Artificial Intelligence risks to grow food are substantial - CIO News

Artificial intelligence (AI) is on the cusp of driving an agricultural revolution, and helping confront the challenge of feeding our growing global population in a sustainable way. But researchers warn that using new artificial intelligence technologies at scale holds huge risks that are not being considered. Imagine a field of wheat that extends to the horizon, being grown for flour that will be made into bread to feed cities' worth of people. Imagine that all authority for tilling, planting, fertilizing, monitoring, and harvesting this field has been delegated to artificial intelligence: algorithms that control drip-irrigation systems, self-driving tractors, and combine harvesters, clever enough to respond to the weather and the exact needs of the crop. Then imagine a hacker messes things up. A new risk analysis, published recently in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, warns that the future use of artificial intelligence in agriculture comes with substantial potential risks for farms, farmers, and food security that are poorly understood and under-appreciated.