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Proof of Corn

proofofcorn.com

151–160 of 325 posts

Re: Proof of Corn

#151
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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Re: Proof of Corn

#152

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?

Can't wait to see how much money they lose. I'll see if my 6 year old can grow corn this year.

> I'll see if my 6 year old can grow corn this year.

Sure..put it in Kalshi while your at it and we can all bet on it.

I'm pretty sure he could grow one plant with someone in the know prompting him.

Re: Proof of Corn

#153
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…

Another way to look at it is that Seth is a Tool that Claude can leverage.

On one end, a farmer or agronomist who just uses a pen, paper, and some education and experience can manage a farm without any computer tooling at all - or even just forecasts the weather and chooses planting times based on the aches in their bones and a finger in the dirt. One who uses a spreadsheet or dedicated farming ERP as a tool can be a little more effective. With a lot of automation, that software tooling can allow them to manage many acres of farms more easily and potentially more accurately. But if you keep going, on the other end, there's just a human who knows nothing about the technicalities but owns enough stock in the enterprise to sit on the board and read quarterly earnings reports. They can do little more than say "Yes, let us keep going in this direction" or "I want to vote in someone else to be on the executive team". Right now, all such corporations have those operational decisions being made by humans, or at least outsourced to humans, but it looks increasingly like an LLM agent could do much of that. It might hallucinate something totally nonsensical and the owner would be left with a pile of debt, but it's hard to say that Seth as just a stockholder is, in any real sense, a farmer, even if his AI-based enterprise grows a lot of corn.

I think it would be unlikely but interesting if the AI decided that in furtherance of whatever its prompt and developing goals are to grow corn, it would branch out into something like real estate or manufacturing of agricultural equipment. Perhaps it would buy a business to manufacture high-tensile wire fence, with a side business of heavy-duty paperclips... and we all know where that would lead!

We don't yet have the legal frameworks to build an AI that owns itself (see also "the tree that owns itself" [1]), so for now there will be a human in the loop. Perhaps that human is intimately involved and micromanaging, merely a hands-off supervisor, or relegated to an ownership position with no real capacity to direct any actions. But I don't think that you can say that an owner who has not directed any actions beyond the initial prompt is really "doing the work".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself

Re: Proof of Corn

#154
“A farm coordinator doesn’t plant every seed”

Huh? I have no doubt that mega corporate farms have a “farm manager”, but I can tell you having grown up in small town America, that’s just not a thing. My buddies dad’s were “farm manager”, and absolutely planted every seed of corn (until the boys were old enough to drive the tractor and then it was split duty), and the big farms also harvested their own and the smaller ones hired it out.

So unless claude is planning on learning to drive a tractor it’s going to be a pretty useless task manager telling a farmer to do something he or she was already planning on doing.

Re: Proof of Corn

#155
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…

>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.

They could also just burn their cash. Because they aren’t making any money paying someone to grow corn for them unless they own the land and have some private buyers lined up.

Re: Proof of Corn

#157
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. This whole process still appears to have a human as the ultimate outer loop. 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.

Why wouldn't they be able to eventually set it up to work autonomously? A simple github action could run a check every $t hour to check on the status, and an orchestrator is only really needed once initially to set up the if>then decision tree.

Presumably because operating a farm isnt a perfectly repeatable process and you need to constantly manage different issues that come up

Re: Proof of Corn

#158
post #111
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can find such custom operators - but those are not deal made over the internet, they are made in person with a handshake. Generally the cost to get all the equipment there is - in a good year - all of your possible profit for something that small. Tractors are slow on the road. Once the tractor is there the implement needs to unfold (best case - worse case your combine header is pulled in via a separate truck and…

Agreed. Growing up on a small farm (~1120 acres) our garden alone was probably at least 5 acres in size. It's laughably small, the only way he'll succeed is for a neighbouring farmer to take pity on him.

I love the variety of people that come to HN. There are real farmers weighing on on the plausibility of this.

Re: Proof of Corn

#159
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

I think once we get off LLM's and find something that more closely maps to how humans think, which is still not known afaik. So either never or once the brain is figured out.

I'd agree that LLMs are a dead end to AGI, but I don't think that AI needs to mirror our own brains very closely to work. It'd be really helpful to know how our brains work if we wanted to replicate them, but it's possible that we could find a solution for AI that is entirely different from human brains while still having the ability to truly think/learn for itself.

Re: Proof of Corn

#160
post #11

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?

>So far it's bothered 10 companies directly with no legal authority to actually follow up with what is requested? Aren't these companies in the business of leasing land? I dont see how contacting them about leasing land would be spam or bothering them. And I dont really know what you mean by "with no legal authority to actually follow up with what is requested."

The chatbot has no legal authority.
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