Agriculture and AI
Industries like agriculture don’t get many groundbreaking innovations, things are pretty much set. However, when innovation happen, it completely changes everything. Think about how revolutionary electrification, tractors, and fertilizers were for the farming sector. Some version of this is happening right now with the dawn of precision agriculture. Precision agriculture utilizes the same facial recognition technology existing in your phone, and applies it to agriculture. The artificial intelligence system can tell you exactly how much water and sun an individual plant needs to optimize those individual plants own productive output. It can tell you exactly how much fertilizer to use and when. Perhaps most interestingly, the AI system can diagnose individual plants with any multitude of diseases and parasite, and show farmers the best course of action to take. This has the potential of greatly increasing agricultural outputs globally, especially in developed countries where the implementation of technology will be cheaper. Legislators should encourage all agricultural producers to adopt this new technology, but they should be mindful on how it’s adoption will affect the agricultural sector.
One such thing to be aware of is how precision agriculture technology will affect the quantity of labor demanded by the agricultural sector. Agriculture has historically been an occupation which can be done by anyone in society, pushing artificial intelligence and smart agriculture will change this. Each farm would require engineers, computer scientists, IT professionals, and other white-collar workers to guarantee the agricultural operations. Without high human capital workers, output would cease. Sure, the consensus states agricultural productivity will skyrocket, but this is at the expense of an easy method of production. Complicating the overall production line may not be a good thing.
Legislators, especially those representing rural agricultural constituents, will be interested in this new-found technology. Yet they will have to deal with the bifurcation of competing interests between their constituents. On one hand, more voters will be interested in saving their livelihoods. On the other hand, wealthier individuals will have the capability to capitalize on this new machinery and massively improve their productive output.
