 billion people can’t survive off picking wild berries.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• schoen 6y ago
  Elsewhere in this thread someone suggested the opposite. Presumably you could attempt to implement this either as "destroy all species other than C" or as "destroy only species W". I don't know how to think about which, if either, this approach is more suited to.
• nbardy 6y ago
  I'm so tired of these endless orthogonal attacks on technology that is aiming to help the environment. Of course things are perfect. This could reduce the usage of tons of dangerous herbicide. Go start your own thing instead of lazily smashing others.
• 99_00 6y ago
  Why did you link to an article about pacific northwest indigenous forest gardens. It seems like you are making an implied argument. Not stating your argument ensures it can't attacked. Not wanting your argument attacked suggests it is weak and won't stand up to scrutiny.
  • hosh 6y ago
    You caught me red handed. I have made explicit arguments elsewhere on HN before. It usually involves writing a lot of exposition, starting with identifying and deconstruction of the default paradigm that some people call “Value Extraction”. It can get very in involved. This time, I was adding a subtle sarcasm, which I knew a small minority of HN readers will pick up. They are already familiar with food forests, restoration agriculture, and some may even be familiar with regenerative paradigms. But let me see if I can condense this into something explicit: Rather than eliminating everything but the monocrop, there are alternative forms of agriculture that takes advantage of the synergies that come from companion planting, “guilds”. Specific combination of plants planted together can be put together to reduce ecological invasions, or create an ecosystem that can produce harvestable food items for most of the year. Some combinations can mutually resist pests and diseases. Others can be combined to take advantage of vertical spaces (canopy layers), or to effectively modify the local hardiness and heat zones, or modify wind conditions. Designing such a thing can get very complex. Some designs, however, become so resilient, they continue producing human-harvestable food despite being abandoned for over 150 years. The Pacific Northwest is not the only region where indigenous people have used these practices. There is quite a bit of anthropological evidence that this is a wide spread practice ... what is novel with that article is that ecologists are acknowledging that this had happened in the Pacific NW.
    • hosh 6y ago
      And to address the several commentors who say this technology is orthogonal to agricultural practices: An alternative use of ML, CV, and robotics, might be something that can observe and identify all the participants in an ecosystem, such as food forest, and use ML to sketch out the possibility space in which viable cross species synergies can enhance an ecosystem. This could be used as an aid in designing a food forest. One use of ML, accelerates ecological degeneration. A different use of ML accelerates ecological regeneration. I don’t think the latter involves a weed killing robot.