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Comment by pwaivers | Hacker News Reader

> This is the one note of darkness that enters an otherwise optimistic conversation. “This technology could be used in a completely different way,” he says. “You could have entire states in America with no people in them. The potential for what we’re doing to be used in the wrong way is there.”

What is inherently wrong or evil about this? If we could automate a state-size farm to feed everyone, isn't that a good thing?

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Feeding everyone is, of course, a good thing.

But to have a state with no people in it implies that people would not be allowed to enter it, i.e. it would represent huge swathes of natural resources wherein some smaller group of people would be keeping the general public out by virtue of it being private property. Forcing people off of land and into cities, thus forcing them to buy food with labor, is one of the primary means by humanity has been subverted from achieving its real potential. Empirically, the rise of more efficient machines has often been deeply linked to human bondage.

>Forcing people off of land and into cities, thus forcing them to buy food with labor, is one of the primary means by humanity has been subverted from achieving its real potential.

it is completely opposite. The fact that people can get a food to eat in exchange for the product of their thinking instead of being forced to work in the fields doing manual labor is what has been driving our civilization forward. An ancient/medieval agricultural village would have no use for Einstein whereis the modern city based technology civilization was happy to feed him just for Gedanken experiments.

How do you link machines to bondage? If you look at slavery from Sparta to the American South it's often had a large component of agricultural labor. Even things like serfdom where the serfs were nominally free but tied to working the land it they were doing agricultural work.

You're not wrong. But, human history goes back roughly 200,000 years. Slavery can only be dated back to 1860 BCE.

One could argue that the "bondage curve" -- if there is one -- is parabolic. I.E. human bondage peeked sometime during the Atlantic Slave Trade and has been going down ever since.

One could also argue that -- before modern machinery -- humans existed for nearly 200,000 years with no documented form of bondage.

I'm assuming (I don't know) the OP is referring to what some people call "modern slavery" -- in that the majority of the workforce has 0 social mobility. I think it's pretty absurd when people compare this to slavery during the Atlantic Slave Trade, but it happens.

Your arguments seem misleading - the existence of anatomically modern humans goes back roughly 200,000 years, but human history, i.e. the era with documented evidence starts with widespread writing that comes much, much later; first samples of writing is from ~5000 BC, but they're sparse enough to not be informative about social practices.

The very first documented law codes (2100–2050 BCE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Ur-Nammu ) already mention slavery. We can't know how long slavery existed before that, since those are literally prehistoric times and archeological evidence is not sufficient to determine these relationships, however, as the current evidence shows that slavery existed for as long as we have documented form of anything, there's absolutely no reason to assume that for the 200,000 years slavery didn't exist and good reason to assume that it did exist for at least part (or even all) of that undocumented time, as in the absence of any other evidence it would be prudent to assume that civilization at 10,000 BC had similar practices as it did in 2000 BC instead of being significantly different for no good reason from all other documented human history - we have no historical evidence at all of a time in early human history without slavery.

What part of those laws that didn't pertain to agriculture (failing to plant/harvest) were about the penalty for raping somebody else's slave. So many measures of grain etc.

That does bring the notion that we can make some assumptions about slavery in prehistoric times; it seems a core part of society in early agricultural societies but we have not observed it so much in hunter-gatherer communities (except sedentary hunter-gatherers with higher population density, which generally do have slavery, so it's more about the settling down rather than food source) - purely for economic reasons; it's practical/useful to keep slaves for farming or mining labor, but not so much for sparse, mobile hunting/gathering parties. Raiding neighbours for "wives" i.e. sex slaves does seem to be a thing even in those societies, though.

It could be a reasonable assumption that the prehistoric agricultural societies had slavery just as early historical agricultural societies, but that the earlier hunter-gatherers, i.e. a major part of those 200,000 years did not have widespread slavery. Well, other than the "intermarriage" with neighbours (often likely not fully voluntarily) which predates modern humans, given the genetic evidence for the partial "assimilation" of neanderthals and other parallel hominids.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

It is an interesting exercise to imagine a state sized "farm state". Essentially you'd have one city (the capital of the state) consisting of folks who administered the state, people who maintained farm equipment, farm operators, and a police force for patrolling the state to protect the farms from people who might trespass or try to steal crops. "Farmers" would likely be more like DevOps folks who would sit in an office with a few dozen screens showing the equipment status, perhaps views from the various pieces of equipment as it was driving around the various plots, maintenance status, etc.

Efficient, pleasant, and dystopian all that the same time.

Well, the one person in the state would get two senators and a representative, so that's one thing to consider.

That's why I'd be in favor of making vertical farming more prevalent- by making farmers physically closer to the coastal cities they serve the rural areas will be starved economically. At this point in time, it's my conviction that retribution for the present tyranny of the minority will best come through technological means rather than warfare or politics.

Fully automated tower farms are a dream of the future city.

Vertical farming is a pipe dream for everything but specialized high-margin produce. There's just not enough space to grow staple crops in coastal cities. Those volume crops will always be grown in large open areas and then hauled in to population centers. And no, improvements in solar cell efficiency or whatever won't change that equation.

> in coastal cities

I've never heard this being proposed- most vertical farming startups with any true prospects tend to be just outside the cities, but substantially closer than other farms. The chief advantage in vertical farming has nothing to do with actually farming within a city and everything to do with shortening supply lines. Likewise, I've never seen any company propose that they could completely replace conventional farms, but it's worth noting that every crop that can be grown with vertical farms allows another crop to be grown on arable land.

Shortening supply lines is a rather silly goal. It doesn't really save anything.

It brings fresher produce. I guess I don’t understand your comment.

Short supply chain: If I harvest in the morning and drop produce off in the afternoon to a restaurant or sell at a farmers market.

Regular supply chain: especially with large corporate farms. Harvested and hydrocooled(in case of greens) within 90 mts. Transported to cooler. Goes to packer and wholesaler. Distributor and broker and then onto shelf space at supermarket. It’s alreadr 3-4 days old. Expensive with fossil fuel based storage. Being transported. Could go into trash as food waste if it isn’t in pristine condition. These are the costs of longer supply chain.

With tomatoes etc that can bruise when ripe, they are picked unripe and then given the ethylene treatment for ripening.its several days old and needs a lot of $$. And energy wasted.

Why would you say short supply chains don’t save anything.

> It doesn't really save anything.

It doesn't save time? Oil? I don't understand your reasoning here.

It doesn't save a significant amount of time or oil. Not enough to count anyway.

Indoor soilless farming has possibilities. Higher productivity through benign GMOs is possible. Also I like GMOs grown inside controlled indoor environment ..esp transgenic so they don’t go rogue or feral with the natural habitat and wilderness. There are uses for vertical farming. We need that too.

We don't need vertical farming. We already produce way more food than we need. Up to 40% is just wasted.

We import a lot. Vertical farming will grow local food and provide food security. I think it’s valuable in any urban food system.

I think your attitude is pretty shitty, and exactly the sentiment that people in those rural areas point at when supporting people like trump. They're not evil people. They're humans just like you and me and feel overlooked and forgotten. Your attitude proves them right

Did it ever occur to you that maybe I was one of those people living in a rural area at one point, and that's exactly why I have the attitude I have? I moved to one of the coastal cities in large part because I got tired of fighting with people in my hometown who insisted on shooting themselves in the foot with their resistance to change, and I'm not talking about the sort of pie-in-the-sky fantasies of the Y Combinator crowd. I'm talking about simple changes to roads to make traffic flow more bearable and building a new hospital to replace old, antiquated facilities that were literally falling apart.

> They're not evil people.

Don't put words in my mouth- I never said that. They're not necessarily evil, but they're definitely inept, and the only way they'll wise up is if they're forced to by circumstance, which is precisely what I'd like to see. The rural areas of our country are more like crack addicts who need an intervention. How far would you be willing to go to martyr your own life for an addict? At some point they need to hit rock bottom and learn how to sober up.

> Your attitude proves them right

My attitude has no bearing on how these people act or feel- the bulk of them don't care how I feel and have had the same convictions well before either a) the Trump presidency became a possibility and b) I even developed my beliefs on the matter.

But the state sized farm could straddle several states.

There's nothing morally wrong with it, but our current government systems aren't built for a few corporate entites (because there's no way this is downscalable to small family farms) essentially owning both entire states and the majority of the nation's food production. That's one merecenary army away from corporate nation-states

So you fix the government. Fully automated farming seems an inevitability at this point, and the materials costs to build denser instead of wider will be prohibitve so long as we have perfectly arable land to throw combines at.

It sure can feel like you have to design your economy, culture, and society around an unchanging, unaffable government, but none of those are really receptive to bending around something as transient as the ruling class of a given age.

Could mean local community farming hands will suffer from possible job loss and in turn cant make money the way they used to. If people lose those jobs where do they turn, people living in the rural communities do so out of cost or personal preference, so where do the former go if their income disappears?

I guess if you picture it more like in the movie Logan where its just a giant corporate run automated farm that displaces regular farmers who cant afford the setup that seems pretty dark and dystopic.

> If people lose those jobs where do they turn

Crime, because there won't be a robust safety net to catch them. (In the USA at least) However, there is a robust police state to catch them when they are criminals.

Priorities.

This is the general trend that pervades tech. Using algorithms to automate business tasks is good, but using the same technology to reduce demand for unskilled, backbreaking labour is somehow bad.

I think its because it leads to uncomfortable future scenarios, like how the economy of the future will be completely dominated by skilled and educated workers, and there will be much less requirement for unskilled labourers.

The problem is that "we" would eventually be "Amazon Monsanto Corporation". People can accept inequality when it is somewhat plausible that it is necessary, but transitioning to what would essentially be a kingdom would be a challenge for a lot of countries.

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