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Comment by fishtoaster | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, this feels right on the cusp of being interesting. I think that, being charitable, it could be interesting if it turns out to be successful in hiring and coordinating several people and physical assets over a long time horizon. For example, it'd be pretty cool if it could:

1. Do some research (as it's already done)

2. Rent the land and hire someone to grow the corn

3. Hire someone to harvest it, transport it, and store it

4. Manage to sell it

Doing #1 isn't terribly exciting - it's well established that AIs are pretty good at replacing an hour of googling - but if it could run a whole business process like this, that'd be neat.

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Is that actually growing corn with AI though? Seems to me that a human planted the corn, thinned it, weeded it, harvested it, and stored it. What did AI do in that process? Send an email?

It is trying to take over the job of the farmer. Planting, harvesting, etc. is the job of a farmhand (or custom operator). Everyone is working to try to automate the farmhand out of a job, but the novelty here is the thinking that it is actually the farmer who is easiest to automate away.

But,

"I will buy fucking land with an API via my terminal"

Who has multiple millions of dollars to drop on an experiment like that?

> [Seth is using AI to try] to take over the job of the farmer. Planting, harvesting, etc. is the job of a farmhand (or custom operator).

Ok then Seth is missing the point of the challenge: Take over the role of the farmhand.

> Everyone is working to try to automate the farmhand out of a job, but the novelty here is the thinking that it is actually the farmer who is easiest to automate away.

Everyone knows this. There is nothing novel here. Desk jockeys who just drive computers all day (the Farmer in this example) are _far_ easier to automate away than the hands-on workers (the farmhand). That’s why it would be truly revolutionary to replace the farmhand.

Or, said another way: Anything about growing corn that is “hands on” is hard to automate, all the easy to automate stuff has already been done. And no, driving a mouse or a web browser doesn’t count as “hands on”.

> all the easy to automate stuff has already been done.

To be fair, all the stuff that hasn't been automated away is the same in all cases, farmer and farmhand alike: Monitoring to make sure the computer systems don't screw up.

The bet here is that LLMs are past the "needs monitoring" stage and can buy a multi-million dollar farm, along with everything else, without oversight and Seth won't be upset about its choices in the end. Which, in fairness, is a more practical (at least less risky form a liability point of view) bet than betting that a multi-million dollar X9 without an operator won't end up running over a person and later upside-down in the ditch.

He may have many millions to spend on an experiment, but to truly put things to the test would require way more than that. Everyone has a limit. An MVP is a reasonable start. v2 can try to take the concept further.

Or, just buy some corn futures. By slightly increasing the price of this instrument, it slightly signals farmers to increase production. Corn grown!

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