Imagine a field of wheat stretching to the horizon, where flour is being grown that will be made into bread to feed the people of the city. Imagine all the power to till, plant, fertilize, monitor and harvest this land is delegated to artificial intelligence: algorithms that control drip irrigation systems, self-driving tractors and combine harvesters, smart enough to make decisions about the weather and the weather reaction. the exact needs of the crop. Then imagine a hacker screwing things up.
“The idea of smart machines running a farm is not science fiction.” —Assaf Chakol
A new risk analysis, recently published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, warns that the future use of artificial intelligence in agriculture poses huge potential risks to farms, farmers and food security that are poorly understood.
Drones spray pesticides on wheat fields
"The idea of smart machines running farms is not science fiction. Big companies are already pioneering the next generation of autonomous agricultural robots and decision support systems that will replace humans in the field," said Dr Asaf Tzachor, from the Centre for Existential Risk Research (CSER) at the University of Cambridge, who is the first author of the study. Paper.
