Y'all realize that you are crushing this guy's dreams now, right? Smart money says he's somewhere crying into a bottle of wine about how he objectively isn't the "artist" he thought he was.
I grow corn and soybeans, and automation is a huge part of my job. It's nothing new. I've had GPS, autosteer, data collection and mapping software on my equipment for over a decade, and it gets more sophisticated every year. It's allowed me to do a better job and be a lot more efficient. Precision Agriculture has become a huge industry and it's going to be necessary to produce the amount of commodities needed to feed an ever growing population with a shrinking land base. It won't put me out of a job but it will change my job description over time.
Also in the ag industry. I would like to think we do enough custom work that we fit a nitch market because robots would need to be recalibrated too often to be efficient. In reality I'll probably sit in my office programming the line and doing whatever my management software tells me to do... I guess I'm totally replaceable. Better start working on my resume
One of the most interesting pieces of ag-automation I've seen is the system that crop dusters use... it's THIS close to being fully automated. Just imagine gas-powered drones that would roll out and do this, automatically.
Aerial spraying drones are very, very close. They already have fixed wing drones that fly patterns over fields to collect pretty much any kind of data you want and they're relatively cheap. You just launch it out of the back of your pickup, watch PornHub for about 10-15 minutes while it collects data and uploads it to your computer in real time, and then pick it up and go home.
Enh fuck wine. Overpriced alcoholic grape juice, just another thing people can pretend to be cultured about.
Sometimes when having a party I mix grape juice with vodka, then put it in a decanter and tell people it is fine wine.
I think I'm a little thicker skinned than that. I get where you guys are coming from, and I agree that at some point in the future, AI modeling will likely be advanced enough that we won't be able to tell whether or not something was created by a human or a construct. But for now, it is art. You can called it shitty undefined science if you want, but then, so is everything. Art, as we define it as a human creation, requires inspiration and, for lack of a better term, "soul". Yes, you can analyze flavor compounds, consistencies, all the numbers you want and come up with a perfect blend for someone. But there is as yet no formula for that. There's also no formula for getting the right ingredients in the first place. Fruit that is picked by the numbers is not always the best fruit for the end product. The farming is, in some of the places that produce the highest quality wines, impossible to do anything by machine. In fact, overall, the highest quality fruit is always hand harvested, hand pruned, trimmed, selected, etc. And of course, there's the fact that art has flaws. Flaws are what bring out the greatness. Something that is nearly perfect, but not quite, is a much more interesting thing than glossy machine by-the-numbers. Look at Clementine in the Westworld. Gorgeous, right? Even more so because her nose is kinda jacked up. Machines will definitely be able to produce high level stuff, maybe even "perfect" stuff. But it won't be art.
There's not really any such thing as perfect wine. It's all subjective and contextual. Hell, that's where the other part of my job (being certified as a sommelier) comes in. It depends on your taste preferences, but also on your mood, the weather, the company, the conversation, the food, etc. Hundreds of little factors that can influence and sway your opinion of what's right for the time, and they're different for every single person. No machine is going to be able to do that.
I don't think there is a "perfect" wine. Different people have wildly different preferences in taste. AI may be able to create a good wine, but it will determine what the "best" wine is and then only make that. I think there will still be a market for high priced handcrafted wines. All your jugged, boxed etc. wines will be machine created and be better for it, but the high end stuff will still need a human touch for the foreseeable future. Once the machines gain sentience then maybe that won't be the case, but then we're all fucked anyway.
Personally, I wouldn't take that bet. That's part of the whole concept of Machine Learning... it can absorb and process all those millions of little data points and process them to get the results you don't think it would be able to. Just like a sommelier. It's not like you'd just show up with a bottle of wine, magically knowing what the customer wanted... you'd ask them questions that would help you narrow down your suggestions... no different than an AI. And the AI would have much, much more information at hand. It could know of the quality of individual batches or cases of wine, not just the generic year and geographical area. Never mind it could also have access to any one of the hundreds of "wine apps", where the person has built up a solid history of wines that they like and don't like. That kind of thing.
Absolutely, but it will shrink like crazy. I think it'll be the difference between IKEA and hand-crafted furniture. The vast majority of people will buy IKEA, but there will still be a market for the hand-crafted. Or cars. A hand-built super car or a Ford Focus? There are markets for each. And don't forget that at scale, wine production is very much NOT art. All too often a small run of wine will win some awards, gain the winery notoriety, and then they will start ramping up scale/volume to cash in on that notoriety. The wine that they end up producing isn't nearly as good, because they've taken the "good grapes" and diluted the shit out of them with lesser quality grapes to get more volume while sacrificing quality to some degree. But sure, there's more to it than that... a ton of what makes a good (and fun) wine is the marketing and packaging... it's more fun to take a bottle of Blasted Church that has a story attached to it than a bottle of mass produced Jackson-Triggs, but there's also a hell of a huge market for 2 Buck Chuck.
I think the "artistry" in wine making is the whole, delivered package, not just the production of the wine, so I think you're safe. While I think AI could eventually make superior wine more consistently, I think that you have no worries for your job future.
Totally agree. Maybe we've been thinking of wine differently in terms of scale. You are 100% correct about this when it comes to mass marketed, 500,000+ cases/year wine-beverage-plants. They can automate damn near everything from the planting, the farming, the harvest, the blending, the bottling, the whole damn bit. I'm talking more along the lines of <10,000 cases/year, what would be considered boutique wineries. That's where I'm interested in working. Big enough to do decent business, but small enough to be hand-crafted.
And I firmly believe that. It's an interesting case of AI potentially being able to do the job, but not necessarily taking the job. AI can affect the large-volume operators where some MBA figures it's cheaper to automate than pay migrant workers or staff, but the smaller, boutique industry would probably remain unaffected, unless the automated price point drops drastically, which I doubt would happen.
Not to get too far off track but my friend is in wine sales and Ive been to half a dozen or so big wine events. The biggest selling point Ive noticed is the history of the winery and their wine making process. More to the point of taking advantage of a winery's new found popularity it wouldn't surprise me if more places end up using a sort of Pappy Van Winkle model and just producing extremely limited stock and charging exorbitant prices. The scarcity becoming part of the rabid selling point. Just hook me up to the matrix and let me fuck virtual porn stars and drink boxed wine and think it's classy.
It'd be very interesting to see how much the attendees of those big wine events represent the demographic of wine purchasers. Some of the more prolific wine drinkers I know don't buy boutique, or go to big wine events... it'd be interesting to see a financial/economic breakdown of large-scale vino vs small winery sales.
This is a wine thread now. Interesting to me is that at these events the restrauntuers that attend are being sold on the history and process, many Ive interacted with seem like very discerning wine enthusaist that would care about this stuff. My friend says the end consumers ultimately don't care about that and the best performing places offer a limited selection with a range of palatability.