201–210 of 483 posts
It's all fun and games until the selection pressure evolves weeds that say "human" on their leaves to fool the AI.
Farming goes from broad selection against pests with chemicals to introducing a massive selection pressure towards biological mimicry and adversarial image attacks.
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No, the price increase will be much smaller than the wage increase because the wage increase only goes to the fraction of the population that does the work while the price increase applies to the entire population.
If you raise the base cost of production in a low margin case like agriculture, then the price of the good must increase or they would be running at a loss.
But the market will always find the place where the work is unbearable and stop just shy of that.
I am not easy about those technologies. What stops them to retrain it so that it will blind humans who have bad comment history on Facebook?
"It's harder to find people to do that work every single year" Translation: The wages we pay are crap and we're not going to pay them more.
Paying people to walk through fields picking weeds doesn't sound scalable or sustainable to me.
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Just buy or rent a goat. Those things love poison ivy.
Well now you've done it. Why use lasers when we can genetically engineer goats to hate the taste of corn/sorghum/wheat and love the taste of weeds?
Given where ML and CV are today, I'd bet on open source models trained on weeds within 3-5 years. This company can scale, but their unit price is going to plummet. Also, it sounds like they're using cameras, where it's concievable that other future sensors could be more efficient. An iteration of this with higher resolution cameras and small flying drones seems like an intuitive next step. This is a super interesting…
I wonder at what point it becomes economically feasible to breed crops that are more distinguishable from weeds? After all, this is what we did with chemical weedkillers.
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This most likely wouldn't be safe for poison ivy removal. Burning poison ivy creates a toxic cloud. As much as poison ivy isn't fun, poison ivy in your throat and lungs is even less fun.
Presumably the laser wouldn't be setting the whole plant up in smoke. Couldn't it target the base and let it fall?