[ExI] The run up to the singularity

[Keith Henson]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 7:01 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

snip
>
> That silly game came out of nowhere and has millions of people playing it.
> Oddly enough, it may have caused the value of farmland to go crazy, because
> a million amateur farmers want to try their hand at the real thing.  I am
> sorely tempted to try to subdivide my folks' farm into about 40 one-hectare
> lots and sell them for 30k each, while offering a standing crew which does
> in real life what Farmvillers do in  the virtual world.  Imagine all those
> contiguous postage stamp hobby farms being run by people with desk jobs in
> the city, what could possibly go wrong?

It actually might be a good idea.

I don't know how much Farmville demonstrates it, but evolution has
almost certainly selected for sets of genes that make people _like_ to
farm.  In western Europe people who stayed on the farms had kids in
excess of the number who could farm when their parents died.  The ones
who didn't want to farm went off to the exciting cities, where the bad
sanitation killed most of them generation after generation.

The current farmers are the residual of that process.  Farming, even
with lots of machines to help, still hard dangerous work that requires
a lot of insight and willingness to invest current efforts in
anticipation of a future crop.

So could you tap this genetically entrained yearn to farm?  (And make
money on it?)

Probably.  The question is how.

We should talk about this offline.

Keith