Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pixl97 43 days ago
The problem here is you're missing the middle steps.

As AI gets better and cheaper farm owners don't hire as many hands. Their tractors become more automated. The building do more with less supervision. This is already what we see, this is why we dropped from something like 50% farm employment to like 1% in the US. But when your employment levels get that low on non desirable jobs it gets very hard to find the next generation that will be the farm owner. The hands these days are much more like gig workers, it's very unlikely they'll buy/inherit a farm and work it in the future. The family of the farmers has all gone to college and is working in a city somewhere that can get an Amazon deliver in 6 hours rather than 4 days.

It's not that AI will even be optimal to manage, it will just occur with the massive consolidations that are continuing in farming communities.
2 comments
throwway120385 41 days ago
Yeah here's an example of an autonomous tractor: https://www.agxeed.com/. You buy this and program it with what you're going to do. Right now you still have to keep it fed with seed, and I think you have to run spray and some of the other equipment manually. But the more sophisticated this stuff gets the more we're going to see "robofarms." If you can have a tractor, sprayer, and combine that can be assigned self-contained tasks within a field, then you can have an LLM manage those systems by feeding them self-contained tasks. You could intermediate by having the LLM provide you with a "task list" in whatever control environment that equipment uses and then validate that the task list is correct with correct settings and boundaries. But I think technologically we're within striking distance of this today.
link
skybrian 42 days ago
Yes, that makes more sense. AI is the continuation of automation. I don’t think it’s going to eliminate management entirely, but you can certainly get to the point where the owner is basically just an investor and they hire a professional management firm.

This happens a lot in real estate. The work is all contracted out.

link