AI integration in ag is low now. AI innovation leads to widespread adoption.

Inevitably, the pursuit of these benefits will also involve risks. In this section, we highlight various possible unintended consequences of the applications of AI in agriculture and the impacts for agriculture of developments in AI elsewhere. We describe these as “risks” rather than “costs” because it is not certain that each will eventuate (or to what extent they will eventuate if they do eventuate) and because some of them, especially those involving changes in power relations or transformations in social practices, are not necessarily negative for all parties concerned.Footnote3 We have chosen to spend more time on the risks of AI than the benefits, not because we think that the risks are more likely than the benefits, or will outweigh the benefits, but because the incentives, particularly in the private sector, to realise the benefits are stronger, and more likely to be effective, than are the incentives to avoid the risks, which may require acting in the collective interest rather than in the pursuit of private gain. For this reason, we believe it is important to clearly identify the risks and draw them to the attention of those actors and institutions that might have the power to mitigate them. The risks should be of especial concern to governments, which are charged with serving the public good, and to the broader community who may be affected by them. Although we do not treat it separately below – not being a risk “of” AI – it is also clear that failure to secure the potential benefits from AI should itself be counted as a risk that should be taken seriously in deliberations about these matters.

3.1. Technologically mediated unemployment

Perhaps the first risk that occurs to people when they think about AI is that it will take over their jobs.Footnote4 The capacity of AI to replace human beings in carrying out cognitive tasks is both what makes it AI and makes it attractive to industry. Once machines are better at performing the tasks that are required to produce some good and/or can produce it more cheaply, there will be little incentive to employ human workers.

Use of agricultural robots enabled by AI, for the most part, might threaten the jobs of people currently performing manual labour. However, the idea that AI might eliminate many white-collar positions is now being widely promulgated (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, Citation2014) suggesting that AI might threaten job losses in both blue-collar and white-collar roles in agriculture, as elsewhere in society (Frey & Osborne, Citation2017). While the applications of AI will undoubtedly generate some new jobs it seems unlikely that will create as many jobs in agriculture as it would eliminate.

However, there is significant uncertainty regarding the timescale over which job losses due to AI are likely to occur. The extent to which AI impacts on farming and rural communities will depend upon how capable AI becomes and how widely it is adopted. In particular, it depends on how long it takes for improvements in machine vision, navigation, and planning to allow robots to play a significant role in agricultural production. In the short term, we suspect that large impacts are unlikely, given the limitations of existing robots (Kamilaris et al., Citation2018), which struggle to integrate the various discrete technologies (machine vision, navigation and localization, battery technologies, safe operations, and dextrous grasping) required to carry out useful tasks in agricultural contexts (Duckett et al., Citation2018) and/or to operate effectively in the unstructured, often cluttered and highly variable environments characteristic of agricultural settings (Bechar & Vigneault, Citation2016), despite the current hype around them.Footnote5 Over the longer term, however, we anticipate large impacts.