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Proof of Corn

proofofcorn.com

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Re: Proof of Corn

#181

Post by direwolf20 »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #164
Yeroc wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If a neighboring farmer needs a bit of cash, has some land or equipment, and gets an email (or phone call!) from farmerfred@proofofcorn.com reading generally: > I'm about to lease some acreage at {address near you} and willing to pay {competitive rate} to hire someone to work that land for me, are you interested? I see no reason why that couldn't eventually succeed. I'm sure that being an out-of-state investor who do…

> Fred is here

Ah, they've created SCP-423

Re: Proof of Corn

#182

Post by bodge5000 »

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…

This is where you get to this weird juxtaposition of "AI can now replace humans" existing simultaneously with "Its unfair to compare human work to AI work".

Like if a human said they started a farm, but it turns out someone else did all the leg work and they were just asked for an opinion occasionally, they'd be called out for lying about starting a farm. Meanwhile, that flies for an AI, which would be fine if we acknowledged that theres a lot of behind the scenes work that a human needs to do for it.

Re: Proof of Corn

#183

Post by recursive »

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…

More confidence isn't always better. In particular, confidence pairs well with the ability follow through and be correct. LLMs are famous for confidently stating falsehoods.

Re: Proof of Corn

#184

Post by mring33621 »

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…

"...where we could replace humans with as little quality degradation as possible"

This is pretty much the whole goal of capitalism since the 1800's

Re: Proof of Corn

#185

Post by aqme28 »

tw04 wrote: post #155
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…

>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.

Sure but that’s a different goalpost. Just growing food from an AI prompt is already impressive

Re: Proof of Corn

#186

Post by 9dev »

topaz0 wrote: post #179
9dev wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the plausible, strange, not-too-distant future in which AI models are autonomously running things in the real economy. A plot line in Ray Naylers great book The Mountain in the Sea that plays in a plausible, strange, not-too-distant future, is that giant fish trawler fleet are run by AI connected to the global markets, fully autonomously. They relentlessly rip every last fish from the ocean, driven entirely by the…

They also enslave human workers to do all the manual labor.

I didn't want to spoiler too much, but yes. They do.

Re: Proof of Corn

#187

Post by recursive »

autoexec wrote: post #170
zeckalpha wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If that were the case Claude would have come up with the idea to grow corn and it would have reached out to Seth and be giving Seth prompts. That's clearly not what happened though so it's pretty obvious who is leveraging which tool here. It also doesn't help that Claude is incapable of coming up with an idea, incapable of wanting corn, and has no actual understanding of what corn is.

Generally agree. But lack of "understanding" seems impossible to define in objective terms. Claude could certainly write you a nice essay about the history of corn and its use in culture and industry.

Re: Proof of Corn

#188

Post by aqme28 »

bluGill wrote: post #162
marcd35 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You only want to apply expensive fungicide when there is a fungus problem. That means someone needs to go out to the field and check - at least today. You don't want to harvest until the corn is dry, someone needs to check the progress of drying before - today the farmer hand harvest a few cobs of corn from various parts of the field to check. There are lots of other things the farmer is checking that we don't have s…

There’s no reason an AI couldn’t anticipate these things and hire people to do those checks and act on their reports as though it were a human farmer. Thats different than an AI researcher telling Claude which step is next.

Re: Proof of Corn

#190

Post by lupire »

lbrito wrote: post #89

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

Technology has already replaced 90% of the human work in agriculture. That's why you live in a city.

The remaining work is only bad because it's low paying, and it's low paying because the wealth created by machines is unfairly distributed.

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