Are you sick of everyone talking about AI?
Me too.
But have you heard of AGI?
AGI is where AI goes above and beyond human intelligence, and it may only be a couple of years away.
The average human has an IQ of about 100.
AGI could have an IQ of 1000, or more!
What could it come up with if it was ten times smarter than the smartest human?
If you want to blow your mind on this stuff, have a listen to this interview with Ex-Google exec, Mo Gawdat, on the Diary of a CEO podcast.
Of course, there is a lot of speculation in this interview, and who knows if he is right, but it did get me thinking.
About weeds!
AGI stands for Artificial General Intelligence. At the moment, AI can do specific tasks, AGI will be able to do a lot more.
There’s a global arms race by the tech super-powers to try and get there first. Some people, like Mo Gawdat, reckon it’s less than two years away. Others say it’s 15 years.
Mo predicts a dystopian future for the next 12 to 15 years, where lots of people lose their jobs and society descends into chaos. I hope he’s wrong.
But what does this all mean for weeds and agriculture in general?
Firstly, if he’s right, and lots of people lose their jobs, you may end up with a paralegal driving your seeder (until that job is taken by AI as well).
You’ll have to pay them in six-minute time slots, but maybe $5/six minutes instead of their current absurd fees.
And weeds. Could AGI be used to optimise weed control, to ultimately reduce the cost of weed control while maximising yield?
Some of the things that spring to mind immediately are that AGI could;
- Quickly develop better and better algorithms for camera sprayers to continually improve weed control with camera sprayers.
At present, making a weed-identifying algo involves a human staring at pictures of weeds in crops on a computer screen, and colouring them in with a digital pen. Slow and costly. AGI will take this job and do it much faster, making algos better and cheaper, and making camera sprayers the only way to go. - Work out the cheapest form of weed control and apply it.
Camera sprayers, variable rate herbicides, variable crop competition, variable harvest weed seed control etc. The main thing on grower’s minds at the moment is cost. AGI will be able to look at your weed control and make it cheaper. Cameras and satellites looking at your crops will give AGI the feedback it needs to measure the cost effectiveness of your weed control and make it as cheap as possible.
AGI may tell us that we don’t need harvest weed seed control, and Seed Terminator goes broke.
Or then again, it may tell us that every header on the planet needs a Seed Terminator.
Likely somewhere in between. - Develop new herbicides.
Currently, herbicide development involves creating millions of molecules and testing them on weeds. AGI will be able to do this better, making herbicide development faster and cheaper. - Mapping weed patches, and monitoring them through time.
You need to know if your weed control is getting better or worse. AGI will count your weeds and tell you. - Measuring resistance and modelling how it will develop, and use weed control to stay ahead of it.
AGI will measure the efficacy of your herbicide application, alert you to your resistance levels, and monitor this resistance through time, enabling you (or should I say, your AGI agronomist) to develop weed control systems to stay on top of the resistant weeds.
If AGI can optimise weed control, these decisions will become easy for the farmer, taking the guess work out of what is the most profitable way to farm.
And, as with all other tech advancements in the past, the pioneers will experience some pain in the adoption, and the early adopters will thrive.
Every farm in the country, if not the world, is now talking about the cost of everything and how hard it is to make a margin.
I believe one of the reasons for these skinny margins is that we are buying expensive inputs then applying them, evenly to the entire farm.
AGI taking control of your weeds will not be for every farmer, but I encourage you to have an open mind when you hear about this stuff. If all of your neighbours are producing crops at lower cost for higher yields, it may only be a matter of time before you’re on the ropes.
And let’s not just stop at weeds.
Optimising nutrient application will be even more important, as will managing all other inputs.
Sci fi bullshit? Maybe.
I’ve never read a Sci Fi book in my life, but everyone is talking about AI, and nobody is talking about what AI can do for weed control. So, I thought I’d give it a crack.
Let me know what you think!
The Terminator Agronomist
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