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Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

No piece of equipment that will be used on a farm deserves more than the bare minimum of sensors.

Sounds ripe for a shakeup.

Why?

Because they will probably be purchased by the thousand, if not 10 thousand. Furthermore, they will be exposed to rugged environments where every extra component that can fail is a huge liability.

Exactly. Better to figure out a novel way to use fewer sensors equally well (cheaper) or the same sensors to better effect (more results).

Those things are hard though, plugging a few sensors into a Pi, slapping a LAMP stack on it then creating a web interface and smart-phone app you can show the VCs is easy by comparison.

  slapping a LAMP stack on it then creating a web interface

You know, that'd be really great and all, but please, please, please don't discount the potential for rampant, malicious destruction of food supply for kicks, revenge or maybe even strategy/tactics in state conflict. Consider how warlords and pirates operate in other countries and failed states.

Food security is important, and a robot that can selectively clip and gouge weeds can do the same to both critical food and cash crops too.

Furthermore, simple competition, big corporate espionage and personal differences can still affect small organic growers as well. Human factors are real, and novelty is good but it doesn't cure quite everything.

This seems an important point that hadn't occurred to me. Our food chain is already pretty dependent on Internet-connected infrastructure working correctly, but it seems absolutely plausible that this will be a future attack vector if we network and automate farming machinery.

If you can build a robot to go around destroying crops you can built a hunter-killer to go after the crop killing robots.

The future gets scary fast when you consider the almost inevitable tick-tock between capability/defense.

The threat is not from unknown robots sneaking in to uproot crops (after all why not do something fast and cheap like spreading salt?). The threat is that the farmer's own weeding robots will be hacked to uproot crops, probably by ze Russians. Firmware updates should be secured.

A threat not the only threat.

Someone somewhere is working out how to weaponise them, we've as a species weaponised everything else we've ever invented pretty much.

It's the other way around:

we have domesticated every weapon we have created for peaceful purposes.

Actually I like that, it's closer to the essential truth.

I think George Carlin nailed it with his routine about flamethrowers.

> The very existence of flamethrowers proves that sometime, somewhere, someone said to themselves, 'You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.

I don't really understand what he's talking about. Most farm equipment nowadays has thousands in dollars of GNSS equipment and a multitude of other sensors.

This. I suspect quite a lot of techies here would be surprised by modern farming.

I've followed what's happening in that sphere tangentially because I find industrial programming fascinating.

I think a lot of techies would be surprised what all that stuff costs as well.

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