[elihu]

On large scales, it's more like you have a hundred big tractors and if one of them breaks down the whole operation keeps going because there are 99 big tractors left. The question then becomes: how much maintenance do you have to do per ton of food produced? A swarm of small robots have a lot more parts than a large tractor that does the same amount of work.

There's also energy costs to consider; does a drone swarm use more or less energy than a large tractor for the same result? I'm not sure what the answer is there, and I suppose it depends quite a bit on what kind of work is being done.

[ForrestN]

I guess it's true that the originally propose 1000 is an arbitrary number, and it would take some experimentation and work to figure out the ideal number of robots per acre to optimize whatever you care about most (yield, power consumption, maintenance costs being obvious contenders). But I think it's easy to say that literally one giant robot covering an entire edible forest is obviously going to be more inefficient and troublesome than a swarm of some size.

[ilyt]

> But I think it's easy to say that literally one giant robot covering an entire edible forest is obviously going to be more inefficient and troublesome than a swarm of some size.

Yeah, nobody suggested that we have building size tractors so I don't know what you're arguing.

They were talking about "current farming machine sized ones" vs "a drone with some crap attached"

[_c3ag]

and there is the problem of having too much variety on crops and people wanting meat, basically…

farms are pretty automated these days, maybe 100% when tractors can self-repair; which maybe is not _that_ far away… because some already give reports of what went wrong to the central