But the farmer is purchasing physical property with a software component. John D...

derefr · on May 5, 2017

Like I said, totally uninformed—but I can see the analogy to, say, driverless cars. I don't expect that, in the long term, people will really "own" driverless cars—they require too much dealer-side maintenance, and Bad Things can happen if the "owner" of a driverless car prevents a software update from happening (things that can take the car from road-legal to not, where the law would place the blame for that status on the manufacturer.)

More likely, I think driverless cars will just be rented to people. And most of them won't even be that; the manufacturers will just build pools of them and hire them out, in the mode of taxis. The owner and "driver" will be the manufacturer; the people benefitting will be purely passengers.

I don't see what invalidates that logic when translated over to agro-tech: there's no reason John Deere will end up selling tractors, when they could instead contract them out, just as a temp agency contracts out their employees. They'd be the owner and the operator, insofar as they programmed the things and they're mostly running on automatic. The control buttons on such robots would just be for making "requests", and the owner would be free to ignore them. ("Don't like it? Hire someone else!")

Of course, for now, they're trying to get the benefits of being in that hypothetical world, while still existing in our own, which seems a bit silly. :)

tomc1985 · on May 5, 2017

It is my hope that there will be a contingent of people that can effectively resist, or maybe even destroy, this coming wave of rentals. If not, people will more often find themselves at the mercy of far more, and far larger, organizations that are not likely to care about them. You can see this already with Apple's App Store and the like

sudojudo · on May 5, 2017

You guys have digressed a bit from the original topic, but I wanted to jump in and say that I agree with you, and so do a lot of other people.

I go to great lengths to keep Google and the like out of my life, and I find it really strange how accepting, and even defensive, people are with these intrusive services. It's a Brave New World, and Stallman was right.