Pro-pesticide lobbies will modify the political landscape to their needs, neutralize public dissent with thinktanks and production of studies that show that lasers are a plot to rob you of your God-given right to consume chemicals produced by corporations that provide jobs to blue-collar communities, and we'll be stuck with the poisons until the next plague or world war fundamentally rearranges the power reaches of the dynastic centers of wealth that own it all.
https://ehs.weill.cornell.edu/pathogen-resistance-and-disinf...
About that... https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/micro/1...
So that’s one solution, and it’s a big space for biology to play in. The bigger question will probably be whether or not there’s a route where weeds can make incremental progress toward better resistance from where they are right now.
For insects, as someone else pointed out, the easiest route is probably mimicry. But we might also see insects capable of recognizing the laser bots, noticing the chemical signals of burning bugs, etc.
and I said this becase I take "robots evolving" to mean tech workers being pressured to work by their bosses
PS: I know the above was a joke, but it shows people embrace the power of AI so much they can see the weeds withstanding lasers before they can withstand AI classification.
The only reason why crops needs to have resistens now is because we treat the entire field with the stuff.
With lasers, you can treat the individual item.
This is where you can have three or four sympathetic crops growing side by side, allowing for greater resistance to various environmental factors. It also, if you give them enough attention, increase yeild.
As the US tightens down on abusive practices, there would be less migrants. Therefore we need tech like this since citizens won’t do the work and if they did they would make the product too expensive.
We could probably side step a lot of issues, simultaneously, more elegantly, more efficiently, by driving down to the foundational technology and considering alternatives with our newer technological arsenal.
In farming that foundational technology is monocultures, it simplifies scaling, efficiency of planting, managing and harvesting, but the cost is soil degradation, disease, and susceptibility to pests. All of these issues evaporate with multicrop farming, it would be more interesting to apply robotics and ML to making the planting, and harvesting of that practically scalable.
What could possibly go wrong? [1]
So they aren't going to get tired of working for humans and revolt.
I didn't expect fire to work well but I thought it would be fun, which it was, which is gardening.
It's hard to tell how well it works, depending on how much patience you have you can burn it to the ground and keep going heating the soil and in theory roots and stored energy but that's time and money.
Plants will die if you keep damaging them enough before they can recover it'd be interesting to see what the specs are here. Totally fine in theory.
Mechanical methods could be better, but just not micromanaging it and using permaculture methods would be the best solution.
I'm not advocating for pesticides. But I'm saying lasers are the wrong solution. Nobody is even considering permaculture? Seriously?
A 20W laser (120W input) can cut 3/4th inch thick pine at 6 inches a minute. For burning through a young weeds stem you’re talking fractions of a second per plant. It’s likely the motor and other electronics ends up using more energy than the laser.
Mechanical methods are going to be a lot more complex and thus have significantly more maintenance issues.
Even if that's true, perhaps having a small-ish solar farm near the crops would allow the bots to recharge onsite?
That might be(?) less energy-intensive than manufacturing pesticides remotely and shipping them to the fields.
Back of the napkin with GPT assistance seems around 2 square meters needed to power a 150W laser.
Robots evolving would be someone signing off on the investment of doing a big compute run.
The laser itself is a rounding error here, what matters is the other equipment involved.
This is going to be very good for the environment once it takes off.
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.aar6115
The response letter at the bottom- “Is the effectiveness of alcohol-based handrubs against enterococci really compromised?” by INGEBORG SCHWEBKE has some interesting counterpoints and implies they used 23% isopropanol instead of 70%, which is not enough to sterilize.