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Comment by SequoiaHope | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure what you mean, there’s a lot of people talking about farming automation and its effects on working farmers.

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In places like Africa and India? (Which is what he means when he brings up the "global" poor.) Dude, a lot of them don't even have tractors.

> https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2146927&re...

> Overall, the operation-wise average mechanization levels across crops are 70% for seed-bed preparation, 40% for sowing/planting/transplanting, 33% for weeding and inter-culture, and 34% for harvesting and threshing, resulting in an overall average mechanization level of 45%.

See also: "Percentage of workers engaged in Agriculture = 45.8%"

See my related comment. The poor won’t be buying AI tractors they will be getting displaced by global development deals between governments that bring in such equipment to be operated by western firms.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48271200

It's unclear how agentic LLMs are going to automate farming in the Global South.

I am responding to “There is a real possibility that AI will displace human labor at very large scale.”

In this usage I read the term “AI” to more broadly refer to all advancements in machine intelligence, not narrowly “agentic LLMs” as you’ve said. In the farming automation world it’s very clear that advances in machine learning and multimodal LLMs will enable the use of expanded automation.

In particular the Global South is often seen as a field for investment where governments make international development deals with western governments to provide farming automation equipment in exchange for debt. Then western companies bring in equipment and establish extractive industries while displacing local subsistence farmers. Now alienated from their land, the poor farmers often end up with little choice but to work in new factories also established through these practices.

Robotics as a field is obviously growing. It’s long been common for global south governments to displace their own poor to make space for multinational development deals, And this will only expand as embodied intelligence becomes more capable in the real world.

The poorest of the poor, subsistence farmers are barely producing enough to feed themselves; they trade and barter the little bit they can manage but it is not much and has little impact that goes beyond a tiny village-level radius. Nobody is displacing that because nobody needs to compete with that.

Very commonly governments will displace these poor to build factories or expand large scale farming practices with international development deals. The land gets taken from the poor and they are left with little choice but to work in these new factories often in abusive conditions.

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