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Could AI robots with lasers make herbicides – and farm workers – obsolete?
- henearkr 2y agoLasers are even more energy-intensive than pesticides... Mechanical methods could be better, but just not micromanaging it and using permaculture methods would be the best solution.
- mistercow 2y agoBut they’re basically guaranteed not to poison your food or local wildlife.
- SapporoChris 2y agoNo not poison, but I've been wondering if the lasers could harm anyone's eyesight, human or wildlife. Blind bees? I suspect the incident rate would be extremely low to non-existent.
- echelon 2y agoThey're targeted beams. They won't be scanning at eye level. Any pollinators harmed will probably be extremely small in number, and there might even be updates to the computer vision routines that can minimize that harm. This is going to be very good for the environment once it takes off.
- Log_out_ 2y agoLaser has only 3 moving parts though
- niemandhier 2y ago2 if you use a rotating mirror and a tilting actor
- Retric 2y agoLasers are going to use far less energy than pesticides per plant killed. A 20W laser (120W input) can cut 3/4th inch thick pine at 6 inches a minute. For burning through a young weeds stem you’re talking fractions of a second per plant. It’s likely the motor and other electronics ends up using more energy than the laser. Mechanical methods are going to be a lot more complex and thus have significantly more maintenance issues.
- henearkr 2y agoYou are comparing nothing here. You forgot one whole leg of the comparison... i.e. the pesticide production footprint.
- Retric 2y agoI was comparing it to the equipment used to carry the laser or pesticide. The application of pesticide itself is ~2-3 orders of magnitude larger the laser before you consider manufacturing or transportation. The laser itself is a rounding error here, what matters is the other equipment involved.
- CoastalCoder 2y ago> Lasers are even more energy-intensive than pesticides... Even if that's true, perhaps having a small-ish solar farm near the crops would allow the bots to recharge onsite? That might be(?) less energy-intensive than manufacturing pesticides remotely and shipping them to the fields.
- mewpmewp2 2y agoI was imagining in my head kind of real time conversion from sunlight to a laser. Maybe not the practical solution, but I do wonder how doable would that be. Back of the napkin with GPT assistance seems around 2 square meters needed to power a 150W laser.
- ulrikrasmussen 2y agoWith what model are you comparing them? Lasers are not energy efficient with respect to how much power they output compared to how much you put in, but that is also not how you measure the efficiency of a pesticide. What you want to know is the energy spent per treated m2 of field, and I don't see how you can immediately dismiss targeted lasers over uniformly sprayed pesticide without further analysis of the average number of weeds in an m2 of field combined with the power requirement to kill it with lasers.
- henearkr 2y agoPesticides are no more uniformly sprayed. Nowadays, there is monitoring of the crop health by zone, with cameras on trucks. I'm not advocating for pesticides. But I'm saying lasers are the wrong solution. Nobody is even considering permaculture? Seriously?
- mistercow 2y agoIt’s going to be fascinating to see what new laser resistant weeds and bugs come out of this.
- tossandthrow 2y agoWhy would that develop? The only reason why crops needs to have resistens now is because we treat the entire field with the stuff. With lasers, you can treat the individual item.
- ulrikrasmussen 2y agoGP wasn't talking about crops, but about the selective pressure that would be placed on weeds to better survive laser attacks. I could imagine that weeds would either develop heat resistance or would change appearance to make detection harder.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- goda90 2y agoChanging appearance to avoid detection is as old a agriculture. In fact it's why we have some foods we enjoy now. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry
- BenFranklin100 2y agoThe OP is making a joke.
- isoprophlex 2y agoI'm imagining a field full of chrome-plated beetles and metallic, reflective grasses, haha
- Mistletoe 2y agoThat’s probably not possible for the same reason that we don’t get bacteria resistant to things like ethanol and bleach. https://ehs.weill.cornell.edu/pathogen-resistance-and-disinfectants https://ehs.weill.cornell.edu/pathogen-resistance-and-disinf...
- louthy 2y agoAn army of robot peasants working the fields with lasers for eyes? What could possibly go wrong? [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peasants%27_Revolt https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peasants%27_Revolt
- ape4 2y agoI would expect they don't have full AI - or even chatGPT. They would just have computer vision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_vision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_vision So they aren't going to get tired of working for humans and revolt.
- mewpmewp2 2y agoUnless they get infected by a more capable AI virus.
- internet101010 2y agoNow I am imagining someone sneaking onto a farm in the dead of night and shoving a USB drive into one of the back of one of the robot's heads.
- beardedwizard 2y agoWhat is full ai? Why would they use a generative model like gpt for image classification?
- bwhiting2356 2y agoWhen I was 16, I worked on an organic farm in Chase, BC, Canada. Every morning we would scrape bugs and their eggs off potato leaves and into a jar, feed them to the chickens
- goda90 2y agoWhy not let the chickens into the potato fields to do the work themselves?
- NotACop182 2y agoI'm guessing they would eat the crops as well
- goda90 2y agoNot with potatoes at least. The leaves of nightshades are bitter and toxic even to birds.
- throwup238 2y agoChickens scratch the ground to find food so once they’re done eating the bugs on the crops, they’ll tear up the plant beds looking for more.
- karaterobot 2y agoI'm sure that if they perfect this technology, all those unemployed farm workers will just get high-tech green jobs, and everything will be fine. There's rarely small or large scale consequences for this kind of thing.
- gadflyinyoureye 2y agoAn interesting thing is that many farm workers are migrants. They are needed for a period and then, largely, return to their country of origin. As the US tightens down on abusive practices, there would be less migrants. Therefore we need tech like this since citizens won’t do the work and if they did they would make the product too expensive.
- karaterobot 2y agoI can see how in a world without seasonal laborers, there would be fewer legal migrants who do work in the country then go home, definitely. Something tells me that wouldn't solve the migration crisis.
- ulrikrasmussen 2y agoI think this technology is pretty exciting because it could also allow regenerative farming to be organic - as far as I understand that is currently impossible because you have to apply herbicides when you don't plow your land. That would be a win both for the environment and the climate.
- goda90 2y agoThere are no spray, no till farms. Cover crops are a great way to suppress weeds, and then you harvest, cut down, and/or graze animals on the cover crops to help create a mulch layer on the soil.
- ulrikrasmussen 2y agoThank you, I didn't know that.
- xchip 2y ago[flagged]
- mewpmewp2 2y agoWhich ones?
- KaiserPro 2y agoOne of the exciting things about better computer vision is the ability to have dense mixed crops. This is where you can have three or four sympathetic crops growing side by side, allowing for greater resistance to various environmental factors. It also, if you give them enough attention, increase yeild.
- theluketaylor 2y agoEspecially with a robot that can harvest and sort different crops. Monocultures are unsustainable, but currently there isn’t really any other economic choice to keep a farm running. Technology like this is going to open so many new possibilities.
- leemcalilly 2y agoI want this for my yard. Like a yard roomba.
- noisy_boy 2y agoI think the gap here is hardware - specifically suited to work with various type of plants/crops, some of which are delicate (some use cases like this are hands-off but there are probably a lot more hands-on scenarios). I think the software can be developed relatively easily (ml/vision etc) but I'm not aware of any hardware that is as dexterous as our fingers and can be easily used in a farm setting.
- tomxor 2y agoI feel like this is just another version of people solving problems created by technology by adding more technology. We could probably side step a lot of issues, simultaneously, more elegantly, more efficiently, by driving down to the foundational technology and considering alternatives with our newer technological arsenal. In farming that foundational technology is monocultures, it simplifies scaling, efficiency of planting, managing and harvesting, but the cost is soil degradation, disease, and susceptibility to pests. All of these issues evaporate with multicrop farming, it would be more interesting to apply robotics and ML to making the planting, and harvesting of that practically scalable.
- dartos 2y agoNo
- black_13 2y ago[dead]
- skywhopper 2y agoA: No
- RiverCrochet 2y agoMy cousin, who I disagree with totally, says this: Pro-pesticide lobbies will modify the political landscape to their needs, neutralize public dissent with thinktanks and production of studies that show that lasers are a plot to rob you of your God-given right to consume chemicals produced by corporations that provide jobs to blue-collar communities, and we'll be stuck with the poisons until the next plague or world war fundamentally rearranges the power reaches of the dynastic centers of wealth that own it all.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- kjkjadksj 2y agoThere will always be people working. Labor is cheap. It will always be front running capital intensive automation that needs to generate a margin to be successful, a margin based on data from people doing that job.
- readthenotes1 2y agoLabor is cheaper than machinery until it isn't. I think we have some historical examples back in the period known as the industrial revolution that might speak to this.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoThe point is, machines need to be built and optimized. That has a cost that even today is high enough where its still better to have a worker flipping burgers, even if we have the technology to automate this already. The cost of labor is just that low, and the cost of automation is just that high, and the amount of profit you get from burger flipping is only covering so much overhead.
- Caius-Cosades 2y agoI sure wish. Less toxic stuff we spread around the better. Now if we could do something about the horrible waste of fertilizer that ruins our waters and coastal seas. I mean I'd love to go and swim in july and august, but the waters are laden with blue-algae-neurotoxins so it's bit of a no-no.
- aaron695 2y agoI bought a Propane Torch Weed Burner and it doesn't really work - https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Weed+Burner+Torch https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Weed+Burner+Torch I didn't expect fire to work well but I thought it would be fun, which it was, which is gardening. It's hard to tell how well it works, depending on how much patience you have you can burn it to the ground and keep going heating the soil and in theory roots and stored energy but that's time and money. Plants will die if you keep damaging them enough before they can recover it'd be interesting to see what the specs are here. Totally fine in theory.