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Is Your Autonomous Tractor Safe?
Keeping autonomous farm equipment safe for farmers and other people is essential during the rush to use AI (artificial intelligence for everything.
(Ztractor’s Bearcub 24 Autonomous farm equipment )
Smart equipment — tractors and combines — till, plant, fertilize, monitor and harvest the fields. Using cutting-edge artificial intelligence, they do the work and save farmers countless hours of labour. The equipment responds to the weather and calculates the exact needs of each crop.Now, imagine a hacker breaking into the digital system to steal, destroy or change the data.
Artificial intelligence (AI) in agriculture has been hailed as one of the bright lights of production. But few consider that it could come with a dark side.
New risk analysis done by researchers at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom warns that the future of AI comes with potential hazards for farms, farmers and food security systems that are under-appreciated and poorly understood.
“Greater technological innovation is often proposed as a panacea for humanity’s ailments and annoyances from epidemic prevention to agricultural productivity,” said Asaf Tzachor, a researcher with the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge.
Science fiction writers certainly thought about autonomous farm equipment and showcased these ideas in their stories. For example, in his 1958 short story Who Can Replace A Man, sf writer Brian W. Aldiss described a field minder:
(Agricultural Robot from 'But Who Can Replace A Man' by Brian W. Aldiss)The field-minder finished turning the top-soil of a two-thousand-acre field. When it had turned the last furrow, it climbed on to the highway and looked back at its work... the land was bad. Like the ground all over Earth, it was vitiated by over-cropping or the long-lasting effects of nuclear bombardment.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 10/11/2024)
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Robotic Barber Programmed With a Number of Styles
'He found a barber shop which, he thought, would be good for an idle hour.'
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'Thirty rounds of fighting is tough work. Even for machines.'
Caterpillar Electric Mining Loader Not Yet Ready For Moon
'...the excavations were already in progress, for he saw gray slopes of rubble.'
Centipede Robots Down On The Farm
'...the walking mills of Puffy Products began to tread delicately on their centipede legs across the wheat fields of Kansas.'
Anthropic's Claude AI Creates Legal Citation From Whole Cloth
'Here is a Clerk that would work incessantly, and neither eat, sleep, want payment, or grumble.'
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'About time you got here,' the astronaut said.
'They Erased My Memory' Says Ariana Grande
'...using a neutralizing electronic impulse.'
Solitary Black Hole Wanders In Space
'...the Hole is something like a vortex or a whirlpool?'
Spaceplane From Virgin Atlantic
'ZARNAK, YOU'RE TO COMMAND A SCOUTING EXPEDITION --- FIND OUT WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT!'
DARPA Wants 'Large Bio-Mechanical Space Structures'
'These are your rudimentary seed packages... Some will combine in place to form more complicated structures.'
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'The crawling... object was V-Stephen's surgeon-hand...'
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'Joe got out the gravity-simulator harnesses...'
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'You couldn't have the capstone without the pyramid to hold it up.'
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'The first revelation of the new Soviet bore-pellets.'
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'the unobtrusive inspections with tiny remote-cast snoopers...'
