[ppchain]

The point they seem to be making is that AI can "orchestrate" the real world even if it can't interact physically. I can definitely believe that in 2026 someone at their computer with access to money can send the right emails and make the right bank transfers to get real people to grow corn for you.

However even by that metric I don't see how Claude is doing that. Seth is the one researching the suppliers "with the help of" Claude. Seth is presumably the one deciding when to prompt Claude to make decisions about if they should plant in Iowa in how many days. I think I could also grow corn if someone came and asked me well defined questions and then acted on what I said. I might even be better at it because unlike a Claude output I will still be conscious in 30 seconds.

That is a far cry from sitting down at a command like and saying "Do everything necessary to grow 500 bushels of corn by October".

[embedding-shape]

These experiments always seems to end up requiring the hand-holding of a human at top, seemingly breaking down the idea behind the experiment in the first place. Seems better to spend the time and energy on finding better ways for AI to work hand-in-hand with the user, empowering them, rather than trying to find the areas where we could replace humans with as little quality degradation as possible. That whole part feels like a race to the bottom, instead of making it easier for the ones involved to do what they do.

[pixl97]

>ather than trying to find the areas where we could replace humans with as little quality degradation as possible

The particular problem here is it is very likely that the easiest people to replace with AI are the ones making the most money and doing the least work. Needless to say those people are going to fight a lot harder to remain employed than the average lower level person has political capital to accomplish.

>seems to end up requiring the hand-holding of a human at top,

I was born on a farm and know quite a bit about the process, but in the process of trying to get corn grown from seed to harvest I would still contact/contract a set of skilled individuals to do it for me.

One thing I've come to realize in the race to achieve AGI, the humans involved don't want AGI, they want ASI. A single model that can do what an expert can, in every field, in a short period of time is not what I would consider a general intelligence at all.

[santadays]

> I can definitely believe that in 2026 someone at their computer with access to money can send the right emails and make the right bank transfers to get real people to grow corn for you.

I think this is the new turing test. Once it's been passed we will have AGI and all the Sam Altmans of the world will be proven correct. (This isn't a perfect test obviously, but neither was the turing test)

If it fails to pass we will still have what jdthedisciple pointed out

> a non-farmer, is doing professional farmer's work all on his own without prior experience

I am actually curious how many people really believe AGI will happen. Theres alot of talk about it, but when can I ask claude code to build me a browser from scratch and I get a browser from scratch. Or when can I ask claude code to grow corn and claude code grows corn. Never? In 2027? In 2035? In the year 3000?

HN seems rife with strong opinions on this, but does anybody really know?

[neya]

>That whole part feels like a race to the bottom, instead of making it easier for the ones involved to do what they do.

This is what people said while transitioning from horse carriages to combustion engines, steam engines to modern day locomotives. Like it or not, the race to the bottom has already begun. We will always find a way to work around it, like we have done time and again.

[micromacrofoot]

yes exactly, comma.ai is making a driver assistance product and this is similar to their stance... which is refreshing

they know they won't be able to make a fully autonomous product while navigating liability and all sorts of problems so they're using technology to make drivers more comfortable while still in control

none of this hype about full autonomy, just realistic ideas about how things can be easier for the humans in control

[mring33621]

"...where we could replace humans with as little quality degradation as possible"

This is pretty much the whole goal of capitalism since the 1800's

[LoganDark]

Using the example from the article, I guess restaurant managers need handholding by the chefs and servers, seemingly breaking down the idea behind restaurants, yet restaurants still exist.

The point, I think, is that even if LLMs can't directly perform physical operations, they can still make decisions about what operations are to be performed, and through that achieve a result.

And I also don't think it's fair to say there's no point just because there's a person prompting and interpreting the LLM. That happens all the time with real people, too.

[lukev]

Right. This whole process still appears to have a human as the ultimate outer loop.

Still an interesting experiment to see how much of the tasks involved can be handled by an agent.

But unless they've made a commitment not to prompt the agent again until the corn is grown, it's really a human doing it with agentic help, not Claude working autonomously.

[marcd35]

Why wouldn't they be able to eventually set it up to work autonomously? A simple github action could run a check every $t hour to check on the status, and an orchestrator is only really needed once initially to set up the if>then decision tree.

[pests]

> But unless they've made a commitment not to prompt the agent again

Model UI's like Gemini have "scheduled actions" so in the initial prompt you could have it do things daily and send updates or reports, etc, and it will start the conversation with you. I don't think its powerful enough to say spawn sub agents but there is some ability for them to "start chats".

[progval]

Anthropic tried that with a vending machine. The Claude instance managing it ended up ordering tungsten cubes and selling them at a loss. https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1

[9dev]

> the plausible, strange, not-too-distant future in which AI models are autonomously running things in the real economy.

A plot line in Ray Naylers great book The Mountain in the Sea that plays in a plausible, strange, not-too-distant future, is that giant fish trawler fleet are run by AI connected to the global markets, fully autonomously. They relentlessly rip every last fish from the ocean, driven entirely by the goal of maximising profits at any cost.

The world is coming along just nicely.

[bethekidyouwant]

People convinced the vending machine to stock tungsten cubes because it’s funny. Also tungsten cubes are cool.

[bethekidyouwant]

People prompted the vending machine to stock tungsten cubes because it’s funny. Also tungsten cubes are cool.

[jdthedisciple]

So Seth, as presumably a non-farmer, is doing professional farmer's work all on his own without prior experience? Is that what you're saying?

[culi]

Nobody is denying that this is AI-enabled but that's entirely different from "AI can grow corn".

Also Seth a non-farmer was already capable of using Google, online forums, and Sci-Hub/Libgen to access farming-related literature before LLMs came on the scene. In this case the LLM is just acting as a super-charged search engine. A great and useful technology, sure. But we're not utilizing any entirely novel capabilities here

And tbh until we take a good crack at World Models I doubt we can

[nonethewiser]

1) You are right and its impressive if he can use AI to bootstrap becoming a farmer

2) Regardless, I think it proves a vastly understated feature of AI: It makes people confident.

The AI may be truly informative, or it may hallucinate, or it may simply give mundane, basic advice. Probably all 3 at times. But the fact that it's there ready to assert things without hesitation gives people so much more confidence to act.

You even see it with basic emails. Myself included. I'm just writing a simple email at work. But I can feed it into AI and make some minor edits to make it feel like my own words and I can just dispense with worries about "am i giving too much info, not enough, using the right tone, being unnecessarily short or overly greating, etc." And its not that the LLMs are necessarily even an authority on these factors - it simply bypasses the process (writing) which triggers these thoughts.

[tjr]

I would say that Seth is farming just as much as non-developers are now building software applications.

[tekno45]

trying. until you can eat it, you're just fucking around.

[NewJazz]

Anyone can be a farmer. I've got veggies in my garden. Making a profit year after year is much much harder.

[PlatoIsADisease]

Can't wait to see how much money they lose.

I'll see if my 6 year old can grow corn this year.

[tw04]

>I can definitely believe that in 2026 someone at their computer with access to money can send the right emails and make the right bank transfers to get real people to grow corn for you.

They could also just burn their cash. Because they aren’t making any money paying someone to grow corn for them unless they own the land and have some private buyers lined up.

[PetriCasserole]

But that's how it goes. As late as 2005, the real estate agents I worked with finally began to trust email over fax machines. It cracked an egg wide open for them. Now relying on email, they were able to do 10x the work (I have no real data BUT I do know their incomes went from low six figures to multiple six figures). Prior to their adoption, they just thought email was a novelty and legally couldn't be relied upon.

[aqme28]

Sure but that’s a different goalpost. Just growing food from an AI prompt is already impressive

[amelius]

What I'd like to see is an AI simulating the economy, so that we can make predictions of what happens if we decrease wealth tax by X% or increasy income tax by Y% (just examples).

[crdrost]

Why. Why would you want this.

The only framework we have figured out in which LLMs can build anything of use, requires LLMs to build a robot and then we expose the robot to the real world and the real world smacks it down and then we tell the LLMs about the wreckage. And we have to keep the feedback loops small and even then we have to make sure that the LLMs don't cheat. But you're not going to give it the opportunity to decrease the wealth tax or increase the income tax so it will never get the feedback it needs.

You can try to train a neural network with backpropagation to simulate the actual economy, but I think you don't have enough data to really train the network.

You can try to have it build a play economy where a bunch of agents have different needs and different skills and have to provide what they can when they can, but the "agent personalities" that you pick embed some sort of microeconomic outlook about what sort of rational purchasing agent exists -- and a lot of what markets do is just kind of random fad-chasing, not rationally modelable.

I just don't see why you'd use that square peg to fill this round hole. Just ask economics professors, they're happy to make those predictions.

[the_af]

> What I'd like to see is an AI simulating the economy, so that we can make predictions of what happens if we decrease wealth tax by X% or increasy income tax by Y% (just examples).

Please tell me you've watched the Mitchell & Webb skit. If not , google "Mitchell Webb kill all the poor" and thank me later.

Edit: also please tell me you know (if not played) of the text adventure "A Mind Forever Voyaging"... without spoiling anything, it's mainly about this topic.

Everything old is new again :)

[ge96]

Would be crazy it's looking through satellite imagery and is like "buy land in Africa" or whatever and gets a farm going there

[varispeed]

Wouldn't actual proof to be valid need ability to send and receive email and transfer money?

Then it could do things like: "hey, do you have seeds? Send me pictures. I'll pay if I like them" or "I want to lease this land, I'll wire you the money." or "Seeds were delivered there, I need you to get your machinery and plant it"

[cyanydeez]

Isnt this boiled down to a cpmination of Xenos paradox and the halting problem. Every step seems to halve the problem state but each new state requires a question: should I halt? (Is the problem solved).

Id say the only acceptable proof is one prompt context. But thats godels numbering Xenos paradox of a halting problem.

Do people think prompting is not adding insignificant intelligencw.

[Oras]

I think that’s the point though. If they succeeded in the experiment, they wouldn’t need to do the same instructions again, AI will handle everything based on what happened and probably learn from mistakes for the next round(s).

Then what you asked “do everything to grow …” would be a matter of “when?”, not “can?”

[bogtog]

This is fair, but this seems like the only way to test this type of thing while avoiding the risk of harassing tons of farmers with AI emails. In the end, the performance will be judged on how much of a human harness is given

[fuzzer371]

It's because "AI" is the new "Crypto". Useless for everything, but everyone wants to jam it into everything.

[jmspring]

I think with the work John Deere is doing to keep closed systems, I could see a proprietary sdk and equipment guidance component.

[riazrizvi]

Yes. In other words, this is a nice exemplification of the issue that AI lacks world models. A case study to work through.

[zeckalpha]

Another way to look at it is that Seth is a Tool that Claude can leverage.

[LeifCarrotson]

On one end, a farmer or agronomist who just uses a pen, paper, and some education and experience can manage a farm without any computer tooling at all - or even just forecasts the weather and chooses planting times based on the aches in their bones and a finger in the dirt. One who uses a spreadsheet or dedicated farming ERP as a tool can be a little more effective. With a lot of automation, that software tooling can allow them to manage many acres of farms more easily and potentially more accurately. But if you keep going, on the other end, there's just a human who knows nothing about the technicalities but owns enough stock in the enterprise to sit on the board and read quarterly earnings reports. They can do little more than say "Yes, let us keep going in this direction" or "I want to vote in someone else to be on the executive team". Right now, all such corporations have those operational decisions being made by humans, or at least outsourced to humans, but it looks increasingly like an LLM agent could do much of that. It might hallucinate something totally nonsensical and the owner would be left with a pile of debt, but it's hard to say that Seth as just a stockholder is, in any real sense, a farmer, even if his AI-based enterprise grows a lot of corn.

I think it would be unlikely but interesting if the AI decided that in furtherance of whatever its prompt and developing goals are to grow corn, it would branch out into something like real estate or manufacturing of agricultural equipment. Perhaps it would buy a business to manufacture high-tensile wire fence, with a side business of heavy-duty paperclips... and we all know where that would lead!

We don't yet have the legal frameworks to build an AI that owns itself (see also "the tree that owns itself" [1]), so for now there will be a human in the loop. Perhaps that human is intimately involved and micromanaging, merely a hands-off supervisor, or relegated to an ownership position with no real capacity to direct any actions. But I don't think that you can say that an owner who has not directed any actions beyond the initial prompt is really "doing the work".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself

[autoexec]

If that were the case Claude would have come up with the idea to grow corn and it would have reached out to Seth and be giving Seth prompts. That's clearly not what happened though so it's pretty obvious who is leveraging which tool here.

It also doesn't help that Claude is incapable of coming up with an idea, incapable of wanting corn, and has no actual understanding of what corn is.

[bodge5000]

This is where you get to this weird juxtaposition of "AI can now replace humans" existing simultaneously with "Its unfair to compare human work to AI work".

Like if a human said they started a farm, but it turns out someone else did all the leg work and they were just asked for an opinion occasionally, they'd be called out for lying about starting a farm. Meanwhile, that flies for an AI, which would be fine if we acknowledged that theres a lot of behind the scenes work that a human needs to do for it.