[awwaiid]

Farming is already pretty scaled in general, right? Napkin math with Claude's help says we can feed everyone with about 250k workers. The internet says we are currently using like 2 billion. Plenty of room for optimization even without additional technology advancement.

[inhumantsar]

this kind of reductive thinking misses all kinds of nuance and detail. farming isn't just plant seeds, add water, get yield, or put male and female animals in a field, get infinite animals.

one of the biggest reasons that so many people are involved in farming is that there are a huge number of operations which are extraordinarily difficult to scale. some things can only be picked by hand or only grow in specific soil conditions or are clever enough to escape enclosures routinely.

this is where automation comes in. autonomous tractors, robotic pickers, synthetic aperture radar satellite imagery, drone-applied fertilizer, AI-enabling video monitoring, etc.

[awwaiid]

Claude tried to shrink the number with that stuff too, but I directed it to keep only proven existing common tech. I also included delivery ligistics, maintenance, electric grid operators, etc. It would take a huge investment to get to the "current" level of automation worldwide. I can copy the estimates somewhere if you like. What is your estimate?