Anyone who grew up in a rural part of the country can tell you that the sun rarely catches farmers sleeping. After all, a farmer’s work is never done—and that might never change.
However, if you are a farmer, your life might look just a little different someday soon: you wake up around 5 a.m. or maybe even earlier. After getting dressed, you grab a cup of coffee and breakfast to fuel up for the day ahead. As you do, you run through a checklist of priorities and to-dos for the day: feed and water the animals, clean their sheds and pens, and tend the crops. But first, you need to head out to the barn.
There, after making your way past the tractors and harvesting equipment, you arrive at a platform with a large drone on it underneath an opening in the ceiling. You swap out yesterday’s batteries with some fresh ones from a charging terminal. Then, finally, you pull up an app on your phone and speak into it. “Check the soil status of the soybeans before watering the cornfield.” Soon, you hear the familiar whirring of the propellers. You step back and watch as the drone takes off out of the skylight and into the brightening morning horizon. For a moment, you watch as it climbs into the sky, before heading out of the barn and back out into the farm. No time to waste. After all, the cows aren’t going to feed themselves.
It reads like something out of a speculative sci-fi story—but it could very well soon be a reality. While there has been a lot of hype about AI in the past few months after the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, much of the discourse has been focused on things like fearful headlines about sentient bots, what AI means for the future of education and essay writing, how it’ll disrupt industries like writing and coding, or how private companies and entrepreneurs can capitalize on this trend like the they tried to with the metaverse and crypto.
However, some have begun to consider how exactly these new generative AIs can be leveraged beyond the obvious—and even fight climate change while feeding the world. That’s the idea behind a new pre-print penned by a multi-university team of data and machine learning researchers on how emerging advanced AI like GPT-4 can be leveraged for agriculture, while also helping fight climate change.
“Climate change poses a serious threat to agriculture activities,” Jin Sun, assistant professor of computer science at the University of Georgia, Athens and co-author of the paper, told The Daily Beast in an email. “[Meanwhile], the agriculture industry also has a significant climate footprint. [AI] can help in both directions.”
An Environmental Case for AGI
Specifically, the paper argues for the use of artificial general intelligence (AGI), a term used to commonly describe the point in which AI has the learning and understanding capabilities of the human brain. The concept itself is steeped in fear of Terminator-style robot uprisingsand even “God-like” intelligences. Billionaire and former OpenAI board member Elon Musk has even made numerous comments in the past hinting at his own fears about AGI and its potential to upend society. He recently told Tucker Carlson that advanced AI could lead to “civilizational destruction.”
Nevertheless, the idea of AGI has largely remained in the realm of speculation—something that will one day come, but isn’t here yet. However, Sun says that AGI is just around the corner, due to the “success of the GPT-family models.”
These models are general purpose, large-scale, and—in the case of GPT-4—multimodal, which means it accepts image and text inputs to generate text outputs. “This is significantly different from traditional AI models that are more task-specific and unable to adapt to new environments,” Sun explained.