Reminds me of this project from friends of mine:
Proof of Corn
21–30 of 325 posts
Re: Proof of Corn
#22The point they seem to be making is that AI can "orchestrate" the real world even if it can't interact physically. I can definitely believe that in 2026 someone at their computer with access to money can send the right emails and make the right bank transfers to get real people to grow corn for you.
However even by that metric I don't see how Claude is doing that. Seth is the one researching the suppliers "with the help of" Claude. Seth is presumably the one deciding when to prompt Claude to make decisions about if they should plant in Iowa in how many days. I think I could also grow corn if someone came and asked me well defined questions and then acted on what I said. I might even be better at it because unlike a Claude output I will still be conscious in 30 seconds.
That is a far cry from sitting down at a command like and saying "Do everything necessary to grow 500 bushels of corn by October".
Re: Proof of Corn
#23I'm not a huge fan of these experiments that subject the public to your random AI spam. So far it's bothered 10 companies directly with no legal authority to actually follow up with what is requested?
I'm not a huge fan of the unsolicited spam/letters/coupons/etc I get in my mail box from businesses and there's no way for me to opt out.
Re: Proof of Corn
#24> AI doesn't need to drive a tractor. It needs to orchestrate the systems and people who do.
If people are involved then it's not an autonomous system. You could replace the orchestrator with the average logic defined expert system. Like come on, farming AGVs have come a long way, at least do it properly.
Re: Proof of Corn
#25Polk County Iowa is where Des Moines is - the largest city in Iowa. (I live the next county over, but I bike to Polk county all the time) This is not a good location to run this because the farm land is owned by farmer/investors or farmer/developers - either way everybody knows the farm will become a suburb in the next 20 years and has priced accordingly (and if the timeline is is less than 5 years they have switched to mining mode - strip out the last fertility before the development destroys the land anyway). Which is to say you can get much better land deals elsewhere (and by making your search wider) - sometimes the price might be higher but that is because the land/soil is better.
Overall I don't think this is useful. They might or might not get good results. However it is really hard to beat the farmer/laborer who lives close to the farm and thus sees things happen and can react quickly. There is also great value in knowing your land, though they should get records of what has happened in the past (this is all in a computer, but you won't always get access to it when you buy/lease land). Farmers are already using computers to guide decisions.
My prediction: they lose money. Not because the AI does stupid things (though that might happen), but because last year harvests were really good and so supply and demand means many farms will lose money no matter what you do. But if the weather is just right he could make a lot of money when other farmers have a really bad harvest (that is he has a large harvest but everyone else has a terrible harvest).
Iowa has strong farm ownership laws. There is real risk he will get shutdown somehow because what he is doing is somehow illegal. I'm not sure what the laws are, check with a real lawyer. (This is why Bill Gates doesn't own Iowa farm land - he legally can't do what he wants with Iowa farm land)
Re: Proof of Corn
#26It's cute but it seems like it's mostly going to come down to hiring a person to grow corn. Pretty cool that an AI can (sort of) do that autonomously but it's not quite the spirit of the challenge.
There was no challenge. There was a statement, "AI can write code, but it can't affect the physical world."
Tell that to all the car accidents caused by people distracted by siri, the people who’ve done horrible things because of AI induced psychosis, or the lives ruined by ai stock trading algorithms.
Re: Proof of Corn
#27> Coordinates human operators
"Thinking quickly, Dave constructs a homemade megaphone, using only some string, a squirrel, and a megaphone."
Re: Proof of Corn
#28AI CEOs are coming.
Re: Proof of Corn
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, a…
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?
Re: Proof of Corn
#30I think the most intriguing part of this effort: Farmers traditionally employ machines to achieve their harvest. Unless I'm mistaken, this is the first time that machines are employing humans to achieve their harvest. I mean, more or less, but you see what I'm getting at.
> Farmers traditionally employ machines to achieve their harvest
Most food is picked by migrant laborers, not machines.