from Hacker News

Could AI robots with lasers make herbicides – and farm workers – obsolete?

by jshprentz on 8/4/24, 12:20 PM with 65 comments

• by RiverCrochet on 8/4/24, 4:06 PM

  My cousin, who I disagree with totally, says this:

  Pro-pesticide lobbies will modify the political landscape to their needs, neutralize public dissent with thinktanks and production of studies that show that lasers are a plot to rob you of your God-given right to consume chemicals produced by corporations that provide jobs to blue-collar communities, and we'll be stuck with the poisons until the next plague or world war fundamentally rearranges the power reaches of the dynastic centers of wealth that own it all.

• by mistercow on 8/4/24, 1:33 PM

  It’s going to be fascinating to see what new laser resistant weeds and bugs come out of this.

• by bwhiting2356 on 8/4/24, 2:12 PM

  When I was 16, I worked on an organic farm in Chase, BC, Canada. Every morning we would scrape bugs and their eggs off potato leaves and into a jar, feed them to the chickens

• by ulrikrasmussen on 8/4/24, 2:14 PM

  I think this technology is pretty exciting because it could also allow regenerative farming to be organic - as far as I understand that is currently impossible because you have to apply herbicides when you don't plow your land. That would be a win both for the environment and the climate.

• by KaiserPro on 8/4/24, 2:33 PM

  One of the exciting things about better computer vision is the ability to have dense mixed crops.

  This is where you can have three or four sympathetic crops growing side by side, allowing for greater resistance to various environmental factors. It also, if you give them enough attention, increase yeild.

• by noisy_boy on 8/4/24, 3:18 PM

  I think the gap here is hardware - specifically suited to work with various type of plants/crops, some of which are delicate (some use cases like this are hands-off but there are probably a lot more hands-on scenarios). I think the software can be developed relatively easily (ml/vision etc) but I'm not aware of any hardware that is as dexterous as our fingers and can be easily used in a farm setting.

• by karaterobot on 8/4/24, 2:13 PM

  I'm sure that if they perfect this technology, all those unemployed farm workers will just get high-tech green jobs, and everything will be fine. There's rarely small or large scale consequences for this kind of thing.

• by Caius-Cosades on 8/4/24, 7:24 PM

  I sure wish. Less toxic stuff we spread around the better. Now if we could do something about the horrible waste of fertilizer that ruins our waters and coastal seas. I mean I'd love to go and swim in july and august, but the waters are laden with blue-algae-neurotoxins so it's bit of a no-no.

• by kjkjadksj on 8/4/24, 4:34 PM

  There will always be people working. Labor is cheap. It will always be front running capital intensive automation that needs to generate a margin to be successful, a margin based on data from people doing that job.

• by tomxor on 8/4/24, 3:25 PM

  I feel like this is just another version of people solving problems created by technology by adding more technology.

  We could probably side step a lot of issues, simultaneously, more elegantly, more efficiently, by driving down to the foundational technology and considering alternatives with our newer technological arsenal.

  In farming that foundational technology is monocultures, it simplifies scaling, efficiency of planting, managing and harvesting, but the cost is soil degradation, disease, and susceptibility to pests. All of these issues evaporate with multicrop farming, it would be more interesting to apply robotics and ML to making the planting, and harvesting of that practically scalable.

• by louthy on 8/4/24, 1:30 PM

  An army of robot peasants working the fields with lasers for eyes?

  What could possibly go wrong? [1]

  [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peasants%27_Revolt

• by leemcalilly on 8/4/24, 3:04 PM

  I want this for my yard. Like a yard roomba.

• by skywhopper on 8/4/24, 3:52 PM

  A: No

• by dartos on 8/4/24, 3:32 PM

  No

• by aaron695 on 8/4/24, 10:18 PM

  I bought a Propane Torch Weed Burner and it doesn't really work - https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Weed+Burner+Torch

  I didn't expect fire to work well but I thought it would be fun, which it was, which is gardening.

  It's hard to tell how well it works, depending on how much patience you have you can burn it to the ground and keep going heating the soil and in theory roots and stored energy but that's time and money.

  Plants will die if you keep damaging them enough before they can recover it'd be interesting to see what the specs are here. Totally fine in theory.

• by henearkr on 8/4/24, 1:33 PM

  Lasers are even more energy-intensive than pesticides...

  Mechanical methods could be better, but just not micromanaging it and using permaculture methods would be the best solution.