I've been thinking about this in the context of applied ecology
(Permaculture, et. al.) It's undeniable that modern mechanized mass
agriculture is incredibly efficient and already highly automated. It's
kind of fantastic. (And very challenging to compete against.)
The two main downsides (IMO) are related: fragility and ecological ignorance.
The article touches on this: "soil is a natural resource that will become
endangered if we do not mitigate the severe erosion problems that stem
from single species field that are barren (re: nothing actively growing)
for 30-40% of the calendar year (in North America)."
(Imagine installing millions of acres of solar panels and just switching
them off for 1/3 of the year.)
Broadly speaking, if our agriculture destroys topsoil rather than creating
it we're gonna have a bad time.
An interesting challenge would be to automate food forests. For concreteness, check out what these folks are doing: https://www.youtube.com/user/plantabundance
This is one family working on their home plot in a suburb who have converted it into a really cool food forest with chickens and lots and lots of different crops.
Imagine replicating this across millions of acres, without involving
hundreds of thousands of people (which wouldn't be a bad thing, but it
couldn't compete with mechanized agriculture.) What kind of automation
could help with that?
The two main downsides (IMO) are related: fragility and ecological ignorance.
The article touches on this: "soil is a natural resource that will become endangered if we do not mitigate the severe erosion problems that stem from single species field that are barren (re: nothing actively growing) for 30-40% of the calendar year (in North America)."
(Imagine installing millions of acres of solar panels and just switching them off for 1/3 of the year.)
Broadly speaking, if our agriculture destroys topsoil rather than creating it we're gonna have a bad time.
An interesting challenge would be to automate food forests. For concreteness, check out what these folks are doing: https://www.youtube.com/user/plantabundance
This is one family working on their home plot in a suburb who have converted it into a really cool food forest with chickens and lots and lots of different crops.
Imagine replicating this across millions of acres, without involving hundreds of thousands of people (which wouldn't be a bad thing, but it couldn't compete with mechanized agriculture.) What kind of automation could help with that?