NEWS FROM THE FUTURE: Insect swarms descend on crops

Dateline: March 22 2035

In what looked like a scene from Terminator 14, earlier this year the first commercial swarm of biomechanical insects descended on a rice paddy in Vietnam. The 1-million artificial intelligence (AI) guided Asian Honeybees rose and descended, veered left and right, landed and took off in what resembled a well-choreographed ballet performance.

After years of research and experiments, scientists and politicians exhaled a deep sigh of relief. Yes, it was a scientific success, but more importantly it heralded a new era of food security.

The dwindling bee and insect populations had started to affect crop yields, and the world was heading towards a complete food ecosystem collapse. BMI Inc licensed manufacturing worldwide and provided local adaptation kits for their biomechanical insects, ensuring that local insects’ behaviour, size and pollination patterns could be imitated.

Dr Vivienne Wang, head of robotics behaviour programming at BMI, explained that mimicking the local insects’ behaviour was a milestone in AI-powered pollination patterns to ensure genetic selection and wide distribution.

“Humans have a tendency to go systematic, step by step, plant by plant when performing a repetitive task. Nature, on the other hand, has built in randomness to ensure spatial distribution of pollination, and mixing the genome from different plants. This ensures that plants remain healthy and eliminates the bad ones,” she said.

She proudly announced that before they released the first swarm, they ensured that the mechanical bees didn’t collect all the pollen from a plant, just a little. This ensured that real bees and other insects had plenty of nectar and pollen for food.

BMI’s biomimicry behavioural model has applied the learning from past geoengineering attempts and ensured that crops now can weather the storm of excessive use of pesticides, monocrop farming, and climate change.

On the question of what’s next from BMI, Wang answered: “There’s not enough fish in the oceans.” We are looking forward to the company’s next reveal while we watch its shares hit highs on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. /First published in Mindbullets March 21 2024

Global food crisis bites

Biofuel and meat off the menu as feast turns to famine

Dateline: May 27 2024

Since early 2020 we’ve seen a steady uptick in food prices, and now it has reached crisis proportions. Not only are food staples becoming unaffordable for poorer communities, but there just isn’t enough to go around. Four years ago there was an abundance of food; now more than 1-billion people are staring famine in the face.

How did this happen? Gradually, then suddenly. Covid-19 and climate change disrupted supply chains and bumper harvests; then the war in Ukraine and sanctions blocked grain exports and fertiliser supplies, while sending energy prices soaring. In a trifecta of disruption, full silos could not be emptied, gas for fertiliser became scarce and costly, and fuel for planting, harvesting and shipping surged.

Within months, 25 countries had banned the export of various food products, seeking to protect their domestic food security, which only made the global situation worse, while super-exporters such as Brazil enjoyed a demand bonanza. Depressed yields due to flood or drought on three continents added to the crisis.

“This is a worse catastrophe than the Covid pandemic,” UN secretary-general António Guterres said, “and all countries must solve it together. We must start by ceasing the production of biofuel and biodiesel, and drastically reducing the grain we feed to farm animals.”

Reducing meat consumption and promoting vegetarian diets will go a long way to alleviating maize shortages, but cultural habits take a long time to change. More effective hi-tech solutions are available, such as indoor and “vertical” farming, and producing protein with precision fermentation. Gene-editing crops can increase yields and lower fertiliser requirements.

All these remedies come at a cost and the poor will suffer the most. But if we collaborate on a global scale, ramp up the technology, and fight this crisis the way we fought Covid, perhaps we can create the “good future” together.

And everything will be back on the menu. /First published in Mindbullets May 26 2022

Despite appearances to the contrary, Futureworld cannot and does not predict the future. The Mindbullets scenarios are fictitious and designed purely to explore possible futures, and challenge and stimulate strategic thinking