alt Hacker Newsthat's funny, i know where this story is set (i grew up there) - or at least, the place Claude was basing things off of
some inconsistencies that stuck out/i found interesting:
- HWY 29 doesnt run through marshfield, its about 15 miles north.
- not a lot of people grow cabbage in central wisconsin ;)
- no corrugated sheet metal buildings like in the first image around there
- i dont think theres a county road K near Marshfield - not in Marathon county at least
fwiw i think this story is neat, but wrong about farmers and their outlooks - agriculture is probably one of the most data-driven industries out there, there are not many family farmers left (the kinds of farmers depicted in this story), it is largely industrial scale at this point.
All that said, as a fictional experiment its pretty cool!
I think it serves even better as a metaphor for software engineering's future than as a forecast for the future of farming. As you suggest, farmers already had to make the "transition" over the course of the 20th century. A farmer from 1926 wouldn't recognize his counterpart today. They would have nothing to talk about. Software people, though, are still twentieth-century programmers at heart, who are just starting to feel their way through the Kubler-Ross process.
Really a great story, and to the extent it was AI-written, well... even greater.