What AI was made for
This is more like it.
Instead of creating deep fake videos and figuring out which commercial to best send to our Facebook page, artificial intelligence finally made the paper in a heartwarming way. Homo faber—man the toolmaker— might find decent uses for AI after all.
The Dutch, with their world-famous tulips, have taken things to a point where it would be excusable to ask how much further can they go? It seems they’ve employed Theo, a robot that tiptoes through the “goudstuk” tulip crop, looking for telltale signs of disease among the tulip bulbs.
Not only does it provide a checkup of sorts on the plants, but the giant Roomba-looking device kills the diseased bulbs to prevent the spread of viruses, saving the flowers for the job of drawing tens of thousands of tourists from around the world each year. Not to mention the exports.
At present, 45 of the high-tech robots patrol the tulip fields across the Netherlands.
In the past, this kind of work was left up to “sickness spotters,” a job that is probably as detailed as it sounds. Now the robots can take over. For the bigger farms. Theo & Co. cost $200,000 a shot.
“Yeah, it is expensive, but there are less and less people who can really see the sick tulips,” said Allan Visser, a third-generation tulip farmer who’s using the pricey gizmo.
The robot rolls on caterpillar tracks through fields at a little more than half a mile per hour, hunting out red stripes that form on the leave of infected flowers, according to the Associated Press.
“It has cameras in the front, and it makes thousands of pictures of the tulips. Then it will determine if the tulip is sick or not by its AI model,” explains Mr. Visser. “It’s ‘precision agriculture.’ The robot has learned to recognize this and to treat it.”
Soon a Roomba to detect sheath blight for rice farms? We’ll see.
Sure, some sickness spotters might have to find other work. But if this sort of device can be used to farm other crops, then we’re talking perhaps a major increase in agriculture efficiency. Read: More food for a growing planet.
Who says AI is all bad?