71–80 of 325 posts
I'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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So Seth, as presumably a non-farmer, is doing professional farmer's work all on his own without prior experience? Is that what you're saying?
1) You are right and its impressive if he can use AI to bootstrap becoming a farmer 2) Regardless, I think it proves a vastly understated feature of AI: It makes people confident. The AI may be truly informative, or it may hallucinate, or it may simply give mundane, basic advice. Probably all 3 at times. But the fact that it's there ready to assert things without hesitation gives people so much more confidence to act…
I 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.
I have zero doubt Claude is going to do what AI does and plough forward. Emails will get sent, recommendations made, stuff done.
And it will be slop. Worse than what it does with code, the outcomes of which are highly correlated with the expertise of the user past a certain point.
Seth wins his point. AI can, via humans giving it permission to do things, affect the world. So can my chaos monkey random script.
Fred should have qualified: _usefully_ affect the world. Deliver a margin of Utility.
We’re miles off that high bar.
Disclosure: all in on AI
The point could be made by having it design and print implements for an indoor container grow and then run lights and water over a microcontroller. Like Anthropic's vending machine this would also be an already addressed, if not solved, space for both home manufacturing and ag/garden automation.
It'd still be novel to see an LLM figure it out from scratch step by step, and a hell of a lot more interesting than whatever the fuck this is. Googling farmland in Iowa or Texas and then writing instructions for people to do the actual work isn't novel or interesting; of course an LLM can write and fill out forms. But the end result still primarily relies on people to execute those forms and affect the world, invalidating the point. Growing corn would be interesting, project managing corn isn't.
The 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 h…
The 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 h…
Still an interesting experiment to see how much of the tasks involved can be handled by an agent.
But unless they've made a commitment not to prompt the agent again until the corn is grown, it's really a human doing it with agentic help, not Claude working autonomously.
Let's step back.
"there's a gap between digital and physical that AI can't cross"
Can intelligence of ANY kind, artificial or natural, grow corn? Do physical things?
Your brain is trapped in its skull. How does it do anything physical?
With nerves, of course. Connected to muscle. It's sending and receiving signals, that's all its doing! The brain isn't actually doing anything!
The history of humanity's last 300k years tells you that intelligence makes a difference, even though it isn't doing anything but receiving and sending signals.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
These experiments always seems to end up requiring the hand-holding of a human at top, seemingly breaking down the idea behind the experiment in the first place. Seems better to spend the time and energy on finding better ways for AI to work hand-in-hand with the user, empowering them, rather than trying to find the areas where we could replace humans with as little quality degradation as possible. That whole part fe…
Using the example from the article, I guess restaurant managers need handholding by the chefs and servers, seemingly breaking down the idea behind restaurants, yet restaurants still exist. The point, I think, is that even if LLMs can't directly perform physical operations, they can still make decisions about what operations are to be performed, and through that achieve a result. And I also don't think it's fair to sa…
Yes, what I'm trying to get at, it's much more vital we nail down the "person prompting and interpreting the LLM" part instead of focusing so much on the "autonomous robots doing everything".
It'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.
Right. If this level of indirection is allowed, the most efficient way to "grow corn" by the light of the original post would simply be to buy and hold Farmland Partners Inc (NYSE: FPI).
The timing might need to be different but it would be good to see what the same amounts invested would yield from corn on the commodity market as well as from securities in farming partnerships.
Would it be fair if AI was used to play these markets too, or in parallel?
It would be interesting to see how different "varieties" of corn perform under the same calendar season.
Corn, nothing but corn as the actual standard of value :)
You don't get much any way you look at it for your $12.99 but it's a start.
Making a batch of popcorn now, I can already smell the demand on the rise :)