>ather than trying to find the areas where we could replace humans with as little quality degradation as possible

The particular problem here is it is very likely that the easiest people to replace with AI are the ones making the most money and doing the least work. Needless to say those people are going to fight a lot harder to remain employed than the average lower level person has political capital to accomplish.

>seems to end up requiring the hand-holding of a human at top,

I was born on a farm and know quite a bit about the process, but in the process of trying to get corn grown from seed to harvest I would still contact/contract a set of skilled individuals to do it for me.

One thing I've come to realize in the race to achieve AGI, the humans involved don't want AGI, they want ASI. A single model that can do what an expert can, in every field, in a short period of time is not what I would consider a general intelligence at all.

> I can definitely believe that in 2026 someone at their computer with access to money can send the right emails and make the right bank transfers to get real people to grow corn for you.

I think this is the new turing test. Once it's been passed we will have AGI and all the Sam Altmans of the world will be proven correct. (This isn't a perfect test obviously, but neither was the turing test)

If it fails to pass we will still have what jdthedisciple pointed out

> a non-farmer, is doing professional farmer's work all on his own without prior experience

I am actually curious how many people really believe AGI will happen. Theres alot of talk about it, but when can I ask claude code to build me a browser from scratch and I get a browser from scratch. Or when can I ask claude code to grow corn and claude code grows corn. Never? In 2027? In 2035? In the year 3000?

HN seems rife with strong opinions on this, but does anybody really know?

Using the example from the article, I guess restaurant managers need handholding by the chefs and servers, seemingly breaking down the idea behind restaurants, yet restaurants still exist.

The point, I think, is that even if LLMs can't directly perform physical operations, they can still make decisions about what operations are to be performed, and through that achieve a result.

And I also don't think it's fair to say there's no point just because there's a person prompting and interpreting the LLM. That happens all the time with real people, too.

> the plausible, strange, not-too-distant future in which AI models are autonomously running things in the real economy.

A plot line in Ray Naylers great book The Mountain in the Sea that plays in a plausible, strange, not-too-distant future, is that giant fish trawler fleet are run by AI connected to the global markets, fully autonomously. They relentlessly rip every last fish from the ocean, driven entirely by the goal of maximising profits at any cost.

The world is coming along just nicely.

Why wouldn't they be able to eventually set it up to work autonomously? A simple github action could run a check every $t hour to check on the status, and an orchestrator is only really needed once initially to set up the if>then decision tree.

> But unless they've made a commitment not to prompt the agent again

Model UI's like Gemini have "scheduled actions" so in the initial prompt you could have it do things daily and send updates or reports, etc, and it will start the conversation with you. I don't think its powerful enough to say spawn sub agents but there is some ability for them to "start chats".

Nobody is denying that this is AI-enabled but that's entirely different from "AI can grow corn".

Also Seth a non-farmer was already capable of using Google, online forums, and Sci-Hub/Libgen to access farming-related literature before LLMs came on the scene. In this case the LLM is just acting as a super-charged search engine. A great and useful technology, sure. But we're not utilizing any entirely novel capabilities here

And tbh until we take a good crack at World Models I doubt we can

1) You are right and its impressive if he can use AI to bootstrap becoming a farmer

2) Regardless, I think it proves a vastly understated feature of AI: It makes people confident.

The AI may be truly informative, or it may hallucinate, or it may simply give mundane, basic advice. Probably all 3 at times. But the fact that it's there ready to assert things without hesitation gives people so much more confidence to act.

You even see it with basic emails. Myself included. I'm just writing a simple email at work. But I can feed it into AI and make some minor edits to make it feel like my own words and I can just dispense with worries about "am i giving too much info, not enough, using the right tone, being unnecessarily short or overly greating, etc." And its not that the LLMs are necessarily even an authority on these factors - it simply bypasses the process (writing) which triggers these thoughts.

I would say that Seth is farming just as much as non-developers are now building software applications.

trying. until you can eat it, you're just fucking around.

Anyone can be a farmer. I've got veggies in my garden. Making a profit year after year is much much harder.

Can't wait to see how much money they lose.

I'll see if my 6 year old can grow corn this year.

If that were the case Claude would have come up with the idea to grow corn and it would have reached out to Seth and be giving Seth prompts. That's clearly not what happened though so it's pretty clear who is leveraging which tool here.

On one end, a farmer or agronomist who just uses a pen, paper, and some education and experience can manage a farm without any computer tooling at all - or even just forecasts the weather and chooses planting times based on the aches in their bones and a finger in the dirt. One who uses a spreadsheet or dedicated farming ERP as a tool can be a little more effective. With a lot of automation, that software tooling can allow them to manage many acres of farms more easily and potentially more accurately. But if you keep going, on the other end, there's just a human who knows nothing about the technicalities but owns enough stock in the enterprise to sit on the board and read quarterly earnings reports. They can do little more than say "Yes, let us keep going in this direction" or "I want to vote in someone else to be on the executive team". Right now, all such corporations have those operational decisions being made by humans, or at least outsourced to humans, but it looks increasingly like an LLM agent could do much of that. It might hallucinate something totally nonsensical and the owner would be left with a pile of debt, but it's hard to say that Seth as just a stockholder is, in any real sense, a farmer, even if his AI-based enterprise grows a lot of corn.

I think it would be unlikely but interesting if the AI decided that in furtherance of whatever its prompt and developing goals are to grow corn, it would branch out into something like real estate or manufacturing of agricultural equipment. Perhaps it would buy a business to manufacture high-tensile wire fence, with a side business of heavy-duty paperclips... and we all know where that would lead!

We don't yet have the legal frameworks to build an AI that owns itself (see also "the tree that owns itself" [1]), so for now there will be a human in the loop. Perhaps that human is intimately involved and micromanaging, merely a hands-off supervisor, or relegated to an ownership position with no real capacity to direct any actions. But I don't think that you can say that an owner who has not directed any actions beyond the initial prompt is really "doing the work".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself