Farming goes from broad selection against pests with chemicals to introducing a massive selection pressure towards biological mimicry and adversarial image attacks.
First, the evolution of the computational model is simply faster than biological evolution. The computation model is going to be inside biological evolution's (metaphorical) OODA loop. Humans are going to be helping, too, it's not like it's just going to be up to the deep learning algorithms on their own.
Second, for most weed plants, they aren't just a couple of genes away from mimicking corn... they're probably dozens or hundreds of genes away from mimicking corn. Evolution is OK at adapting current things to new uses, or doing a massively-parallel search on what you can do with just a tweak to a gene, but if the task can't be done with one of those things, it just loses and the organism dies. Or, to put it another way, it's good at climbing slopes one step at a time, but if you present it with a cliff it just fails.
It's essentially the same reason why nothing has evolved a resistance to a human gardener yanking them physically out of the ground and leaving them to die on the concrete... it's not just a matter of tweaking a couple of genes for that. This robot presents an exceedingly harsh selection landscape for a weed.
Not the case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_ex... gives us a concrete example of this; the ability to metabolize citrate required two mutations, the first of which isn't useful on its own.
As long as a mutation isn't drastically harmful, it may persist in the population to be built upon later.
> It's essentially the same reason why nothing has evolved a resistance to a human gardener yanking them physically out of the ground and leaving them to die on the concrete...
They have evolved quite a few of these. Try and clear a lawn of dandelions and you'll discover they regenerate from their taproot if you leave any of it in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry indicates another, where false flax has evolved based on a human invention, winnowing machines, to evade them.
Rye grain evolved so effectively based on human activity that it went from weed to useful crop, even.
I think evolution over longer timespans is the algorithm that keeps giving. In a single run it created all life and current technology. Evolution is radically open-ended, and that's how it gets around deceptive search spaces.
A few examples come to mind:
- "Clovers" fix nitrogen in the ground, other plants can take that nitrogen from the ground, some gardeners now intentionally keep this weed to benefit the plants they are growing for crops. I think the term is called "rotating cover crop".
- "Comfrey" has incredibly long tap root which mines minerals and stores those in the leaves. Gardners/farms can plant comfrey, chop the entire top off, the decaying leaves release the minerals into the surface soil for the surround crop plants to utilize. Without comfrey, those minerals would of been locked away from the main crop. After the comfrey is cut, it grows back the leaves again and the gardener/farmer can repeat this cycle.
- Some weeds attract beneficial insects to the garden/farm and thus benefit the main crop. Wise gardener/farmer would keep these around. For example, more bees means more insect pollinated fruit to be grown.
The pattern with highly competitive specifies results in either extinction of one of the species or a mutual beneficial evolution. For example:
- "Bull horn Acacia tree" - Ants and the tree have co-evolved that in the present they are highly depend on each other for survival. In the history, at one point when the ants and tree were introduced the ants brought a lot of acacia tree destruction followed by ant death because of loss of food source - but over time the trees that benefited the ants got selected along with the ants that were compatible with the trees.
If you'd like to learn more on the topic of coevolved species, I recommend this 30 min video on the topic https://youtu.be/hCAvBmY7ZgA
I don't know what this robot will do, the story is being currently written so we will see what happens!