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Proof of Corn

proofofcorn.com

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Re: Proof of Corn

#81

Post by nonethewiser »

kokanee wrote: post #72
nonethewiser wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 started to write a logical rebuttal, but forget it. This is just so dumb. A guy is paying farmers to farm for him, and using a chatbot to Google everything he doesn't know about farming along the way. You're all brainwashed.

What specifically are you disagreeing with? I dont think its trivial for someone with no farming experience to successfully farm something within a year.

>A guy is paying farmers to farm for him

Read up on farming. The labor is not the complicated part. Managing resources, including telling the labor what to do, when, and how is the complicated part. There is a lot of decision making to manage uncertainty which will make or break you.

Re: Proof of Corn

#82

Post by [deleted] »

nonethewiser wrote: post #59
jdthedisciple wrote: post #41

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…

[deleted]

Re: Proof of Corn

#86

Post by santadays »

embedding-shape wrote: post #39
ppchain wrote: post #22

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…

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…

> 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.

I think this is the new turing test. Once it's been passed we will have AGI and all the Sam Altmans of the world will be proven correct. (This isn't a perfect test obviously, but neither was the turing test)

If it fails to pass we will still have what jdthedisciple pointed out

> a non-farmer, is doing professional farmer's work all on his own without prior experience

I am actually curious how many people really believe AGI will happen. Theres alot of talk about it, but when can I ask claude code to build me a browser from scratch and I get a browser from scratch. Or when can I ask claude code to grow corn and claude code grows corn. Never? In 2027? In 2035? In the year 3000?

HN seems rife with strong opinions on this, but does anybody really know?

Re: Proof of Corn

#88

Post by Yeroc »

bluGill wrote: post #25

Polk 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…

If you spend time on the website you can see the plan is to rent (only!) 5 acres of land for this project. Since it's a lease only and such a small plot it seems unlikely to get him into trouble. Given the small size though I'm dubious he'll find it easy to get any custom operators interested in doing a job that small!

Re: Proof of Corn

#89

Post by lbrito »

This is lopsided. Technology promised to remove drudgery from our lives, and now we're seeing experiments that automate all the easy, air-conditioned decision making while still delegating the toil to humans

Unequivocally awful

Re: Proof of Corn

#90

Post by NewsaHackO »

culi wrote: post #62
jdthedisciple wrote: post #41

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?

Nobody is denying that this is AI-enabled but that's entirely different from "AI can grow corn". Also Seth a non-farmer was already capable of using Google, online forums, and Sci-Hub/Libgen to access farming-related literature before LLMs came on the scene. In this case the LLM is just acting as a super-charged search engine. A great and useful technology, sure. But we're not utilizing any entirely novel capabilitie…

I think is that a lot of professional work is not about entirely novel capabilities either, most professionals get the major revenue from bread and butter cases that apply already known solutions to custom problems. For instance, a surgeon taking out an appendix is not doing a novel approach to the problem every time.
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