Posted on 03/27/2017 11:11:36 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The world population is expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050. China and India, the two largest countries in the world, have populations totalling around one billion. In four years, by 2022, India is predicted to have the largest population in the world, surpassing China.
This means we need new ways to grow food that are smarter and helps regulate our use of land, water and energy in order to feed the planet and avoid a global food crisis.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute believe the answer lies in sensors, artificial intelligence (AI) and robots.
In a new initiative called FarmView, researchers are working to combine sensors, robotics and artificial intelligence to create a fleet of mobile field robots they hope will improve plant breeding and crop-management practices....
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Well, there is always Soylent Green....
The world's problem in the coming decades will not be how to grow food. The problem will be that much of the world's population is too low-IQ to be able to produce enough value to buy the food they need to live on, and the ability of the US to subsidize that is finite.
Yes, Forbers and Carnegie will tell farmers how to farm smarter. /sarcasm
I love tech stuff like this. I can’t help it -— I find it thrilling. Humans are so clever -— for the good, if they want to be.
Yep. Notice the “Agenda 21” language. They’ve destroyed farming by regulating the small farmer out of business, and now they want to destroy the food itself.
MORE IMMIGRATION!!! /s
One computers start programming themselves, 24/7 and learning, we might make a comparable century technological jump in a couple of years. Astonishing.
Time for my favorite back-of-the-napkin calculation.
Short version:
Average livable land area worldwide is 8 acres per person.
That’s more than enough for sustenance farming; that space + effort = true poverty line aka minimum wage.
Long version:
world land area / world population
= ((196,900,000 square miles * 640 acres per square mile) / 7,493,686,430)
= 16.8 acres per person
Assume about half that is unusable rank wilderness (Antarctica, Sahara, etc), we’ve got about 8 acres per person, which is plenty (for now) given that 1 person needs 1-3 acres for sustenance farming (depending on diet).
To wit: if you can’t buy food, you’re welcome to grow it. Figure the true “minimum wage” aka “poverty line” is the work effort required to achieve sustenance given 8 acres. From there, you can either grow more and trade it, or do something else to earn the equivalent.
Problem is the cultural/economic elite are increasingly concluding your point: instead of figuring people can do _something_ to earn their way (increasing total world productivity in the process, thus “lifting all boats”), they’re planning on the low-productivity population will prove incapable of meeting the “poverty line” by any means, and thus both the top & bottom income brackets will demand income (to wit: productivity) redistribution in the form of “guaranteed basic income” - _giving_ people that which they should be able to elicit from the dirt of 8 acres, but without the inconvenience of actual effort.
Yes. indeed.
Why waste big acres on a farm, robots, sensors.
Why not just backyard aquaponics
Simple, little maintenance, provides fish and vegetables. Feed a village, feed the world.
Here in Nevada, the state water engineer is trying to take away 75% of our water that came with our properties for a domestic well.
NO gardens—NO trees watered—No landscaping—No flowers—NO WATERING LIVESTOCK of any kind.
My guess? The author copied the idea from the movie ‘Interstellar’.
This article focuses on near term applications (currently in development) of deploying mobile sensors, to collect exceptionally detailed data - then using AI to make optimal decisions. Those will produce incremental, but cost effective improvements.
But toward the end of the article, it notes that further out, robots will perform “intelligent manipulation” - which means that they will actually do things, rather than advise. That is when the wholesale revolution will transform agriculture. Over time (a generation), we will be able to completely automate food production - better, faster and cheaper - untouched by human hands.
Food will be produced wholesale in new ways as well after robots are handling it - factory farms underground, in or under the water, or in high rise structures - the environments developed around the robots - with the air, water, soil, light and genetic stock manipulated as needed.
When those systems are well tuned, we will be much more ready to take our show on the road, and move out to colonize the solar system.
Sounds as if someone needs to reel him in.
“We’re the government and here to help”
When the SHTF, when we get really hungry, the first step is to eliminate competition. That is what the other guy will be doing. That is what you better be doing.
1. This is why we don’t need agriculture as the excuse to bring in unskilled immigrants.
2. The robots are already in use, not theoretical as this article suggests.
7 robots that are replacing farm workers around the world
http://www.businessinsider.com/robots-that-are-replacing-farm-workers-2016-8
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