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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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