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aqme28yesterday at 9:52 PM1 replyview on HN

There’s no reason an AI couldn’t anticipate these things and hire people to do those checks and act on their reports as though it were a human farmer. Thats different than an AI researcher telling Claude which step is next.


Replies

greedoyesterday at 10:08 PM

"hire people to do those..."

We already have those people, they're called farmers. And they are already very used to working with high technology. The idea of farmers being a bunch of hicks is really pretty stupid. For example, farmers use drones for spraying pesticides, fungicides, and inputs like fertilizer. They use drones to detect rocks in fields that then generate maps for a small skid steer to optimally remove the rocks.

They use GPS enabled tractors and combines that can tell how deep a seed is planted, what the yield is on a specific field (to compare seed hybrids), what the moisture content of the crop is. They need to be able to respond to weather quickly so that crops get harvested at the optimal times.

Farmers also have to become experts in crop futures, crop insurance, irrigation and tillage best practices; small equipment repair, on and on and on.