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Proof of Corn

proofofcorn.com

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Re: Proof of Corn

#191

Post by autoexec »

recursive wrote: post #187
autoexec wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I could get the same thing out of "curl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn" but curl doesn't understand what corn is any more than Claude does. Claude doesn't understand corn any more than Wikipedia either. Just like with Wikipedia, everything Claude outputs about corn came from the knowledge of humans which was fed into it by other humans, then requested by other other humans. It's human understanding behind all of it. Claude is just a different way to combine and output examples of human thoughts and human gathered data.

Re: Proof of Corn

#192

Post by AngryData »

9rx wrote: post #147
kokanee wrote: 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.

> A guy is paying farmers to farm for him Pedantically, that's what a farmer does. The workers are known as farmhands.

That is HIGHLY dependent on the type and size of farm. A lot of small row crop farmers have and need no extra farm hands.

Re: Proof of Corn

#193

Post by 9rx »

AngryData wrote: post #192
9rx wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A guy is paying farmers to farm for him Pedantically, that's what a farmer does. The workers are known as farmhands.

That is HIGHLY dependent on the type and size of farm. A lot of small row crop farmers have and need no extra farm hands.

All farms need farmhands. On some farms the farmer may play double duty, or hire custom farmhands operating under another business, but they are all farmhands just the same.

Re: Proof of Corn

#194

Post by greedo »

aqme28 wrote: post #188
bluGill wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"hire people to do those..."

We already have those people, they're called farmers. And they are already very used to working with high technology. The idea of farmers being a bunch of hicks is really pretty stupid. For example, farmers use drones for spraying pesticides, fungicides, and inputs like fertilizer. They use drones to detect rocks in fields that then generate maps for a small skid steer to optimally remove the rocks.

They use GPS enabled tractors and combines that can tell how deep a seed is planted, what the yield is on a specific field (to compare seed hybrids), what the moisture content of the crop is. They need to be able to respond to weather quickly so that crops get harvested at the optimal times.

Farmers also have to become experts in crop futures, crop insurance, irrigation and tillage best practices; small equipment repair, on and on and on.

Re: Proof of Corn

#195

Post by greedo »

autoexec wrote: post #161
patmcc wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That still doesn't seem autonomous in any real way though. There are people that I could hire in the real world, give $10k (I dunno if that's enough, but you understand what I mean) and say "Do everything necessary to grow 500 bushels of corn by October", and I would have corn in October. There are no AI agents where that's even close to true. When will that be possible?

Given enough time and money the chatbots we call "AI" today could contact and pay enough people that corn would happen. At some point it'll eventually have spammed and paid the right person who would manage everything necessary themselves after the initial ask and payment. Most people would probably just pocket the cash and never respond though.

So an "AI chatbot" is going to disintermediate this process without adding any fundamental value. Sounds like a perfect SV play....

/s

Re: Proof of Corn

#196

Post by greedo »

Yeroc wrote: post #111
bluGill wrote: 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.

And I'm sure a farmer who's already busy is going to waste his time on a five acre lot. Hell, the yield on such a small lot (it'll mostly be end rows) will be terrible. I'm sure there's a dollar amount that would motivate someone, but at a profitable rate, not a chance in hell.

Re: Proof of Corn

#197

Post by AlotOfReading »

nonethewiser wrote: post #81
kokanee wrote: 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…

We should probably differentiate between trying to run a profitable farm, and producing any amount of yield. They're not really the same thing at all.

I would submit that pretty much any joe blow is capable of growing some amount of crops, given enough money. Running a profitable farm is quite difficult though. There's an entire ecosystem connecting prospective farmers with money and limited skills/interest to people with the skills to properly operate it, either independently (tenant farmers) or as farm managers so the hobby owner can participate. Institutional investors prefer the former, and Jeremy Clarkson's farm show is a good example of the latter.

Re: Proof of Corn

#198

Post by pixl97 »

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…

Hello. Ex-Iowegian here with family that owns large farms.

>Farmers are already using computers to guide decisions.

For way longer than most people expect. I remember reading farming magazines in the 80's showing computer based control for all kinds of farming operations. These days it is exceptionally high tech. Combines measure yield on a GPS grid. This is fed back into a mapping system for fertilization and soil amendment in the spring to reduce costs where you don't need to put fertilizer. The tractors themselves do most of the driving themselves if you choose to get those packages added. You can get services that monitor storm damage and predict losses on your fields, and updated satellite feed information on growth patterns, soil moisture, vegetation loss, and more. Simply put super high automation is already available for farming. I tell my uncle his job is to make sure the tractor has diesel in it, and that nothing is jammed in the plow.

When it comes to animal farming in the mid-west, a huge portion of it is done by contracts with other companies. My uncle owns the land and provides the labor, but the buildings, birds, food, and any other supplies. A faceless company setting up the contract like now, or an AI sending the same paperwork really may not look too much different.

Re: Proof of Corn

#199

Post by 93po »

mrguyorama wrote: post #106
knowitnone3 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is Bill Gates wanting to do with Iowa farm land?

Collect rent. That's all rich people do. The premise of capitalism is that the people best at collecting rent should also be in total control of resource allocation.

i would guess it's less about rent seeking and more about him making a bet on safe places to store billions of dollars. there's a lot of economic collapse that can happen where farm land remains valuable in a way that housing stock, office buildings, or MSFT stock wouldn't

Re: Proof of Corn

#200

Post by dabinat »

Given that this is an experiment and the website says they want to treat Claude as a “true collaborator”, they should follow the AI’s directions EXACTLY. Claude alone should make decisions and no human should be allowed to deviate from its instructions, even if they know better. That’s what would make this a valuable experiment, otherwise if there’s a human moderating Claude then it’s no better than Googling.
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