The organic analogy to AI refers to locally-produced crops grown with natural fertilizers and pre-industrial pest and weed control strategies, as an antitode to

The organic analogy to AI refers to locally-produced crops grown with natural fertilizers and pre-industrial pest and weed control strategies, as an antitode to industrial-fertilizer soaked, herbicide-and-pesticide drenched, antibiotic-and-synthetic-hormone laden, globally-transported heavily-processed foodstuffs. While this does sound good to most people, it's always worth remembering that Old South plantations produced nothing but 100% organic cotton, despite their atrocious practices of human slavery. If we include this perspective, AI has some potentially extremely positive potential. One of the most promising trends in agriculture is the adoption of AI to the problem of weed and pest control, as well as fertilizer use. AI robots crawling over fields can use image recognition to identify weeds (and kill them with IR lasers) as well as pest infestations in their early stages. Application of fertilizer to individual plants on as as-needed basis (rather than just dumping large volumes on the entire field) also becomes possible. This can be done far faster and more efficiently than by human laborers walking up and down rows of crops, weeding by hand. Potentially, this could make organic-style agriculture as cost-effective as the industrial variety. Sure, this means fewer field labor agricultural jobs - which are pretty tough, backbreaking jobs by any measure. Similar arguments apply to a lot of the drudgery in creative and artistic endeavors. Of course, AI could also replace most corporate board positions, and a lot of upper management as well, and hey, why not the shareholders and investors too? Are they of any more value to the operation of a business than the replaceable grunt workers are? Let's make the world's smartest AI and have it make decisions about how capital should be allocated to promising startups, removing fallible humans from the loop. Resource optimization on steroids! Yes, I read too much science fiction. See William Gibson, Iain M. Banks, Hannu Rajaniemi, and Adrian Tchaikovsky for examples of what can go wrong (and maybe right).