Would be straight out of sci-fi.
Robot horticulture has long been a staple.
Considering how wrong they were on other important matters the battery explanation could easily be wrong and the CPU correct.
I'm paraphrasing, but Neo says "that's impossible (in reference to the Matrix) since it violates the laws of thermodynamics"
To which Morpheus replies "and where did you learn about the laws of thermodynamics?"
If you're in the Matrix, your knowledge of the Matrix would come from the Matrix itself which would have a bias towards falsifying information to preserve itself.
One other thing I've read is that annual plants were the easiest plants to domesticate because the short life cycle results in faster evolution. However perennials are likely way less environmentally destructive.
What will all these people do once farmers are unnecessary?
There aren't that many people working on farms in developed countries. In the US, only around 3 million people (or <1% of the total population) work on a farm. [0]
In other countries where many people are involved in agriculture, the pending industrialisation/automation of farming will probably have a similar impact to what happened in North America and Europe over the 20th century: more people will move to urban areas and add value to the economy in other ways.
[0] https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Online_Resou...
The answer is "whatever they want". The big problem facing governments everywhere right now is how to jump over the little gully of poverty that comes right after the change to get there.
1) Getting very close to the crops and intertwining with them to make weeding very hard
2) Looking almost exactly like real crops (as-in, to the point where most humans can't tell the difference and the machines need to start taking genetic samples)
You're totally right though; the machines have an adaption-speed advantage, so I'd expect this to be a very effective technique overall (assuming that the robotics pan-out).
I'm sure that gene was always there; but billions of mowings over a century of lawn care means its present everywhere. Simple selection?
Plants can't move around so they evolved to deal with a really wide range of environments and stuff eating them etc.
Its a different growth pattern in the plant. Gotta be driven by genetics.
Further, it's not just the stem involved, if your mowing regularly your taking out the leaves.
PS: There are also a few different plants that all look similar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dandelion
Mendel should have used dandelions for his gene studies, there is lots more to see!
https://news.uoguelph.ca/2014/04/high-school-students-study-...
By the time any evolutionary affects are seen, if at all, of weeds being pulled by ML, ML will have progressed far beyond where it is now, likely well beyond what could be fooled by simple diversity.
Just mapping out the ivy infestation with drones and image recognition software would be impressive. There's enough room for a quad-rotor to move around in theory, but it would have to have some pretty sophisticated obstacle avoidance algorithms.
Developing, manufacturing, and operating a crew of robots just for this one particular ivy problem wouldn't be worth the cost, but invasive species are a widespread problem and are sometimes on much larger scales, like hundreds or thousands of square miles. At some point, using people isn't a realistic option. If we can solve larger invasive species problems for less money than a human work crew, then that seems like a win.
Another kind of bot I am hoping to see is a waste collector. They would find plastic bottles, bags, glass and iron in forests, on roadsides, and even underwater, around beaches. Unleash 100 bots in a forest and in one year, it's pristine. We can also have some collect floating plastic from the oceans.
For large surfaces would that financially make any sense though?
However they have many disadvantages:
Cost - $500 worth of fuel for the tractor vs $250 for chemical + $50 for fuel to run the sprayer is the big one (These cost numbers are what I've heard but I might remember wrong).
CO2: that $500 worth of fuel vs $50 directly translates into CO2, which in turns translates into global warming. (this is the only one that you can argue doesn't have a financial impact on the farmer - and it isn't clear that those arguments are valid)
Soil disturbance. Every time you til the soil you disturb the natural soil. It isn't as bad as deep plowing, but it is still harmful.
Soil compaction. A repetitively light sprayer can cover 100+ feet of crop in just two tire tracks (the first wheel the runs over the ground does the damage, the second barely adds anything so the 4 wheels result in two tracks). A tractor is heavier (the impact of weight it not linear though so figure 10% worse), and can only do 30 feet so you end up with just over 3x as many tire tracks compacting and harming the ground.
Labor cost. Sprayers can run at 15mph in the field. Cultivators are probably running at 5mph. Not only are you taking 3x as many passes, each pass takes 3x as long. You pay the operator by the hour.
Now for your robot which applies? The weed pulling robot will only disturb the soil where the weed is. However the robot needs to get to the weed which increases compaction along each row.
My guess is farmers will spray everything as a primary prevention. Then they will fly drones over the field and send a robot down only the rows where there are weeds. That is just a guess though, you can imagine your own parameters for future robots which will change everything.
Note, herbicides are not nearly as dangerous as popular press makes them out to be.
You must not be familiar with modern farming. Most farmers do no till these days. They never plow - ever. The first seven years of no till they do see less yields than their counterparts that plow, but after that the advantage of non-distributed soil mean they get better yields. (more profit ever before we account for the fact that plowing uses a lot of expensive fuel)
Nothing is simple, but there is a reason most farms and all the big ones are no or limited till.
That may be a use case, but the large majority of grown food is not organic-certified. Does it make sense for such productions?
No plowing, no pesticides, just preventive coverage and good tools.
In the long run, those large monocultures don't make sense anyway.
Robots can be great for a lot of high maintenance, Human intensive, high value cultures such as fruits, greens ...
I guess they could also help expand vegetables farms to non cultivated areas, in some autonomous ways.
to go through landfills and mine for recyclables ...
the list goes on.
I think a lot of techies would be surprised what all that stuff costs as well.
Those things are hard though, plugging a few sensors into a Pi, slapping a LAMP stack on it then creating a web interface and smart-phone app you can show the VCs is easy by comparison.
slapping a LAMP stack on it then creating a web interface
Food security is important, and a robot that can selectively clip and gouge weeds can do the same to both critical food and cash crops too.
Furthermore, simple competition, big corporate espionage and personal differences can still affect small organic growers as well. Human factors are real, and novelty is good but it doesn't cure quite everything.
The future gets scary fast when you consider the almost inevitable tick-tock between capability/defense.
Someone somewhere is working out how to weaponise them, we've as a species weaponised everything else we've ever invented pretty much.
we have domesticated every weapon we have created for peaceful purposes.
I think George Carlin nailed it with his routine about flamethrowers.
> The very existence of flamethrowers proves that sometime, somewhere, someone said to themselves, 'You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.