this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2026
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Exactly, robot already means slave so it means "mechanical slave's slave". So in my grand vision for the future, even the mechanical slaves get their own slaves!
What you have against "machine learning"? FYI I'm not a stalinist.
Anyway, I think pastoralism is fundamentally impossible for the vast majority when we have 12 billion people. We'll want high urban density to save energy and resources on infrastructure. What I personally envision is a single gigantic apartment block that stands along surrounded by miles of mixed fields, food forests and nature. Every apartment is a luxury apartment with an amazing view and you can just walk out and enjoy the communal gardens, or putter around in a small area reserved for you. I believe that would be the most energy and resource efficient way to live in nature. Pastoralism is only possible in a mostly empty country like the USA.
And except using fusion power to create protein or something like rice and wheat grain analogues directly in bioreactors, it will never be efficient to do vertical farming. Converting sunlight into electricity to power grow lights is never more efficient than greenhouses tended to by farmbots.
Holy shit, I hope this is sarcasm because if not you're delusional dude
Just so you know, your instance is run by proud bolsheviks, not AI-researchers...
Okay, that's fine in fiction as long as you don't care about sounding convincing, but in reality providing food, water, utilities, and living space to that many people is a bit more complex than that.
That's not what fusion is. Nuclear fusion is only necessary for changing atoms into different elements. Bioreactors and protein synthesis are chemical reactions, not nuclear. They only change on the molecular level.
It might be less energy efficient, but if you have infinite solar generation that won't matter. Vertical warehouse farming is more efficient in terms of space, water consumption, fertilizer, and most every other externality such as pesticides, harvesting, etc.. It can even be hydroponic or aeroponic, using self-contained and circular systems, and almost every step can be automated.
That won't be the main issue if you have infinite solar power, and farmbots can still be used in vertical warehouse farming. Single-layer greenhouses take up a lot of space though, especially if you need to produce enough to feed several billion people.
I do in fact believe in communism. Just not in Stalinism and that kind of repression. Repression based on "ideological purity" that exists very much outside of socialism too you know? Just because I believe in communism doesn't make me evil or suspicious. And obviously I was joking about robot slaves. Are we done with this shit?
Anyway we don't have infinite solar. Even kite power, the most efficient wind power costs resources and space. I generally do agree that energy isn't really the issue though, it's resources and infrastructure.
If you have a small knee high greenhouse, it will always be more efficient to actually generate chemical energy than vertical farming. Just replace the photovoltaic panel with glass. And for most crops and sensible farming you don't need greenhouses anyway. Shit just grows in the dirt.
Vertical farming calories (to actually feed people) can only be sensible if you have fusion power sometimes in the future. Fission power will eventually run out and is too expensive. Vertical farming is only used for salads and no calorie stuff, but it's fundamentally a dead end as a large scale solution.
Also if you look at the most calorie efficient crops like corn, wheat and potatoes, you need about the size of France to produce enough calories for all 8 billion people. Space is not the issue. With advances in robotics and open source farm bots you can just grow the stuff in the ground without greenhouses and democratize the process.
And about the arcology, instead of sitting in a city and growing and harvesting food or collecting water and and transporting all of it from far away, you just put it in nature and harvest all the basic things directly there using minimal energy. I mean water just falls down from the sky and only needs to be stored. You'd use solar or kite power for energy and grid scale batteries.
There are anarcho-communist instances here, but the .ml admins are literal bolsheviks. As in, authoritarian communists who are notoriously all about that ideological purity and repression. You can find plenty of leftist comms here where people still shit on .ml for being authoritarian.
I'm not saying that's you, because I've met the occasional .ml user who just wasn't aware when they made their account. But by and large, when you see an .ml user, it's usually little better than a troll. Hence the stigma, incase you start noticing a pattern.
I'm not saying you're evil for believing in communism. If we were to discuss Marx philosophically, I'd agree on a lot of points. I generally like Merleau-Ponty's takes on Marxism. But I will continue to shit on any leninists out there when I encounter them.
It's good to know you were joking about the robot slaves, thank you for clarifying. You should know that most people here won't respond well to "jokes" about slavery.
For the rest of your comment, thank you for finally saying something intelligent. You're right, solar isn't literally infinite. Perhaps I should have said "virtually infinite," as once you have the infrastructure in place you can produce as much as it can capture without consuming additional resources, aside from maintenance.
A skyscraper with solar panels covering its southern face can produce a lot of vegetables. Sure, maybe carb-heavy vegetables still need to be done outdoors, but a balanced diet requires more than carbs. And producing vegetables in vertical farms lets you do it much closer to the centers of population, eliminating some of the needs for transportation and storage.
Grains and legumes might still need fields, but those also keep better and you can easily produce enough to store to make it through the following winter while still keeping a surplus. That's harder to do with leafy greens and other vegetables, which are still necessary for balanced nutrition.
"you just put it in nature and harvest all the basic things directly there using minimal energy" is a really bad summary of agriculture, though.
And not everywhere has enough rainfall to produce crops exclusively from catchment, especially now with glaciers melting and rivers going dry. Circular systems that can reuse moisture will be increasingly important as the world heats up.
You need the chemical energy to survive and that requires a lot of light to convert. That is the "critical path". Forget about vegetables, they are not important to solving the food problem.
You're so arrogant but fail to understand the basic engineering and math problems. This is a waste of time.
You act so smug, but you don't seem to realize that warehouse farming is already a thing. This isn't some personal utopian fantasy theory of mine, it's a thing that already exists and can be implemented at a larger scale to solve problems ranging from food deserts, malnutrition, transportation costs, winter spoilage, pests, water consumption, run-off, and habitat destruction due to the agricultural demands of feeding several billion people.
There are specific wavelengths of light that plants use to do photosynthesis. Those wavelengths can be isolated, and there are special LEDs designed specifically for this purpose. They're quite efficient. Or you can use fluorescent lights, albeit they're less efficient than LEDs. You don't need the full spectrum and intensity of direct sunlight, and in fact that can be harmful in hot/dry climates or during droughts, especially as global warming accelerates. Warehouse agriculture has much higher yields than outdoor farming because you can control the climate perfectly while keeping out pests and diseases.
As for fertilizers and compost, they can be used in warehouse agriculture with more efficiency and with less environmental impact than in conventional farm fields. So your chemical energy point is moot.
You talk to me of the engineering and math problems, but clearly you're the one who fails to understand them.
Don't you know how much environmental destruction is currently due to clearing more space for agriculture? And you think that won't get worse as the world population nearly doubles in size, unless we start doing multi-story warehouse farming to feed major population centers?
No, you're just wrong. It is a thing for profitable vegetables or leafy greens or strawberries, but not for producing calories. It will not feed 15 billion people.
With something like 3 kWh of solar irradiance per day per m² you get a pretty abysmal <5% efficiency for producing food calories compared to the 20% efficiency of solar panels. So you quintuple the amount of land you need with solar panels, maybe a little less with higher efficiency indoors. Less with kite power. Again less with fusion power. It's still alot of embedded energy.
I made this table to see how many square meters actually feeds a person, very rough numbers but all I've found. It's less than 250m² in moderate climates to produce 2.2 kcal food. If we stop eating meat and "luxury foods" from around the world we drastically reduce energy costs and reduce land use so we can rewild like 90% of the current arable land.
Conclusion: There is no shortage of land to feed 15 billion people.
And why grow your vegetables and fruits and strawberries far off, or in a bunker, when you can build a million local greenhouses in your community that could additionally serve as food gardens or parks in colder weather?
PS: Solein claims 5% by splitting water into hydrogen using solar power and then using hydrogen to feed single celled organisms. If we ever find a way to split water into hydrogen directly using fusion we'd be set. But until then it's not more efficient than other food algae (also about 5% efficient, which is already great for mostly protein).