Hackers: another threat to global food...

[Workingman]

Over the past decade there has been the introduction of autonomous farm machinery - planters, crop sprayers, harvesters - and it is set to continue with more and more machinery becoming autonomous.

However, experts are warning that their software is open to malicious hackers with the threat of cyber-attacks growing. Since the early days of "denial of service" attacks the hackers have become more sophisticated at breaking into systems - think of the many successful ransomware attacks. They can now break in and take control of mission critical infrastructure.

If they can take control of a tractor and combined harvester imagine the mess they could cause if they got into an air traffic control system or the systems monitoring self-drive vehicles. Some things are best left to humans or at least to small local networks (one farm) not connected to the the Interverse.

The "Internet of things" is not all it is cracked up to be.

[TheOstrich]

I couldn't agree more. But it's the forced collapse of the banking/finance side that worries me the most.

[Suff]

Some things are becoming more automated but as the world population grows, farming becomes more intensive.

Australia and the US are two of the leading users of this kind of software where they replace large crews of drivers who do little more than keep the vehicle straight.

This is all part and parcel with the whole social justice and minimum wage. Most people think social justice and minimum wage is a great thing, they just don't want to pay for food produced by it.

So automation takes over. This boat has long sailed. I recall some idiot in the press in the early 90's wittering on about how pc processors were so fast that Windows would do what you wanted before you pressed the key. Today a £35 raspberry Pi has 1,000 times the memory, 100 times the general processing power and 1,000,000 time the graphics performance.

With this kind of compute power automation was always going to be the next horizon.

As for self driving cars? Only the incompetent solutions will have monitoring. Truly competent self driving needs no monitoring. Something to keep in mind.

Something else to watch for. Tesla will have an AI day 2 some time this year. They will give some details about their optimus robot at that session. Another move down the path of automation and one which may ultimately prove easier than driving a vehicle.

In France they sell MicroCars. Driven by people who don't have a driving license, usually because they can't pass a test. These humans can still do useful work in society.

Something to think about.

As for banking and finance, they have become security obsessed and constantly run specialised penetration tests using companies who think outside the box. They also run hackathons where they get a team of young people and pay them for 48 hours of intense group work to try and break the systems. One of my sons goes to these.

[Workingman]

I don't get it.

The population grows so we automate agriculture to make it more intensive in order to feed them, but at the same time automation is making more of them redundant to the world's needs. All they are doing is gobbling up more resources at an even faster rate so what do we do? We automate the shit out of anything and everything making even more of them redundant.

We are simultaneously the cleverest and most stupid organism on the planet.

[Suff]

WM, I have no argument with that last statement.