Ok, this is super not the point of your post, but now I can’t help thinking about how cool it would be to have an AI-assisted educational video game about improving agriculture. Like, there’s so many useful ideas around improving agriculture that rural villages around the world could benefit from knowing. Stuff like how and where and why to build ‘sand dams’ (small dams back-filled upstream with sand) in dry rocky gullies for harvesting infrequent high-overland-flow rain events. Or turning carbonaceous crop waste into charcoal rather than ash, and then mixing it with nitrogen-rich compost for a year, to make bio-char. Big soil fertility gains as well as great for reducing greenhouse gasses via carbon capture.
Along the same lines of thought, I think the most important automated agriculture tool humanity could develop and deploy wouldn’t be a farm tool at all. It would be a slow-and-steady solar-powered ATV-sized digging robot which could work mostly-self-supervised to build and maintain rainwater capture facilities (sand dams, swales, small reservoirs, dry wells, trincheras, gabions, etc.) up-watershed of farms in semi-arid areas.
Ok, this is super not the point of your post, but now I can’t help thinking about how cool it would be to have an AI-assisted educational video game about improving agriculture. Like, there’s so many useful ideas around improving agriculture that rural villages around the world could benefit from knowing. Stuff like how and where and why to build ‘sand dams’ (small dams back-filled upstream with sand) in dry rocky gullies for harvesting infrequent high-overland-flow rain events. Or turning carbonaceous crop waste into charcoal rather than ash, and then mixing it with nitrogen-rich compost for a year, to make bio-char. Big soil fertility gains as well as great for reducing greenhouse gasses via carbon capture.
Along the same lines of thought, I think the most important automated agriculture tool humanity could develop and deploy wouldn’t be a farm tool at all. It would be a slow-and-steady solar-powered ATV-sized digging robot which could work mostly-self-supervised to build and maintain rainwater capture facilities (sand dams, swales, small reservoirs, dry wells, trincheras, gabions, etc.) up-watershed of farms in semi-arid areas.