[HN Gopher] An AI robot is spotting sick tulips to slow disease ...
___________________________________________________________________
An AI robot is spotting sick tulips to slow disease through Dutch
bulb fields
Author : sizzle
Score : 115 points
Date : 2024-03-26 00:57 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (apnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (apnews.com)
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I wonder if it is connected to the cloud.
|
| There is an obvious route of abuse for ransomware: reprogram the
| bot to destroy healthy tulips as well and demand payment.
| suprfsat wrote:
| Smart, there is no known upper bound to what the Dutch will pay
| for a tulip.
| codetrotter wrote:
| I am reminded of a certain scene from a certain TV show. In
| particular, the very end of said scene.
|
| https://youtu.be/kl6rsi7BEtk
| joseda-hg wrote:
| Unlike most other Ransomware there's at least the option of
| actually pulling the (maybe) proverbial plug on the bot As long
| as it's not run Lights out they should be safe
| tutfbhuf wrote:
| It is only slightly related to the keywords "Dutch" and "tulips",
| but it is likely an interesting wiki article for the average HN
| user: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
| pjmorris wrote:
| A new tulip mania, but with robots? [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
| escapecharacter wrote:
| Multi hype cycle drifting!
| hathym wrote:
| we are not far from an AI mania
| pvaldes wrote:
| Tulip mania was created by the problem that the robots try to
| fix.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Unsure how killing the bulb _and leaving it in the field_ leads
| to a reduction in the virus spread.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Maybe it's sexually transmitted.
| bell-cot wrote:
| I'd figure: bulb is _dead_ == >> plant cells in bulb are dead
| ==>> virii in the bulb can't reproduce (since that requires
| living cells). If (say) they know that the disease is
| infectious (to nearby tulips) mostly later in the course of
| infection, then "catch early, kill, leave in place" could make
| perfect sense.
| Luc wrote:
| The first virus they're trying to keep in check is called TBV,
| Tulip Breaking Virus. It spreads through aphids. The infected
| plants are sprayed with Roundup and die, so aphids won't feed
| on them.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Thanks!
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| Fun fact(tm): Tulip Breaking Virus (TBV) was the cause of
| 16th-century "tulip mania," as it causes the petals to have
| swirls of different colors [on infected "white" bulbs, it is
| most-striking!].
| swayvil wrote:
| Stating via insinuation is so last millennium.
| matthewfelgate wrote:
| It's going to be interesting what yield improvements we get from
| AI and robotics.
| vages wrote:
| Quite sure the tulip robot company will turn a profit on this
| quicker than most generative AI companies do with their products.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I'm not convinced, said AI companies have millions of users
| through e.g. Discord networks already. Plus the market is a lot
| more constrained.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > said AI companies have millions of users through e.g.
| Discord networks already.
|
| How many of them are paying customers? how much of the
| company's reserves are being used to subsidise day to day
| running of the service? what happens to the user base when
| you stop giving free access?
|
| this kind of product is normally a service with a contract
| and upfront cost for the user. ($200k for the machine) with
| an on going support contract.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| The overhead is much lower for software to begin with. We
| can consider the ratio of hardware manufacturers to even
| the hobbyist developer who makes a few bucks on YouTube.
|
| Either way, multinationals are running out of ink signing
| their seats on spaceship AI and they pay in stacks. The
| critical test is achieving escape velocity for each
| individual GenAI "solution" (call it what you want...).
| Software giants with compute access are windmilling free
| models every day, hardware is racing to capture that
| compute, and those GenAI companies are entrenching their
| contracts while the competition is still hot.
|
| Once they have the contracts it's just build build build
| until another AI winter or possibly a nuclear winter.
| wiremine wrote:
| Agreed. Discriminative AI, in general, is further through the
| hype cycle than generative AI, and this is a clear value
| proposition with clear financials.
|
| And, really, they're two sides of the same coin. I could
| imagine the tulip robot using leveraging speech-to-control LLMs
| in the future. Something like: "Move to field 17 and focus on
| the Pink Diamonds"
| whitehexagon wrote:
| Reminds me of my old cycle ride through the Dutch tulip fields to
| work and back. One day fields and fields were just dropping dead.
| Turns out it was an intentional 'slaughter', probably to put the
| plant energy back into the bulbs? Sad to see. But I feel very
| lucky to have spent time living and working there, amazingly
| friendly place.
| berkes wrote:
| Indeed. These bulbs don't grow in these large fields for being
| pretty, but because it takes several years and at least one
| bloom before the bulbs can be sold, planted and start blooming.
|
| I've grown some bulbs from seed, but it takes years. Much
| easier to buy bulbs that have bloomed before. And, indeed, the
| plant itself will drop the leaves soon after being pollinated
| to store all that in the bulb for next year.
| rollulus wrote:
| For tulips, growers cut the flowers indeed so that the plant
| spends no energy on it.
| projektfu wrote:
| In my neighborhood, this is made more efficient by deer.
| qzw wrote:
| Manual weed/insect control is one of the areas I'm really hoping
| will be a principal benefit of AI and robotics. Imagine replacing
| a large portion of the chemicals currently used in agriculture
| with physical means of elimination. That would get rid of a huge
| source of environmental and ecological damage.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| There are some softwares to recognize and track insects given a
| video feed, I had to search them for a course in uni involving
| agritech, eg https://github.com/kimbjerge/insectTracking
|
| There are paid SaaS as well
|
| Ninja edit I find agritech in its entirety very interesting,
| you have startups like constellr that aim to provide insights
| on your crops with satellite data, and public projects like
| copernicus that give you access for free to satellitar data of
| the whole world - and a new scan is done every 5 days -,
| although satellite resolution still doesn't go under 10/20m I
| think
| jxf wrote:
| Harvesting is also a good use case; many crops cannot be
| harvested in any reliable way besides by hand.
| bumby wrote:
| Saffron comes to mind. It's my understanding that the price
| is crazy high simply because it's delicate work that has to
| be done by hand
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| In glass houses it's already possible to solve most issues
| without chemicals, but still happens often. Farmers in general
| are very risk averse.
|
| Flower fields are terrible chemical wise, much worse then food
| due to less strict rules
| berkes wrote:
| Knowing agriculture a little, it's not going to be "replaced
| by" but rather "in addition to". These tulip farms will
| continue to use as much pesticides and herbicides as before
| regardless of mechanical pest controls. It's just too cheap to
| use chemicals, and the risk for not using it too big.
|
| A local farmer told me that if they don't use herbicides on
| timed basis (so even if the farmer can see there's no weeds
| with his eyes and experience) their insurances would go up so
| much that they could pay twice the amount of chemicals for that
| insurance rate rise.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Seems like there is gonna be opportunity for another
| insurance company to compete by understanding new technology
| and offer new policies that acknowledge that.
| berkes wrote:
| If that were the case, there would have been insurance
| companies that understood statistics and deep, local and
| domain- knowledge of farmers on what is needed to mitigate
| or predict risks.
|
| I'm quite sure insurance companies know this extremely
| well. But either choose to stay on the safe side because of
| extreme risk aversion and quite certainly because of
| monopolies or vendor-lock-in.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| >there would have been insurance companies that
| understood statistics and deep, local and domain-
| knowledge
|
| Sounds like _a perfect job_ for an AI-actuary-based
| insurance company.
| taneq wrote:
| > These tulip farms will continue to use as much pesticides
| and herbicides as before regardless of mechanical pest
| controls.
|
| Not if robots are cheaper than the poisons.
|
| Your point about insurance is interesting, the industry would
| do a massive backflip on pesticides if some robotics company
| managed to convince insurance companies that using their
| product was less risky than chemical means.
| berkes wrote:
| Organic gardening is the third "alternative", and it has
| been proven to work, work well, refined for hundreds of
| thousands of years, is well known and the risks are known
| extremely well.
|
| It's not robotics or chemical, that's a false dichotomy.
|
| And yes, I am aware of the "tradeoffs" of organic farming.
| But it still is a viable business plan, often the farmers'
| margins (at least in west EU) are much higher than
| "chemical farming". And no, not always is the yield lower.
| Nor are the crops it always more expensive. And no, the
| common conception that "we cannot feed the world with
| organic farming" is also disproven.
| evandijk70 wrote:
| Do you have any references to these claims?
| lukeschlather wrote:
| Organic farming still uses "organic" pesticides like
| copper. The real falsehood is that organic farming is
| perfectly nontoxic and safe.
|
| Looking forward to having more advanced robots, we could
| start seeing a lot more permaculture. Organic farming not
| only relies on pesticides and herbicides but also on
| monocrops and tilling all of which add up to a lot of
| problems. Robotic tending could eventually allow more
| diverse permaculture to take over.
| unregistereddev wrote:
| So you just need a robotics company large enough to have
| some industry clout.
|
| https://www.deere.com/en/sprayers/see-spray-ultimate/
| j-a-a-p wrote:
| > These tulip farms will continue to use as much pesticides
| and herbicides as before regardless of mechanical pest
| controls.
|
| I happen to have worked in that industry. And I do not want
| justify the environmental burden of floriculture. It is a far
| from green industry using lots of chemicals and energy. But
| the tulip business you mention here is also remarkably high
| tech. It is unfair to frame these companies as they would
| always choose chemicals against innovation. Au contraire I
| would say, it is maybe even the most innovative branche of
| agriculture.
| jetrink wrote:
| A hybrid approach would work well too in some situations. When
| I worked in wetland restoration, one thing we did to reduce the
| ecological impact of herbicides was to cut the weeds a few
| inches above the water or soil, and then to paint herbicide
| directly on the cut face with a foam brush. This was a lot more
| labor intensive than spraying, but reduced the amount of
| herbicide used by 80-90%, and prevented any from landing in the
| water via over-spray. Even without the cutting step, applying
| herbicide directly to the weeds with a brush would be a big
| improvement over spraying.
| rob74 wrote:
| Yes - this is exactly what AI/robotics _should_ be targeted at
| - things that currently would have to be done manually, but
| aren 't feasible (at least not in high-wage countries) like
| this one, or sorting mixed trash into non-recyclable and
| recyclable (and further into various metals and plastics) etc.
|
| Instead, it's targeted at replacing graphics artists and
| software developers...
| bumby wrote:
| Why not both?
|
| Manual work has been getting automated away for over a
| century. Tech has already eroded low and middle class jobs
| for decades. To think that similar won't happen in knowledge
| work (or that we shouldn't let it), feels like a very techy
| type of NIMBYism
| bigfudge wrote:
| Because one will be a net benefit to society and the other
| probably won't be?
| bumby wrote:
| Can you elaborate? Because it's not immediately clear to
| me the distinction.
|
| I'll concede that automating manual labor has made
| consumer products cheaper. Whether that is wholly a net
| benefit, I think, is up for debate. When you consider the
| externalities like the environmental effects of rampant
| consumerism and the erosion of the middle class via a
| reduction in manufacturing jobs, I think there's plenty
| of basis for at least arguing there is tipping point on
| automating away manual labor. To say automating manual
| labor bluntly (and without careful consideration of
| blowback) always leads to a better society, I think one
| needs to define what they mean as society and what
| metrics they're using to define "better." I, personally,
| don't think raw GDP is a good measure of the health of a
| society.
|
| If anything, I think automating knowledge work has as at
| least a potentially larger upside. The downside will
| largely be borne by the upper-middle and upper-classes,
| which is why the GGP can read like a classist
| perspective.
| rob74 wrote:
| I was referring to automating "jobs" that are not even
| realistic jobs without automation, because they would be
| too labor-intensive/unpleasant/low-paying for anyone to
| want to do them, like the trash-sorting example.
| bumby wrote:
| u/xvector did a good job explaining why this dynamic
| exists
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39828089
| Philorandroid wrote:
| They make the cynical case that automation is coming for
| us all, and it will eventually replace every ounce of fun
| or meaning in gainful employment, but that it's okay
| because of some nebulous societal good. It's not a
| convincing argument.
| bumby wrote:
| While I do question their point that AGI is coming for
| all jobs, I think you're shoehorning your own narrative
| onto their point. At no point did they mention "fun" or
| "meaning". Even the idea that those are synonymous with
| employment is suspect.
| Philorandroid wrote:
| It's not a narrative so much as a leftover from what I
| was originally going to post, in that the
| creative/expressive/stimulating work is what's being
| touted as the first thing to be eliminated by AI.
|
| That aside, what exactly is suspect about finding meaning
| or joy in work? Is the quintessential experience meant to
| be soulless and grating?
| jMyles wrote:
| > Is the quintessential experience meant to be soulless
| and grating?
|
| Of course not. Few things in life are more fulfilling
| than a job you absolutely love and are excited to whack
| at every single day.
|
| But your question raises another one of equal stature: Is
| the quintessential experience meant to be a job? If we
| are creative enough to make rocks that can learn to do
| our jobs for us, surely we are creative enough to craft
| an economic model which allows us who no longer need to
| work to paint or write poetry or rebuild antique engines
| without needing to starve?
| Philorandroid wrote:
| I don't think a _job_ is the quintessential experience so
| much as _productive value,_ doing something that brings
| you joy from the act of creating, whether it's making
| music or art, assembling Lego kits, antique engine
| restoration, etc. Getting that satisfaction from your job
| is totally possible, so perhaps to some people it is!
|
| As far as crafting a post-scarcity economic model goes,
| it's not the problem of dreaming one up, it's the
| pervasiveness of scarcity. Even if all of humanity's
| basic necessities are one day a given, scarcity won't
| disappear, just shift around (maybe as transportation for
| the otherwise-infinite supply of consumer goods? Or
| living space away from dense urban centers? Maybe even
| the kind of heuristic analysis abilities humans are
| unmatched in to keep the matter replicators functioning?)
|
| More to the point, saying that this kind of luxury will
| exist in a thousand years doesn't nullify the concerns of
| the present, and probably wouldn't convince most people
| to forfeit their employment to machines likely owned by
| the uppermost classes.
| bumby wrote:
| I would argue there is a danger of conflating "productive
| value" with creative effort. The general view is that
| productive value is measured by how much a market is
| willing to pay for a product or service. I would venture
| to guess that most creative efforts aren't very
| marketable, unless your view is that society should go
| back to artisan craftsmen. Nobody particularly wants to
| consume the music that I create, so they have little to
| no procutive value, other than the joy I get from doing
| them. On the contrary, a lot of non-creative work has
| immense productive value. Re-shingling my roof isn't a
| particularly creative job, but I'm still willing to pay
| for it.
| bumby wrote:
| > _creative /expressive/stimulating_
|
| I think there's a distinction in that I was referring to
| "knowledge work" which isn't explicitly
| creative/expressive/stimulating. Many would classify much
| of research or law as "boring" even though they are
| knowledge work.
|
| > _what exactly is suspect about finding meaning or joy
| in work?_
|
| I did not mean it as wrong to find joy in your work. On
| the contrary, I think that's a worthwhile goal. But the
| distinction I make is that _any_ work can be found to be
| fulfilling. It 's the distinction between "finding your
| passion" and "cultivating your passion." I've worked with
| people who found meaning in their job cleaning offices
| and others who treated the design of rockets as soul-
| crushing. I think it has more to do with the person than
| the job. So I push back a bit on the false dichotomy
| created by classifying "knowledge" jobs as inherently
| worth saving from automation while manual work should be
| fodder for it. I also think the focus on a job for
| fulfillment is a bit of a red-herring. I think what
| people really need are to be valued members of society
| and, for many, a job is a means to that end (and maybe
| not even a good one).
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Any job that is necessary can have higher pay.
| Agriculture is probably one of those things that are
| necessary, unless we all eat fish.
|
| Higher wages in agriculture would mean a combination of
| less profit and/or higher consumer prices. That is not a
| sin. It is mostly politicd that demand that food prices
| have to be low so that the population don't realize how
| poor they are and much they are being robbed on
| corruption and waste.
| Kalium wrote:
| Automating knowledge work is what enables people to learn
| from books instead of hiring tutors. Teaching can now be
| done via tools and printing presses. This in turn means
| we can have libraries, which many people consider a key
| public good.
|
| It's perhaps worth pausing to consider if we have any
| kind of useful ability to predict blowback on anything
| but a trivial scale. It was fifteen years between the
| invention of HTTP and the creation of Facebook. It was
| twenty five years between the invention of HTTP and the
| Cambridge Analytica breach. I do not think any person
| could have meaningfully predicted those on those
| timescales.
|
| If we cannot currently usefully predict blowback, then
| what reason is there to try to anticipate it as a matter
| of policy?
| bumby wrote:
| I don't think I fully agree with the premise that
| blowback is completely unpredictable. I think there are
| plenty of examples where people can predict the
| directionality of future developments, even if they can't
| predict the exact specifics.
|
| We can certainly predict that when automation happens
| people will lose jobs. In a country where productivity is
| king and self-worth is tied to employment, we can predict
| this may lead to a crisis in society. And we also know
| people tend to turn to vices like drugs during those
| times. So I don't think things like the opioid epidemic
| that hit the former manufacturing centers of the country
| are unrelated nor completely unpredictable. They just
| sometimes take decades to play out.
|
| I'm not making a Luddite case that technology needs to be
| stalled. But I'm also not making the techno-optimist case
| that everything will eventually work out if we just plow
| forward with reckless technological abandon. The latter
| runs the risk of a lot of increased human suffering in
| the short term at the very least.
| Kalium wrote:
| To clarify, I am not saying blowback is completely
| unpredictable. You are absolutely right that there are
| times when blowback can be predicted in a general sense.
| My argument is that a general directionality of blowback
| is generally not useful for crafting policy.
|
| You're completely right that it was easy to predict that
| there would be some consequences to automation and people
| losing their jobs. Yet I do not think it was easy to
| predict what shape those would take. As a result, it was
| functionally impossible to offer useful policy measures.
| You can say "We should reform society away from believing
| productivity is king and self-worth is tied to
| employment", but that's itself not specific enough to be
| useful. "This may lead to a crisis in society" is
| similarly rather non-specific. How do you craft policy
| around "this may lead to a crisis"?
|
| In practice, I see two recurring patterns when people try
| to predict blowback. First, people use fears of blowback
| to launder their anxieties. If you look at the
| conversation around AI, you will see this happening in
| many forms.
|
| Second, people often use predictions about blowback to
| advance policies they wanted anyway. Artists want to be
| hired more and stronger intellectual property laws, the
| same things they wanted yesterday. Advocates for saving
| small towns in the rust belt will suggest the same
| retaining and social safety net policies they suggested
| yesterday before anyone asked them to predict blowback.
|
| In my opinion, these two patterns are deeply linked. They
| are both about trying to turn confirmation bias into
| policy. None of the answers from this are automatically
| wrong, but none of them are novel. Most worryingly,
| neither approach offers any kind of way to reliably
| predict blowback so it _can_ be dealt with via policy.
|
| In my career, I've seen any number of engineering teams
| devote significant time and effort to trying to solve
| technical problems that never arose. Not because they
| were solved in advance, but because the team's
| predictions about where issues would arise were wildly
| incorrect. From this, I have drawn the lesson that we are
| well-advised to approach the task of trying to predict
| failure in complex systems with deep humility.
|
| The more complex the system, the more humble we need to
| be. At some point, trying to make any prediction more
| specific than "something will probably go wrong" becomes
| a poor use of time.
|
| This is neither the Luddite case nor the techno-optimist
| case. It's an argument to be skeptical of our own ability
| to make good predictions about the future except in, as
| you wisely and correctly say, very general ways.
| bumby wrote:
| You are right that I was speaking in generalities, in
| part because a forum isn't the best format for these
| types of in-depth policy discussions and also because I
| don't claim to be a policy-wonk. In fact, that's why I
| prefer engineering roles. But I'll try to clarify a bit.
|
| Let's dilate on "This may lead to a crisis in society" to
| try to get to a policy. If we can agree on two things we
| might be able to get a rough scaffolding of a framework
| to discuss policy. 1) government programs, like
| everything from social security to roads/bridges take
| money to run and 2) the vast majority of federal funds
| come from taxes related to work, like income taxes and
| social security taxes. By extension, if automation
| effects jobs, it then affects the programs that create a
| stable society.
|
| So one aspect is: as automation takes people's jobs, it
| potentially threatens the ability of government to fund
| its programs. If a society ignores this, it faces a
| potential "crisis" if those programs help create the
| conditions for a stable society. There's a few ways one
| could address this. On the cost side of the equation, we
| could use austerity measures to reduce the cost burden.
| There's certainly something to be gained here, and it
| would be a long digression to decide which policies are a
| priority. (For example, I've heard research saying that
| roads provide the most benefit on a cost basis, followed
| by early education programs like Head Start). On the
| supply side of the equation, it seems like there are two
| options: a) help workers get replacement jobs that pay
| at, or near, what they had before their job was automated
| away or b) get the money through a different, non-income
| based policy. It didn't seem like we did a good job
| crafting policy in the rust belt related to a). There
| wasn't much re-investment into those communities or
| workers, compared to what was gained by automation. There
| are various ways to address b), including restructuring
| corporate taxes or instituting an automation tax to make
| up for the displaced incomes formerly garnered by workers
| paying a tax. But we went the other way on those, too.
|
| While I concede those are very high-level, the intent is
| to show there are real discussion points that can be
| crafted into policy and it's not just some hand-wavy
| rhetoric.
| Kalium wrote:
| I believe you may have overlooked one of my key points:
| we did not have any useful way to predict those
| consequences at the time production was being automated
| that would have marked them out as particularly likely.
|
| Automation started in the _1780s_ , with the industrial
| revolution. The initial impacts had a lot to do with
| creating vast numbers of jobs, driving down the cost of
| all kinds of consumer goods, and heavily driving
| urbanization. I can't see any easy way to get from there
| to the rust belt if I'm someone looking forward in 1780.
| Right now we can treat this as obvious only because we
| have the benefit of hindsight. I cannot imagine any way
| in which the modern history of Detroit would have been
| reasonably and usefully predictable from 1780 (at the
| time it was a frontier fort under British military
| control).
|
| You're right, impacts can be decades off. They can even
| be centuries off. There were a lot of equally credible
| people who thought automation was going to have utopian
| consequences that didn't include people losing their
| productive economic positions. This isn't a binary,
| either. There were plenty of other possible outcomes as
| well. How were people in 1780 to know what we do know?
| What happens if every predicted outcome is taken
| seriously? What happens if they're then all wrong, or not
| right on a sufficient timescale? I know how I would
| expect that to interact with limited government
| resources.
|
| At the end of it, I think we're likely limited to dealing
| with consequences and trivially short-term prediction.
| Those, at least, we have a reasonable shot of observing.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| >Can you elaborate? Because it's not immediately clear to
| me the distinction.
|
| Replacing a task with AI that otherwise will be done
| chemically with environmental degradation or not done at
| all because people won't or can't-- AI in that context
| makes things better.
|
| As for attempts to deploy AI as a _replacement_ for
| sophisticated human work like "automating knowledge
| work", the output will be _worse_ and it 's a race to the
| bottom on quality. As we see from our algorithmic-driven
| tech industry friends, robot-led workstreams benefit
| society only in the short run. In the long run, people
| come to miss-- and their lives are diminished by-- an
| absence of quality, humanity, agency, caring, fairness,
| all the things algorithms cannot and will not ever be or
| do.
|
| Anyone who is serious about this topic only discusses in
| terms of AI + humans (as a combination) and not AI as a
| replacement for sophisticated work. Statements beyond
| that reflect a lack of appreciation for either the
| complexity of the topic or for what society actually
| expects out of a "knowledge" workstream.
| bumby wrote:
| I would consider myself in the AI+humans camp. However, I
| do not see the distinction between automating knowledge
| work and manual work in what you describe. Somehow,
| knowledge workers seem to think what they do has some
| magic special sauce. I tend to think this is the result
| of human bias and not clear, first-principled thinking.
| You make a bold claim that automating knowledge work will
| be worse but don't show any data to confirm it. Even
| trivial cases can disprove it, however. Do you think
| knowledge work is worse when it is "automated" using an
| Excel spreadsheet vs a pencil and paper?
|
| > _an absence of quality, humanity, agency, caring,
| fairness, all the things algorithms cannot and will not
| ever be or do._
|
| I would argue that automation can be quite better than
| humans on many of these domains. When they do fall short,
| it's often because they are reflecting (and in worse
| cases, amplifying) the shortcomings of humans in these
| same areas.
| aydyn wrote:
| > Why not both?
|
| Can you be explicit?
|
| With LLMs I use it as a tool to improve my efficiency at
| translating thought to code, that's good.
|
| With image generation, I struggle to see the value,
| especially relative to its harm even apart from taking jobs
| from artists. What I see is:
|
| * The increase in possibility of fake photos/fake news (the
| recent photoshopped Kate Middleton comes to mind)
|
| * A new level of degenerate coomer addiction from AI booba
|
| * Mass production of CSAM (I believe this to be a hugely
| underreported issue from what I've seen on reddit/civitai)
|
| Diffusion models/image transformers are incredible and fun
| technological marvels but as far as I can tell current
| usage is at best a fun toy.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| It does "take jobs from artists" but it also hugely opens
| things up for more people. Like, a friend of mine made a
| parody trading card game a bit ago. Doing custom art for
| each card would've been completely prohibitive. Instead,
| she used AI art for it all. Cue lots of hilarity and a
| good time for all.
|
| Same for writers, another friend is writing a D&D
| campaign. Again, he doesn't have the skill himself to do
| good digital art, and dozens of custom pieces is way too
| much cash at this point. But some carefully-done AI
| pieces, they mon't be perfect, but a damn bit better than
| nothing!
| aydyn wrote:
| As I said, it's at best a fun toy and all you've said
| confirms that. It does not help solve any of the problems
| facing humanity.
| bumby wrote:
| > _It does not help solve any of the problems facing
| humanity._
|
| There's an argument that neither do most jobs [1], but
| that doesn't mean they are unaffected by automation.
|
| [1] Graeber, D. and Lou, L.I.T., 2019. Bullshit Jobs: A
| Conversation with David Graeber. Made in China Journal,
| (2).
| aydyn wrote:
| > There's an argument that neither do most jobs
|
| Agreed, lets not add to that pile of useless jobs
| bumby wrote:
| So what's your plan for people who currently have those
| "useless" job that need them to provide for themselves
| and their family?
|
| I'm all for getting rid of bull$hit jobs to allow people
| to pursue meaningful, creative work. And while a lot of
| people laude the automation aspect, I don't see many
| proposing ideas on how to close that gap.
| aydyn wrote:
| You realize I fully agree with you, right? I'm not sure
| what you're arguing for.
| bumby wrote:
| I think you're having a different "argument". My original
| post is about rejecting the false dichotomy that
| automating away manual jobs is inherently good and
| automating away knowledge jobs is inherently bad. But you
| chimed in to make the case that knowledge jobs aren't at
| risk of automation. I don't agree with that latter point,
| even if it's digression from the original one. Because I
| disagree with it, I was asking you to elaborate on what
| you'd suggest for those knowledge workers who eventually
| get displaced? To use a glib example, do we just tell
| every lawyer "learn how to plumb"?
| SamBam wrote:
| I get what you're saying, but this sounds a lot like "Person
| who voted for Face-Eating Leopards Party only wants leopard
| to eat _other_ people 's faces."
| xvector wrote:
| If you want to create an AGI it will eventually "target" all
| professions.
|
| Art, writing, and basic programming are just the easiest ones
| to tackle first. You have fast iteration cycles because
| iteration is virtual.
|
| This temporary period of difficulty is the price we pay for
| AGI, which will yield far more benefit in the long run.
| sophacles wrote:
| > which will yield far more benefit in the long run.
|
| This is questionable at best. Im glad you have optimism,
| but do you have any facts that show it won't be a long run
| benefit like cfcs, or lead in everything?
|
| > This temporary period of difficulty is the price we
| pay...
|
| Im glad you're signing me up for difficulty. I get that you
| probably think you stand to benefit in some way from AGI,
| so why don't you pay the price yourself instead of
| volunteering others? Maybe it's because the difficulty that
| it causes really really sucks, and the benefit isn't worth
| paying the price yourself?
| rob74 wrote:
| Far more benefit - but the question is, for whom? And don't
| start with topics like universal basic income, I'm not very
| optimistic about that. The way it's looking like right now,
| in the long run 1% will reap the benefits, while 99% will
| be out of a job...
| jackling wrote:
| Strange to ask the question, but eliminate one of the
| strongest arguments right off the bat. Should probably
| explain why UBI is not feasible in this scenario.
|
| As for benefits, likely for everyone. People don't work
| just to make money, people make money since they work and
| produce for society right? Making money was never the end
| goal, and if we can avoid more work, that should be
| better for society as a whole.
| GPerson wrote:
| I'm not making an argument here. What I would like
| explained is why we don't already have UBI, given that
| mass production and automation has existed for a very
| long time already.
| jackling wrote:
| The new form of automation is different than previous
| forms, that could be a reason why: https://www.youtube.co
| m/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU&ab_channel=CGPGr....
|
| In short, automation shifted the amount that needed to be
| done in certain industries. AI could possibly make shift
| so large that there won't be enough work for everyone to
| do.
| GPerson wrote:
| Automation practically eliminated the labor required to
| provide for the basic necessities of human survival, but
| if I don't maintain an increasingly inconsequential job,
| then I will die homeless in the streets in short order.
|
| I'm really not trying to argue for or against any new
| technology. But I don't see why any new technological
| change necessarily brings about UBI given the absolutely
| drastic reduction in the amount of labor necessary for
| human survival we already achieved in the mid 1900's. So
| my question is still, why did the old forms of automation
| not bring about a post scarcity utopia (or at least a
| UBI)?
| lc9er wrote:
| Not sure if this is sarcasm and I just need another
| coffee. Almost everyone works for money, short of a
| privileged few that are lucky enough to work purely for
| the satisfaction of the work itself.
| jackling wrote:
| That wasn't my point. An individual works for money in
| order to buy things. But we just have this system in
| place because labour needs to be done in order for us to
| survive. Labour makes goods and services that we need,
| society alloocates money so we can live. If we automate
| most labour away, then money doesn't need to exist as a
| system. It exist just to facilitate our current system of
| consumption and labour. When there is a dramatic shift to
| that system, we shouldn't fight the shift just because it
| will automate jobs away and make money less valuable, the
| system of allocate wealth needs to change to accomodate
| the shift.
|
| I wasn't trying to say that people don't work for money
| fullstop, but rather that money isn't what people are
| trying to get ultimately. People want things, things that
| make people happy and alive. They get money in order to
| acquire those things.
| lc9er wrote:
| Ah gotcha. I understand what you mean. Though I don't
| know that I share your optimism. I fear the wealthy class
| will just squeeze and squeeze all the money and resources
| from everyone else, and make moving to a post-money
| system as painful as possible.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Young women can always prostitute themselves, and that's
| something an AI can never replace.
|
| So mass prostitution for women and mass gang violence for
| men is what the younger generation gets. To the benefit
| of the few and the elderly. It's already happening.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| > Young women can always prostitute themselves, and
| that's something an AI can never replace.
|
| How will the clients pay if AI has already taken away the
| jobs?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Answer to you and the other responder: The average man is
| not going to be their clients. They are broke. The
| clients are of course going to be those who benefit from
| the massive difference in wealth. And it does not have to
| be prostitution only in the traditional sense, it will
| also be so called sugar dating and literal harems. That
| is the norm for mammals.
| yifanl wrote:
| The endgame for the trillions of r&d dollars we're
| funding AI with is so a small subset of rich people can
| return to monke?
| bumby wrote:
| There's an argument that the relatively "old" tech of
| internet pornography has already changed the way and
| amount of sex that people engage in. Why do you think it
| stops there?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > or sorting mixed trash into non-recyclable and recyclable
| (and further into various metals and plastics)
|
| A lot of that can already be automated. Push the trash into a
| series of shredders, until it's powderized, then use magnets
| to pull out metals, and differentiate the rest by weight, IR
| spectrum and air streams. Then, one can use a spectrum of
| solvents to target plastic polymers to get back the
| precursors.
|
| Unfortunately, for plastic polymers that's still way more
| expensive than to just dump the wholesale trash on some Asian
| or African piece of land where it will eventually either
| degrade into microplastics or be burnt by extremely poor
| people who hope to get some of the metals back.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| It cannot replace neither artists nor software developers.
| People are already laughing at Devin or whatever this thing
| is called hallucinating really heavily and producing
| gibberish.
| digging wrote:
| current state of technology !== maximum capabilities of
| that technology
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| We are still not flying in space ships to other planets.
| It's quite possible the AI won't progress at all.
| aqfamnzc wrote:
| Hardware is hard. That and the fact that AI is still bleeding
| edge - I'm not surprised at all that LLMs, image generation,
| etc. is what companies are jumping for right now.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Instead, it 's targeted at replacing graphics artists and
| software developers..._
|
| It would be nice if we would not stigmatize manual labor.
| There's nothing wrong with manual labor. For some people,
| it's ideal.
|
| In a city where I used to live, I'd frequently come home on
| red eye flights. Over time I started to recognize a couple of
| older gentlemen mopping the floors in the early morning
| hours.
|
| Then one day, they were gone. Instead, there was a slow-
| moving robot mopping the floors. One clearly too large to get
| into all the places where the dirt accumulates, but...
| Automation!
|
| A couple of years later, I learned that the airport was part
| of a municipal program employing intellectually challenged
| adults, and that the cleaning guys I saw were probably part
| of that.
|
| Now when I travel through that airport, I always wonder what
| happened to them. Did they find another mopping job? Are they
| homeless now? Do they have to live under a bridge because
| society fetishizes technology and robots? Because budget
| spreadsheets always have a line for "money saved," but never
| a line for "lives improved?"
|
| Mopping the floors at the airport is not a great job for a
| tech bro who wants to make seven figures. But it's a good,
| honest job for a lot of people.
| asimovfan wrote:
| If there are people intellectually challenged, the solution
| is not to abuse them for menial tasks which noone want.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Clearly you've never worked with the intellectually
| challenged. These are people who want to live normal
| lives, and like most normal people find earning an honest
| wage and providing for themselves very rewarding.
|
| And to describe manual labor as "abuse" is, frankly,
| disgusting.
| asimovfan wrote:
| I have family members who are intellectually challenged
| and my work is manual labour. There could be many
| therapeutic applications provided by the government where
| they could still live 'normal' lives (this is obviously
| wrong because they do need different conditions, if you
| really want to benefit them they will have different
| requirements). Normal lives do not mean doing work that
| is tiresome.
|
| Perhaps in a different world manual labour could be
| something good, but i dont think its honest of you to say
| that you think people who do manual labour are not being
| abused.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _i dont think its honest of you to say that you think
| people who do manual labour are not being abused._
|
| The next time you drive through a construction zone, let
| the construction workers know how you feel. I'm
| interested to hear their responses.
|
| EDIT: Since HN doesn't permit me to respond to your
| response, I'll note here that I have worked plenty of
| manual labor jobs. I've been poor. Very poor. I'm better
| off today than I was then. But, I don't recall ever
| thinking that having a job involving manual labor was
| abuse. It was just a job. It's what you did to pay the
| rent, and hopefully buy some ramen and canned potatoes
| for the week.
|
| I've done landscaping, and mucked out toilets, and
| cleaned out the pits of elevator shafts, hauled endless
| boxes from one end of a factory to the other, and I've
| always taken pride in my work. Perhaps I was just brought
| up differently than you were.
| asimovfan wrote:
| Having worked in many, many menial jobs, i can tell you
| that there is definitely the general tendency to think
| that we were being abused in all of them.
|
| Perhaps you can try working at a mcdonalds or something
| or as a janitor for a while, see how you feel about your
| employers or the institution that is employing you.
| asimovfan wrote:
| As you yourself admit, you describe your own experience
| with such work in negative terms, conditions of being
| 'very poor'. Why would you wish it on a person who is
| intellectually challenged?
|
| Regarding ethics of work, you are talking about something
| completely different. Being proud of working an honest
| job is not the subject at hand.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _menial tasks which noone want_
|
| I enjoy manual labor and I wish it was easier to get paid
| for it. I find cognitive work more pleasant and
| satisfying when I devote part of my time to external
| physical effort, which forces me to focus my mind outward
| instead of on abstractions.
|
| It seems to me (reading your other comments) that your
| issue is not with manual labor _per se_ but the
| capitalistic system that devalues it and gives many
| manual laborers as little autonomy as possible.
| asimovfan wrote:
| Indeed, it is as you say.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| things that currently would have to be done manually, but
| aren't feasible
|
| one example i'd like to see is "guiding cows to pastures"
| which is often no longer economic to be done by humans
| lossolo wrote:
| Check out this one "Sniper robot treats 500k plants per hour
| with 95% less chemicals"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV0cR_Nhac0
| scns wrote:
| Fantastic! Thank you.
| bumby wrote:
| I agree, there is a lot of delicate and manual agricultural
| work that I would like see AI tackle. But this doesn't seem to
| be one of them.
|
| The article is a little light on the details, but it doesn't
| look like this robut does any manual work on the flowers.
| Rather, it seems like it uses image recognition to plot the GPS
| coordinates of potential sick plants (with the assumption that
| a human will follow up to remove them manually if necessary).
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| At the end of the day its still cheaper to spray pesticide so
| thats what the farmer will do, unless regulated.
| rurban wrote:
| For sure not. Visual AI is taking over now (because it scales
| easily), robots already did so.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| What is cheaper, a robot that has a vision program to
| identify pests and target them alone, or a robot that just
| has to spray pesticide?
| barbazoo wrote:
| Totally, depends on what's cheaper though as that's what
| farmers will choose, no matter what stage of the climate crisis
| we're in.
| randomdata wrote:
| Speaking as a farmer - the farmer will always choose what the
| consumer wants. Any deviation from that and you won't be
| farming for long.
|
| Granted, what's cheapest is usually what the consumer wants.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| "all I want is my frickin lasers attached to my frickin
| weedbot"
| cloudbonsai wrote:
| Found a clip that shows how this robot works:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UwrXj4as6LA&t=18
|
| It's very cool. The machine is basically a very big overhead
| scanner that slowly moves over hills.
|
| Seems that this design is pretty much applicable to other crops
| (such as potatoes...) as well.
| leoff wrote:
| why have a truck doing this? Couldn't this be a much lighter
| and efficient structure with just the camera and robot arm?
| 3D30497420 wrote:
| Guessing it makes it more flexible to use since it is self-
| contained, so it could be used on whatever size or
| configuration of field.
|
| It sounds like a gasoline engine? That seems an interesting
| choice.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Makes sense; (red) diesel is already in use on farm fields,
| one tank lasts for ages, loads of power, doesn't need to be
| quiet since it's in fields, it's lighter weight so less
| soil impact, and water doesn't affect it much.
|
| Downsides is of course pollution etc, even if diesel
| engines have gotten a lot cleaner over the years.
| berkes wrote:
| If you think of it, though: all the pollutants, heavy
| metals, and other chemicals that are in the X liter of
| diesel a farmer burns per yet, ends up on, and in the
| crops.
|
| We eat that. (and thus need to wash it, to mitigate that)
| lukan wrote:
| There is usually worse stuff on the fields than diesel,
| but this is about flowers which do not get eaten.
|
| And the same design would likely work with a battery at
| some point in the future. But currently diesel is
| standard on the fields.
| PeterisP wrote:
| What heavy metals? Leaded fuels aren't used for decades.
| Diesel exhaust doesn't really leave anything worth caring
| about on the crops, "natural" pollution from rain, soil,
| bugs and birdshit is an order of magnitude more relevant
| than exhaust, and the things intentionally sprayed on
| fields - fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides - is much
| worse than those, even for organic farms manure and their
| range of approved pesticides are applied in huge
| quantities and will mean polluted crops that (obviously)
| need to be washed and will have all kinds of harmful
| residue anyway.
|
| If the device was solar instead of diesel, that wouldn't
| move the needle on the dirtiness of the crops. Even the
| pollution from wear&tear on tires and brakes is more
| relevant than fuel - we worry about fossil fuels due to
| the global effect of greenhouse gas emissions, we also
| care about people breathing in small particles from
| diesel exhaust, but it doesn't really harm food in farms.
| Retric wrote:
| > all the pollutants, heavy metals, and other chemicals
| that are in the X liter of diesel a farmer burns per yet,
| ends up on, and in the crops.
|
| It's really not that much. A combine harvester uses about
| 15 gallons / hour of fuel and harvests ~450,000 pounds of
| corn per hour ie more than a lifetimes supply of food.
| Various other equipment gets used but it's all trivial in
| comparison to what's directly sprayed on crops.
|
| Meanwhile your directly exposed to all the car fumes
| around you on a daily basis. Also, tulips aren't a food
| crop.
| PeterisP wrote:
| The robot arm would still have to be mounted on a truck,
| wouldn't it? It's not like it will be half a mile long and
| just reach over the whole field.
|
| Also, robot arms can be a quite expensive way of doing
| things; I saw a prototype that used tethered drones (like the
| common quadcopters, but power and data comes over a cable) to
| manipulate things as apparently it was like 10 times cheaper
| than a robot arm capable of reaching the same distances and
| transporting the same weight payload.
| Someone wrote:
| I would guess the problem is easier to solve in the more
| controlled lighting below that truck than in the more varying
| daylight.
|
| It also needs lots of lighting
| (https://youtube.com/watch?v=9H_JUvXyL74)
|
| That roof also may protect the electronics better from rain.
|
| Finally, I can't find details on
| https://h2lrobotics.com/?page_id=254&lang=en but I doubt it
| is "the camera". There probably is more than one.
| Goonbaggins wrote:
| I work on a similar type of application (AI connected to a
| robot arm that sorts recycling). This looks pretty efficient
| for a few reasons.
|
| - Consistent lighting is crucial for the most efficient AI.
| Full overhead enclosure makes this way easier
|
| - Gantry style robot is MUCH lighter and easier to repair
| than both a 6-axis arm or even a delta robot. It's also
| likely an order of magnitude cheaper than other options
|
| - Gantry robot also makes it pretty modular if they need to
| modify for different crop widths
| wiremine wrote:
| I'll take your Tulip killer and raise you one.
|
| An almond tree mummy remover: A robot with Airsoft guns.
|
| https://www.insighttrac.com/
| gwbas1c wrote:
| What is a mummy (within the context of an almond tree)?
|
| I can't even find the definition (in context) in the
| dictionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mummy
| mda wrote:
| Apparently a mummy is an almond nut that was not harvested
| and remained on the tree. Some pests depend on these to
| survive the winter, so having them on trees is a risk.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| It's always important to be conscious of industry jargon
| and define it.
|
| (The landing page should probably have _some_ kind of
| definition of what a mummy is. It doesn 't need to be
| detailed.)
| wiremine wrote:
| Agreed. The target audience knows exactly what it is.
|
| (BTW, I wasn't involved directly)
| K0balt wrote:
| This is adjacent to some ideas I've been working on in my farm.
| My focus is more on weed control though.
|
| At first the title gave me a vision of a rage fueled automaton
| laying waste to awesome tulips lol.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Imagine a software bug that wipes out an entire cultivar.
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| What was interesting to me was how expensive this thing was, I
| wonder how much of that cost came from the software. Elon
| mentioned how they're trying to create a "world model" for their
| Tesla FSD, which has enabled them to use the same software for
| Optimus.
|
| I'd imagine the future will be large "ready to go" Ai packages,
| which companies would tweak to their liking.
| chefandy wrote:
| Seems to me that smaller, more focused models would be more
| practical. Why would the tulip machine need to know the rules
| of canasta or the history of peanut butter and jelly
| sandwiches? I wonder if there's going to be a persistent
| monolith/microservices cycle.
| senseiV wrote:
| well world model in the context of the tulip fields, so
| models could be finetuned+sheared to drop size and remain
| effective
| mkmk wrote:
| Isn't cost typically a function of the value a product provides
| the purchaser, rather than a function of the inputs required to
| create it?
| j-a-a-p wrote:
| Wasn't it 180.000 EUR? Once you start buying equipment for the
| industry you will discover that consumer price levels do not
| apply here. Perhaps it is the lower scale, or it is the burden
| of compliance.
| lynx23 wrote:
| There you have it, "the future of nursing homes"... All the
| material for a dystopian sci-fi book, fueled by a single spooky
| headline. Matrix and A Scanner Darkly mixed up into something...
| that makes you even more affraid of the future.
| amelius wrote:
| Side question to anyone working in this field. Aren't you afraid
| that the next wave of AI (generic robot that can be taught to do
| anything) will destroy your business model?
| I_ wrote:
| Anyone working in this field is likely to be aware how woeful
| current actuators and power sources can be in a machine
| designed solely for one purpose, let alone how they might be in
| a machine designed for every single purpose.
| sema4hacker wrote:
| I've been waiting for someone to create a robot that rolls along
| the edges of our freeways picking up all the litter.
| johnea wrote:
| Wow! How did we ever survive without that!
| ShitHNDorksSay wrote:
| "Tech and AI solves life's issues." Some dorky H1B Indian stuck
| in the Bay area.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| we already have crypto and NFT mania so might as well bring back
| the AI-infused Dutch tulip bulbs hype now.
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