My cousin, who I disagree with totally, says this:
Pro-pesticide lobbies will modify the political landscape to their needs, neutralize public dissent with thinktanks and production of studies that show that lasers are a plot to rob you of your God-given right to consume chemicals produced by corporations that provide jobs to blue-collar communities, and we'll be stuck with the poisons until the next plague or world war fundamentally rearranges the power reaches of the dynastic centers of wealth that own it all.
Endospores are a reduced form of the bacteria meant to survive extreme conditions, but they’re not the bacteria itself. Once the spore is reactivated and the outer protective shell is lost, it becomes just as vulnerable to bleach as any other bacteria.
The paper is titled ” Increasing tolerance of hospital Enterococcus faecium to _handwash_ alcohols” [1]. They’re tolerating small concentrations of alcohol used in hand sanitizer, not a concentrated disinfectant.
The response letter at the bottom- “Is the effectiveness of alcohol-based handrubs against enterococci really compromised?” by INGEBORG SCHWEBKE has some interesting counterpoints and implies they used 23% isopropanol instead of 70%, which is not enough to sterilize.
Laser resistance can take a lot of forms. In the case of weeds, I’d bet that cat briers are already effectively laser proof. You can burn them down, but they send off shoots and store up massive amounts of energy in fragmented little potatoes. Miss any of them, and they come back up and keep going.
So that’s one solution, and it’s a big space for biology to play in. The bigger question will probably be whether or not there’s a route where weeds can make incremental progress toward better resistance from where they are right now.
For insects, as someone else pointed out, the easiest route is probably mimicry. But we might also see insects capable of recognizing the laser bots, noticing the chemical signals of burning bugs, etc.
PS: I know the above was a joke, but it shows people embrace the power of AI so much they can see the weeds withstanding lasers before they can withstand AI classification.
GP wasn't talking about crops, but about the selective pressure that would be placed on weeds to better survive laser attacks. I could imagine that weeds would either develop heat resistance or would change appearance to make detection harder.
When I was 16, I worked on an organic farm in Chase, BC, Canada. Every morning we would scrape bugs and their eggs off potato leaves and into a jar, feed them to the chickens
I think this technology is pretty exciting because it could also allow regenerative farming to be organic - as far as I understand that is currently impossible because you have to apply herbicides when you don't plow your land. That would be a win both for the environment and the climate.
There are no spray, no till farms. Cover crops are a great way to suppress weeds, and then you harvest, cut down, and/or graze animals on the cover crops to help create a mulch layer on the soil.
One of the exciting things about better computer vision is the ability to have dense mixed crops.
This is where you can have three or four sympathetic crops growing side by side, allowing for greater resistance to various environmental factors. It also, if you give them enough attention, increase yeild.
Especially with a robot that can harvest and sort different crops. Monocultures are unsustainable, but currently there isn’t really any other economic choice to keep a farm running. Technology like this is going to open so many new possibilities.
I think the gap here is hardware - specifically suited to work with various type of plants/crops, some of which are delicate (some use cases like this are hands-off but there are probably a lot more hands-on scenarios). I think the software can be developed relatively easily (ml/vision etc) but I'm not aware of any hardware that is as dexterous as our fingers and can be easily used in a farm setting.
I'm sure that if they perfect this technology, all those unemployed farm workers will just get high-tech green jobs, and everything will be fine. There's rarely small or large scale consequences for this kind of thing.
An interesting thing is that many farm workers are migrants. They are needed for a period and then, largely, return to their country of origin.
As the US tightens down on abusive practices, there would be less migrants. Therefore we need tech like this since citizens won’t do the work and if they did they would make the product too expensive.
I can see how in a world without seasonal laborers, there would be fewer legal migrants who do work in the country then go home, definitely. Something tells me that wouldn't solve the migration crisis.
I sure wish. Less toxic stuff we spread around the better. Now if we could do something about the horrible waste of fertilizer that ruins our waters and coastal seas. I mean I'd love to go and swim in july and august, but the waters are laden with blue-algae-neurotoxins so it's bit of a no-no.
There will always be people working. Labor is cheap. It will always be front running capital intensive automation that needs to generate a margin to be successful, a margin based on data from people doing that job.
Labor is cheaper than machinery until it isn't. I think we have some historical examples back in the period known as the industrial revolution that might speak to this.
The point is, machines need to be built and optimized. That has a cost that even today is high enough where its still better to have a worker flipping burgers, even if we have the technology to automate this already. The cost of labor is just that low, and the cost of automation is just that high, and the amount of profit you get from burger flipping is only covering so much overhead.
I feel like this is just another version of people solving problems created by technology by adding more technology.
We could probably side step a lot of issues, simultaneously, more elegantly, more efficiently, by driving down to the foundational technology and considering alternatives with our newer technological arsenal.
In farming that foundational technology is monocultures, it simplifies scaling, efficiency of planting, managing and harvesting, but the cost is soil degradation, disease, and susceptibility to pests. All of these issues evaporate with multicrop farming, it would be more interesting to apply robotics and ML to making the planting, and harvesting of that practically scalable.
I didn't expect fire to work well but I thought it would be fun, which it was, which is gardening.
It's hard to tell how well it works, depending on how much patience you have you can burn it to the ground and keep going heating the soil and in theory roots and stored energy but that's time and money.
Plants will die if you keep damaging them enough before they can recover it'd be interesting to see what the specs are here. Totally fine in theory.
With what model are you comparing them? Lasers are not energy efficient with respect to how much power they output compared to how much you put in, but that is also not how you measure the efficiency of a pesticide. What you want to know is the energy spent per treated m2 of field, and I don't see how you can immediately dismiss targeted lasers over uniformly sprayed pesticide without further analysis of the average number of weeds in an m2 of field combined with the power requirement to kill it with lasers.
Lasers are going to use far less energy than pesticides per plant killed.
A 20W laser (120W input) can cut 3/4th inch thick pine at 6 inches a minute. For burning through a young weeds stem you’re talking fractions of a second per plant. It’s likely the motor and other electronics ends up using more energy than the laser.
Mechanical methods are going to be a lot more complex and thus have significantly more maintenance issues.
I was comparing it to the equipment used to carry the laser or pesticide. The application of pesticide itself is ~2-3 orders of magnitude larger the laser before you consider manufacturing or transportation.
The laser itself is a rounding error here, what matters is the other equipment involved.
No not poison, but I've been wondering if the lasers could harm anyone's eyesight, human or wildlife. Blind bees? I suspect the incident rate would be extremely low to non-existent.
They're targeted beams. They won't be scanning at eye level. Any pollinators harmed will probably be extremely small in number, and there might even be updates to the computer vision routines that can minimize that harm.
This is going to be very good for the environment once it takes off.
I was imagining in my head kind of real time conversion from sunlight to a laser. Maybe not the practical solution, but I do wonder how doable would that be.
Back of the napkin with GPT assistance seems around 2 square meters needed to power a 150W laser.
Pro-pesticide lobbies will modify the political landscape to their needs, neutralize public dissent with thinktanks and production of studies that show that lasers are a plot to rob you of your God-given right to consume chemicals produced by corporations that provide jobs to blue-collar communities, and we'll be stuck with the poisons until the next plague or world war fundamentally rearranges the power reaches of the dynastic centers of wealth that own it all.