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Proof of Corn

proofofcorn.com

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Re: Proof of Corn

#281

Post by [deleted] »

Yeroc wrote: post #88
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!

[deleted]

Re: Proof of Corn

#282

Post by snowmobile »

Alupis wrote: post #137

I can't be the only person seriously questioning the "Budget" page the AI created?[1] The estimate seems to leave out a lot of factors, including irrigation, machinery, the literal seeds, and more. $800 for a "custom operator" for 7 months - I don't believe it. Leasing 5 acres of farmable land (for presumably a year) for less than $1400... I don't believe it. The humans behind this experiment are going to get very ti…

Actually, the linked university page [1] does claim that the "cash rent equivalent" is $274 per acre. Surprising, but I suppose farmland isn't that expensive. But unfortunately their total budget per acre is $960, 90% higher than in the AI's "budget". Assuming that it can do everything as efficiently and cheaply as an experienced human farmer, such as harvesting all 5 acres in 14 hours of labor.

[1] https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/crops/html/a1-20.html

Re: Proof of Corn

#284

Post by 9rx »

greedo wrote: post #196
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.

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.

> Hell, the yield on such a small lot (it'll mostly be end rows) will be terrible.

One of my fields has a creek in the corner that divides just two acres from the rest of the field. I've never noticed any meaningful yield drag in that part.

Re: Proof of Corn

#285

Post by ThunderSizzle »

nerdsniper wrote: post #278
pixl97 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>ather than trying to find the areas where we could replace humans with as little quality degradation as possible The particular problem here is it is very likely that the easiest people to replace with AI are the ones making the most money and doing the least work. Needless to say those people are going to fight a lot harder to remain employed than the average lower level person has political capital to accomplish.…

> the ones making the most money and doing the least work. Needless to say those people are going to fight a lot harder to remain employed than the average lower level person has political capital to accomplish. They don't have to "fight" to stay employed, anyone with sufficient money is effectively self-employed. It's not going to be illegal to spend your own money running your own business if that's how you want to…

?

If you have a cushy job where you don't really work, and you make a lot of money (doesn't mean you have capital), how does that translate to being suited to becoming an entrepreneur with the money they are no longer earning with the effort capacity they apparently don't have?

Re: Proof of Corn

#286

Post by amelius »

crdrost wrote: post #215
amelius wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'd like to see is an AI simulating the economy, so that we can make predictions of what happens if we decrease wealth tax by X% or increasy income tax by Y% (just examples).

Why. Why would you want this. The only framework we have figured out in which LLMs can build anything of use, requires LLMs to build a robot and then we expose the robot to the real world and the real world smacks it down and then we tell the LLMs about the wreckage. And we have to keep the feedback loops small and even then we have to make sure that the LLMs don't cheat. But you're not going to give it the opportuni…

Maybe you are right, but I'd like to see a competition where a computer (running AI agents) and an economics professor make predictions.

Re: Proof of Corn

#287

Post by 9rx »

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…

> 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

Nah. If you can see that you have tar spot, you are already too late. To be able to selectively apply fungicide, someone needs to model the world around them to determine the probability of an oncoming problem. That is something that these computer models are theoretically quite well suited for. Although common wisdom says that fungicide applications on corn will always, at very least, return the cost of it, so you will likely just apply it anyway.

Re: Proof of Corn

#288

Post by PetriCasserole »

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.

But that's how it goes. As late as 2005, the real estate agents I worked with finally began to trust email over fax machines. It cracked an egg wide open for them. Now relying on email, they were able to do 10x the work (I have no real data BUT I do know their incomes went from low six figures to multiple six figures). Prior to their adoption, they just thought email was a novelty and legally couldn't be relied upon.
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