The Most Patient Gardeners

Humanity sits at an inflection point, poised for faster-than-ever progress. What if we used the speed boost of AI… to slow down?

For everyone who’s contemplating the latest advances in Artificial Intelligence, these are unsettling times, suddenly turned exciting. The technology has just reached a level where it can upend industries, change the rules of most games, and garner astronomical advantages to first movers. Which means that businesspeople are getting busy.

Perhaps it’s the promise of riches that’s making a lot of this activity very myopic. People are thinking up short-term solutions, for quick money.

Artificial intelligence is turning into a mad dash for cash.

That’s a shame, because we could aim so much higher, and apply AI to humanity’s problems. In the process, we’d create lasting wealth and safety for everyone, instead of just moving some money around. But it requires a different kind of thinking.

We have to be wary and dubious of quick-thinking by analogy. Ideas that feel the most comfortable are the most likely to hold us back. We need to go back and slow-think from fundamentals, aiming to replace the industrial-age solutions, rather than just throwing AI on top of them.

The industrial age was a struggle against scarcity, a fight to rip more goods out of the ground, faster, using our limited supplies of mindful effort. It was brutal and mechanistic. It was about power and speed. “Quick, break this rock, pump this oil, burn this fuel, move this cargo! It takes people time, and people’s time is money, so hurry, even if it’s wasteful, even if it’s ugly, even if it’s dangerous. Hurry!”

But AI makes mindful effort abundant and nearly free. Effort is no longer a limiting factor. We have more work capacity than we know what to do with. Let’s not use this accelerated productivity to find cheaper ways to treat people like numbers, like cogs in a machine. Let’s dismantle this industrial-age mindset, and reinvent a world where people are treated like people.

With AI providing the effort, we get something back: Time.

What AI gives us is time and patience.

AI can take the time to patiently take care of each person. It has the time to listen and respond with patience and goodwill. It will take the time to take care of our needs. Our needs met, we in turn will have more time. Time to spare, time to share, time to care.

One of my favorite examples of an old approach worth reinventing is a big one: agriculture.

Large-scale monoculture is the original climate catastrophe, turning the once fertile crescent into a desert, destroying habitats, making ecosystems fragile and prone to disease. This is not the way food wants to grow.

Now, with AI, we can finally solve this. Here’s how:

Gardener robots.

Unlike industrial agricultural, small-scale farming can be good for biodiversity and the sustainability of ecosystems… but the profitability imperative makes it hard to scale labor-intensive practices.

With AI, we could have low-power, slow, patient gardener robots, with deep and wide knowledge of botany and of the local ecosystem. Solar-trickle-powered, moving gently at the pace of the plants they tend, they could be hands-off perma-cultivators of wide areas of biodiverse nature, including all the areas that are not suitable for monoculture.

Their labor could be essentially free, lowering the cost of food produced, and of the ecosystem biodiversity services provided. Amending soils, channeling rivulets, herding insects, seeding against erosion…

These robots can be built, for the non-electronic elements, from mostly sticks and twine, and can learn how to repair themselves and each other.

The building and training of these robot gardeners could be started as a business: A real-life VR FarmVille, for instance, letting people pay to play, until the remote human operator “players” have produced enough data for the AI to be well-trained.

But the endgame model is probably to release these AI gardeners into the wild to become part of the ecosystem. Monitors of climate change, mitigators of habitat destruction, stewarts of biodiversity, helpers of life’s longing to breathe.

As for us humans, with out newfound time to spare, with our full bellies, perhaps we’ll choose to spent some time out there, alongside our sticks-and-twine robots, tending our planetary garden.

Even if robots do it better, with infinite knowledge and unfailing patience, there would still be ample room, and time, for us to commune with, and care for, our mother.

All images produced using MidJourney AI