Comment by fishtoaster
1 day ago
Yeah, this feels right on the cusp of being interesting. I think that, being charitable, it could be interesting if it turns out to be successful in hiring and coordinating several people and physical assets over a long time horizon. For example, it'd be pretty cool if it could:
1. Do some research (as it's already done)
2. Rent the land and hire someone to grow the corn
3. Hire someone to harvest it, transport it, and store it
4. Manage to sell it
Doing #1 isn't terribly exciting - it's well established that AIs are pretty good at replacing an hour of googling - but if it could run a whole business process like this, that'd be neat.
Is that actually growing corn with AI though? Seems to me that a human planted the corn, thinned it, weeded it, harvested it, and stored it. What did AI do in that process? Send an email?
It is trying to take over the job of the farmer. Planting, harvesting, etc. is the job of a farmhand (or custom operator). Everyone is working to try to automate the farmhand out of a job, but the novelty here is the thinking that it is actually the farmer who is easiest to automate away.
But,
"I will buy fucking land with an API via my terminal"
Who has multiple millions of dollars to drop on an experiment like that?
> [Seth is using AI to try] to take over the job of the farmer. Planting, harvesting, etc. is the job of a farmhand (or custom operator).
Ok then Seth is missing the point of the challenge: Take over the role of the farmhand.
> Everyone is working to try to automate the farmhand out of a job, but the novelty here is the thinking that it is actually the farmer who is easiest to automate away.
Everyone knows this. There is nothing novel here. Desk jockeys who just drive computers all day (the Farmer in this example) are _far_ easier to automate away than the hands-on workers (the farmhand). That’s why it would be truly revolutionary to replace the farmhand.
Or, said another way: Anything about growing corn that is “hands on” is hard to automate, all the easy to automate stuff has already been done. And no, driving a mouse or a web browser doesn’t count as “hands on”.
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Or, just buy some corn futures. By slightly increasing the price of this instrument, it slightly signals farmers to increase production. Corn grown!