A World Without Hunger

The first person I have known to take autonomous agriculture technology seriously is Douglas Mallette, founder of Cybernated Farm Systems.

We can technically feed the world with autonomous agriculture technology which eventually requires no human labor.

It has been said that you can give a man a fish and feed him for a day. It has been said that you can teach a man to fish and feed him the rest of his life. I say that you can create an autonomous, self sufficient, self replicating, decentralized, distributed, integrated, and interoperable fish farming system to feed all men forever. The previous statement is meant to be true and funny.

Autonomous robotics technology is at the core of how I see that we might create a reality where people need not suffer from starvation and malnutrition. And in order for this technology to function, its control algorithms would require information from the environment regarding the population and the available resources. The system would depend on information technology connecting an internet of things.

I can imagine many different kinds of systems which help accomplish the goal of an autonomous agriculture system. I am confident that the technology can be built to solve the technical problem of hunger and malnutrition.

The harder problem to solve is people problems and people’s behaviors which would make this technology unavailable. My thoughts in the matter of people problems is to favor giving people the opportunity to choose to live in a society where their food is assured through advanced technology.

Even after we have the technical knowledge to deploy the autonomous agriculture technology, there will continue to be hunger and malnutrition because of people problems. Imagine that we somehow develop a kind of 3d printer technology that is able to easily transform any material into any other material: including food. There will continue to be hunger so long as there continues to be people who wish to control other people by restricting their freedoms.

I am interested in solving the technical problems which could end world hunger. And I am interested in solving the people problems which are preventing us from creating that technology.