The world’s population is set to reach almost ten billion people in 2050. Two-thirds of these people will live in cities. With the population growing at a rapid rate, the demand for food follows this trend. The question however is where we will get all the food to feed all these people. The agriculture industry is verry innovative and is trying quite hard to combat this question.

One of the companies trying to solve this issue is Bowery farming. The company is moving produce from the field to the factory. From the outside of the building no one can guess crops are being grown and harvested inside the building. The firm is combining different technologies to optimally grow crops. It uses artificial lightning, advanced individual plant monitoring, and vertical growing. At the centre of all this tech is an AI-powered algorithm constantly learning what the best conditions are. The inside of the factory has no direct sunlight as each individual crop receives just the optimal amount of light through LED lightning. No water is wasted as well, only the individually calculated amount of water is given to a crop. The factory is closed from the outside and has a very strong policy on hygiene, because of this there are no pesticides necessary. Another concept Bowery uses is vertical growing, the factory has multiple floors where crops can grow. A system of robots moves the boxes of produce around the building. This makes the output per square meter much higher than traditional farming on land.

All these applications make the process of farming much more efficient, Bowery uses relatively harmless ways of improvement. More improvements are possible, but ethical questions can then be asked. Is genetic mutation ethically right? One thing is sure, the production of food has to increase. No matter what.

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2018-09-20/this-high-tech-farmer-grows-kale-in-a-factory-video

As we have all read in the posts on this blog and heard in the lectures, artificial intelligence has come a long way. Various industries are or will be affected by artificial intelligence in one way or the other. Most practices of AI concern relatively innocent subjects (shopping, searching, etc.), however more radical applications will also be affected by AI. Today Google announced that they will no longer bid on a 10 billion dollar cloud computing contract of the Pentagon. This contract entails the transitioning large amounts of defense department data to the cloud. This might seem like a job perfectly fit for Google or any other cloud computing giant, although there is more than just cloud storage. Google said the contract did not align with their internal ethical guidelines regarding AI. This makes you wonder whether it was just really storing data in the cloud.

Google was previously involved in a project (Maven) with the Pentagon on analysing drone footage with artificial intelligence. The AI had to make decisions on whether to eliminate a target or not without human interference. Multiple questions can be asked. Do we want an autonomous working military? Do we trust the AI that much? Google asked itself these same questions and decided it wanted nothing to do with direct military purposes and quit the project. These statements concerned project Maven.

Google did not further elaborate its decision on the Pentagon contract other than that it violated its ethical guidelines. The other bidders (Amazon, Microsoft and IBM) still remain active in trying to get the contract. Google is quite outspoken on the ethical part of its technology (especially AI) in comparison to its competitors. Does google have higher ethical standards or is it just a way to market the fact they will perhaps not win the contract? They were in on the bid for two months.

Sources:

Google will not bid for the Pentagon’s $10B cloud computing contract, citing its “AI Principles”

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-pentagon/google-drops-out-of-bidding-for-10-billion-pentagon-data-deal-idUSKCN1MI2BZ
https://nos.nl/artikel/2232035-onrust-over-google-s-hulp-aan-drones-van-het-amerikaanse-leger.html