Bemused: Weeder Robots

Well, I was late this morning. Bad me. I was in fact working on a short story, not goofing off. The "Muse" part of my brain was singing. If I were a perfect writer it would sing on weekends. I'm not perfect.

For this piece of speculative fiction I'd gone back to the "peaceful world" of a previous post some readers may remember, a short story in which flying planes above someone's house could be considered an act of war if it weren't so ooobviously the act of a child with Problems.

According to some that story might have been a little too "peaceful" and family-friendly, and no, I don't imagine even a peaceful world, with more than one human in it, being all that peaceful and family-friendly all the time. They have melodrama. The focus of my current online activism is pretty melodramatic. How, I asked the "Muse," would a comparable level of melodrama unfold in a world free from pollution, rape, and war?

It'd unfold all right. A world free from pollution, rape, and war is not a world free from capitalism, from corporations big enough that the Founder-President-and-C.E.O. might not realize that an employee had made a terrible mistake...these people are still human, or human-like; they're not perfect.

The story would not, of course, be about pesticides. A world free from pollution is a world where every primary school child knows that you don't solve an agricultural pest problem by spreading poison over the land. Even if the poison didn't harm humans, that would be an unsustainable plan, doomed to breed more and tougher pests.

So how do they cultivate grain? With corn there's no problem; you hoe and weed and hoe and weed and hoe and weed, and there goes the pleasant part of summer, and you're still hoeing and weeding when the heat wave arrives, and sweat drips into your eyes and ears and you fantasize about moving to the city to become a certified public accountant, but there's no need for poison to eradicate weeds from corn. With rice you eliminate a lot of pests by flooding the field, rice being a semi-aquatic plant, but you still spend too much time floundering about in mud. With wheat, the weed problem has actually become part of the English language; wheat yields per acre can be adversely affected by weeds that look just like wheat until they've matured and been harvested, and only then can farmers sort out the nasty weed seeds, the "tares." Wheat and "tare" weeds have become our default metaphoric explanation of why God allows evildoers to live: even God has to give people enough chances to make enough choices to be fairly judged as good "wheat" or evil "tares." And wheat is a grass that grows in fields, not separated rows; even when weeds don't look like wheat, it's hard to get them out of a wheat field. This is the kind of problem that makes farmers agree with the chemical companies that they can't produce food without using poisons to kill the weeds.

As the photographer known as Akshay Paratmuni could tell us, you can't just hoe the weeds out of a wheat field as you would a corn field. Photo donated By Akshay.paramatmuni1987 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25519924

In the case of corn growers, it's because they're too dang lazy to hoe and weed, too dang stingy to pay teenagers to do it; corn growers who want "herbicides" need to be whacked with a hoe handle and told to get their sorry selves back to the fields. Corn is not, however, as nutritious as rice and wheat are. People who digest wheat gluten really can make wheat their primary food source--and be healthy. Enough people can digest natural wheat gluten that we as a species need to continue to cultivate wheat. But, having made enough technological "progress" that farmers depend on some sort of "herbicide" to deliver wheat crops, do we have to go backward in order to go Green?

I thought about this, and the "Muse" part of my brain said: "Hah."

"Does this world have wheat?" I queried.

"Of course they have wheat. That's the story. They have advanced robotic technology! Even in that beyond-Amish country where the law-abiding citizens live in caves because they think it's unbiblical and self-indulgent to build houses, they can have wheat. They have robotic cutworms that scuttle constantly through wheat fields, snipping off anything that their sensors don't recognize as wheat."

"Lovely," I said, "so where's the melodrama?"

"They tried gene splicing, too, and gave it up as a bad idea when genetically modified bacteria..."

Oh, well, read the story, when and wherever it's published.

One part of the difficulty I've had writing speculative fiction is that, however wildly speculative a story is, I live among people who want to believe it's autobiographical. I once wrote a novel in which a pregnant unmarried woman, trying to emigrate through the fourth dimension to a more pleasant world, self-aborts by crossing through fourth-dimensional space. That's not the main part of the story; it's an idea I lifted from Anne McCaffrey, who mentioned it only in throwaway lines in those of her stories I've read. The neighbors who were into recycling, at the time, peeked at discarded scraps of that manuscript and took it into their heads that I had had an abortion. Oh, right. In fourth-dimensional space, too, and if you believe that, look out behind you, because my flying dragon has been known to eat people whose minds it reads as being too stupid to live...

Then there's another difficulty I have that's been best expressed in Earthsong, the surprising, disappointing third volume in the Native Tongue series...

(I don't think the person who did the cover painting had read the book; it's not about "smart houses." I have no idea what that person had been reading. Or drinking.)

In Earthsong Elgin needed to portray the effects of substantial social progress around our Earth and its colony planets, several centuries ahead of our time, and with her trademark sense of whimsy she did that by having the story narrated in the third person by "trancers" who mostly "channel" one character's story, but occasionally "change the channel" and present short stories about other people who never directly encounter the main character. At least one of those short stories was dear to her heart as a paradigm of something she believed to be true about human nature. Others probably struck her, and me, and most readers of "literary" fiction and nonfiction who occasionally read science fiction, as boring little space operas, or techno-operas, where ordinary people do ordinary things in environments just slightly different from ours...and she switched between the short stories by letting the trancers exclaim, "Boring! Change the channel!"

When I write speculative fiction, or any fiction, at some point I always think, "But that's not what really happened! That's fiction! Boring! Change the channel!" I liked fiction when I was too young to write it; now that I've racked up some experiences worth writing about I've matured into a nonfiction person. Like, bleep would I know what fiction readers consider boring? Didn't somebody say there were only three fiction plots in the universe? Well, this is one of them...if it's boring to them, let them change the channel.

C.S. Lewis said that the real appeal of science fiction was the pleasure of exploring an imaginary world. In a novel you can do that. In a short story...who am I to judge the people who create the market for short stories?

Anyway I wrote this story, and the "Critic" part of my brain said, "Oh right, Bill Gates meets Nancy Ward! Boring! Change the channel!" and the "Creative" part said "No, it's part of the history of this alternative world," and the "Inner 25-year-old of the Past" part said "What fun to write about twenty-something sophisticates instead of children or teenagers," but the seriously interesting part of the story is the weeder robots. The love/war conflict between/within the spy and the inventor, bah, read it if you're in the mood for that sort of thing; it's a frill, even though my ideal reader (who is of course American) would think twice, "Do people react that way?--Er um...maybe the rich and powerful in the United States don't usually...but what about the leaders of colonial nations? What about those Filipinos who ate that first, sickening batch of E. coli corn?" and that might be an enlightenng line of thought for some U.S. readers; I don't know.

How far into the future is this idea? Roomba has already built and patented a clunky, first-generation "Tertill" weeder robot; the company offered these gadgets for sale last summer. Somewhat to my disappointment, Amazon isn't selling used ones yet, although Amazon sells Roomba vacuums and will undoubtedly start selling Tertills or similar products soon. We are not talking about a radical new concept here. We are talking about a refinement.

Neither Amazon nor Wikipedia offers a picture of a Tertill; Bing has, and it looks a lot like this Roomba.

The weeder robots by which I've been bemused all morning are small enough to scuttle in between wheat stalks, or lawn grass stalks if anyone in that world cultivated lawn grass (which I doubt). This makes them small enough to need protection from cats and songbirds, and at a crucial point in the story the inventor (who's always lived in a city) tells the industrial spy "You would have worked it out in a few years," and the spy says "At the cost of how many birds?" The robots resemble insects and are protected from birds by a coating that's disgusting, though not fatal, to birds, like monarch butterflies. They don't simply go after anything in a cabbage field that doesn't look like a cabbage. They have sophisticated biochemical sensors that can scan (taste? smell?) plant sap, leave wheat stalks growing, and grind up those nasty "tare" weeds at the ground level. They don't look much like cutworms, which few humans enjoy looking at; maybe more like beetles, or buttons, or miniature Tertills, in bright bird-warning colors arranged in patterns humans consider cute. They work like cutworms. Given time, they could kill Bermuda grass, if that stuff grew in their world (which I doubt). Plants keep growing back from roots, only so many times; these robots keep recharging in sunshine and shredding the plant sprouts, more times than even Bermuda grass grows back.

I wouldn't know how to build these things in our real world, where I'm still toiling along, constrained by finances, on the much easier problem of building a safe dung-burning generator...but I'd bet that Bill Gates could build a weeder robot that could recognize the taste of wheat, or knows someone who does. I say it's time they got on with it. The world does not need even one more year of glyphosate poisoning. The world needs some real technological progress that will make glyphosate and all the other herbicides obsolete. Anybody who can build Roombas, or robot ballet dancers, should be able to get some useful ideas by studying cutworms.

And although I've spent a good deal of this year so far, and may spend much more, bashing Monsanto, I would just absolutely love to read that Monsanto's chemists had developed the safe reagent, sealed inside the core of the robots, that the robots used to distinguish grain crops from grass-type weed. Jolly high time that company did something right.