Job Security
It seems like everywhere I read or listen these days artificial intelligence overwhelms the conversation. Once reserved only for science fiction, AI now dominates the news cycles running the gamut from breakthrough applications to glaring failures. Who knew a computer could hallucinate and lie?
Being a former geek, I played around with it when trying to design a label for some new products. Where is the intelligence if one has to specify exactly how many fingers are on a hand? Back in the day, computer researchers used to say garbage in, garbage out. But judging from the outcry of publishers, authors, content creators, and AI-friendly clauses in end-user agreements, machine learning is drawing from everything that can be found online and then some. I fear for the generation who thinks AI is the answer to all their prompts.
Farmers are always being fed some line about how technology is going to make their lives easier. Ask anyone who owns a fancy John Deere tractor about their right to repair (they don’t have one). Give me old iron I can fix myself any day of the week. Today’s modern tractors drive themselves based upon GPS. They optimize planting and fertilizing with precision accuracy, so no money is wasted on excess inputs. Similarly, AI combined with advanced equipment can robotically weed, harvest, sort and grade crops.
One area my fellow farmers said they’d enjoy experimenting with AI would be for irrigation. What a treat it would be to have their crops, both in the fields and greenhouses monitored for moisture and automatically watered according to need, but the fear of technology failures is what keeps them physically inspecting their soils. One broken sensor and I could lose an entire crop.
It's lambing season for me right now. AI bots must be scraping my social media because I’ve had several cold calls from sales reps trying to sell me digital livestock monitoring services. They stumble at how well WiFi or cellular work with stone bank barns. They ask if I’d like to monitor my livestock from anywhere using my smart phone. I counter with what good is watching an animal in distress if I’m miles away? I look at that damn screen too much already. And what fun would there be in an omnipotent technology telling me when someone was going to give birth and to how many. No natural language processing can interpret the sounds a mother makes to her newborns, but as a farmer I know those sounds intimately and what they mean. How would an algorithm interpret one of the livestock guardian dogs creeping too close? Foot stomping and chuffing are the ewe’s automated decision making thanks to generations of domestication and not a network of microprocessors requiring massive amounts of energy.
Conveniences for farmers tend to come with glitches. How many times has my credit card processing machine left me hanging out to dry first thing on Sunday morning because the software updates are pushed on Saturday night. That’s why I keep two former generations of payment technologies in my market kit these days.
I know some vendors would enjoy having autonomous vehicles for their drive to markets once their box trucks and vans have been loaded. That way everyone could catch an hour or more of sleep, not just the passengers. For now, adaptive cruise control and lane assist will have to suffice.
As long as one generates cats playing reggae or the president turning himself into the pope, have at it. For now, I’m going to stick with real-world experience when it comes to putting food on your tables. You may get stuck in AI hell for customer service everywhere else, but at the farmers market, you’re going to get a real person.