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Comment by trainsplanes | Hacker News Reader

>Removing pests, such as aphids, thrips and lygus bugs, is a next step for FarmWise

This would be great. Poisons become ineffective against their intended targets pretty quickly after a few generations, but evolving resistance against being zapped is a bigger hurdle to overcome.

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I'm guessing they would eventually evolve towards camouflage/hiding from the zapper rather than resistance to zapping.

Or they would start widening their diet to include non-agricultural plants as well. That, too, is a way of escaping the killer robots.

Assuming it’s using some sort of ML to detect the bugs, that’s a matter of just inputting a new set of data. Easier to update a set of training images than find new poisons that don’t kill absolutely everything.

Or updating the sensors and hardware, in cases where the camouflage is too good

> camouflage/hiding from the zapper

Mirrored carapace. The refection could even harm the sensor.

Someone needs to write a SciFi short about this.

Bug evolves a pattern that rewrites zapper into ai sentient human zapper

Where do you think I got the idea in the first place?

there are already reverse-engineered "pathalogical" geometries that can convince ml that a random squiggle is a car or a human or whatever.it would be interesting to see insects evolve dazzle patterns that fall into some local minima in the ml gradient and are clearly bugs to the human eye but seen as nothing at all by the ml implementation.

The method implied in the rest of the paragraph is targeted use of pesticides, only where they are needed.

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