Eight ways to feed ourselves if rogue AI destroys modern agriculture

If a cyberattack shut down the electricity grid, we would need to eat animal feed and biofuel crops, ban alcohol production, cut food waste and fish from sail boats. (Unsplash) The capacity of rogue AI agents to destroy our species within the next decade has recently been a hot topic of debate.

Fears have been voiced within the industry about the rapidly increasing capabilities of artificial intelligence.

If AI did choose (or was used) to eliminate humanity, long-term disruption of the electricity grid would be a straightforward approach.

Analysis from the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers outlines how sophisticated cyber operations could theoretically achieve this — a serious enough risk that Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has been meeting with utility executives to discuss how to prevent it .

Read more: AI agents can now remember and hackers can ‘poison’ their memories — a new cybersecurity threat An attack on the grid would hobble conventional agriculture.

The only people with power would be those who generate their own by, for example, using solar power and microgrids .

Without fuel pumps, lifestock ventilation, food refrigeration, irrigation systems, grain drying and fertilizer production, our food system would rapidly collapse.

Even small-scale farmers would struggle.

Without electricity, it would be challenging to irrigate and harvest large fields of arable crops. (Unsplash/Keagan Henman) We do not all have to starve , however.

In fact, my colleague David Denkenberger and I wrote a book a decade ago that showed we could produce enough calories without conventional agriculture in a global catastrophe to feed the global population .

Here, I share eight ways we can feed ourselves to survive if agriculture fails.

How agriculture would fail If rogue AI agents took down the grid, conventional agriculture would fail in a predictable sequence.

First we would run out of fuel.

Pumps at fuel depots and stations are electric, so tractors, combines, irrigation generator sets and other equipment would stop working within days to weeks , depending on the extent of on-farm fuel storage.