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Comment by candu | Hacker News Reader

...and hundreds of millions worldwide who have been saved from malaria or lifted out of extreme poverty would likely disagree with you: what good is super-human synthetic intelligence several decades from now (assuming that's even a tractable generalization of largely task-specific ML models) if you're not sure where your next meal comes from?

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Well, I founded a startup that's using ML to help turn satellite data into credit risk profiles for the world's poorest farmers so we can sell them fertilizer and seed.

So... I think tensor flow is going to be pretty great for the 1K farmers we're working with this year and ~50k we're going to try and reach next year.

This is one of those ideas where I think...how on earth did you come up with the idea of building such a company? Sidenote: sounds absolutely amazing! Congrats!

> help turn satellite data into credit risk profiles for the world's poorest farmers so we can sell them fertilizer and seed

Not sure if satire or serious :].

Completely serious, we're alumni of The Climate Corporation.

Satellite data is cheap or in many cases free, and the cost of sending a trained loan officer out to the field is far too high to justify.

Shoot me an email at earl@apolloagriculture.com and I'd be happy to chat more.

> if you're not sure where your next meal comes from?

This is certainly work in progress, but:

"31. In 1990, more than 60% of people in East Asia lived in extreme poverty. As of 2016, that proportion has dropped to 3.5%."

I'm calling BS. East Asia basically just means China, because it dwarfs other populations. IMHO >60% of Chinese were certainly not living in extreme poverty in 1990, unless economically defined via free market rhetoric and bad statistics. The reality is that people used to grow more of their own food and buy less, so the need for free-market capital was limited. Perhaps this is the source of the mistake.

There was and still is far more extreme poverty in South Asia.

This actually sounds interesting as a fact but I would like to see some evidence/links.

Just look for photos of any place in China in the 1990s, or ask someone who lived there.

Pretty much exactly this. Global reductions in poverty equate to reductions in $2/day income threshold in two countries: China and India.

http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/china-i...

Accomplished at the cost of tremendously increasing resource consumption, particularly energy:

China: https://m.imgur.com/Vj5VwS9?r

India: https://m.imgur.com/elFJjGP?r

So in your opinion what percentage of Chinese were living in extreme poverty in 1990?

Even in the best of circumstances, with unlimited food for all, those people will be dust in a century. Even incremental improvements in technology will help hundreds of generations of humans going forward.

Not all uses of technology ore a positive influence. HFT, NSA's surveillance are two that come to mind straight away.

I don't want this to come across as if I support these particular programs, but I would imagine some tech comes out through veterans and takes on consumer applications.

Does the NSA file patents? If not, usage of tech is probably enforced by the honor code

"Does the NSA file patents?"

They do actually. They also get defense contractors like SAIC's holding company to do it for them then sue groups doing things like encrypted messaging. They can also slap secrecy orders on patents & block those from coming to market with that sort of thing going up since Bush-Cheney.

"usage of tech is probably enforced by the honor code"

See Snowden leaks. Defense contracting debacles. PROMIS scandal. So on and so forth.

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