The article on the future of farming in Japan reminded me of this great TED talk about how algorithms are shaping our world. In the video, Kevin Slavin talks about how our world is increasingly controlled by algorithms and as these algorithms become more and more complex, fewer and fewer people understand why machines are doing what they're doing. This leads to funny things happening like an unexplainable 9% drop in the stock market or a book about flies on Amazon being priced at 23 million dollars. He concludes by showing how it's more than just data algorithms are manipulating. Algorithms are shaping our culture, what we like and dislike, what we watch and don't watch. They actually lead people to move to different locations and spend billions on new infrastructure.
While the general feeling about the farming article was 'that's pretty cool', the direction we're heading worries me. We can recover from the stock market drop or the ridiculous book pricing examples relatively easily. What happens when the farming algorithm, in an attempt to maximize yield, tells a farmer to keep watering crops causing thousands of crops to be lost? What happens if the majority of farmers in a particular region use that same algorithm, effectively destroying an entire region's crops? We can't simply "undo" these sorts of things. The article mentioned that "smart" farming systems help less experienced farmers run the farm better, making farming almost foolproof. I don't know about you, but I don't want fools running my farms (or any industry for that matter). When we end up doing things just because an algorithm tells us to and we no longer understand why the algorithm is telling us what to do, we end up in a precarious place.
