As a child, I grew up in a village in China and our family farmed rice. It was mostly my mom who was doing the farming while my dad worked in the city.
Some things I remember:
* Seeing hired buffalos tilling our fields
* Playing with frogs and catching tadpoles in the fields
* Someone with a machine that removes the husks would come to our village during harvest
* The smell of rice fields. I recently smelled it again and it's very comforting.
Now I work in high tech, working on AI, and the fancy stuff. There is just something about rice fields that I love - maybe just memories, childhood, smell, how serene it looks when it's full.
My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they can enable more people in cities to migrate back to rural places. When I was younger, I used envy those who grew up privileged in a big modern city. Nowadays, I absolutely am glad I grew up in a little village in a farming community and I consider myself lucky to have.
I grew up in a similar environment, similar trajectory, but in Africa.
Dad was a teacher in a rural school, mum stayed at home.
Until I went to school I would stay outside all day with my friends, playing in and around the rivers and dams, making our own fun with abandoned cars and rusted out farming equipment.
Our school had one computer, and I was lucky enough to get to use it after hours from time to time.
I would study the manual from front to back so I could optimise my time while on the computer.
Practiced typing on a typewriter to type in code listings faster later (aging myself here ;)
Today I build AI agents and infrastructure to run them for a hyperscaler, and my car drives me around. Feels like another lifetime ago.
This is rural Scotland in the late 1970s / early 1980s.
I'd like my small son to have the same opportunities that I had, instead of a school where the playground has lots of very carefully manufactured play equipment and they get to sit and look at iPads instead of working out for themselves how to program a BBC Micro.
>My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they can enable more people in cities to migrate back to rural places
Ah, the perennial dream of the technologist. Here's a Le Corbusier quote on the same theme from 100 years ago
> The cities will be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live 30 miles away from it too, in the other direction, under another pine tree. We shall both have our own car.
Meanwhile the rest would be housed in "machines for living in".
If there is a hell, Le Corbusier is currently in it, eating the equivalent in cement to all the monstrosities he concocted.
I grew up in similar environment in rural central India and I (half)jokingly say farming was my first real job. We rarely planted rice, but I have vivid memory of helping my father plant the rice saplings in the muddy puddles in my farm.
I am always skeptical of urban people wanting to move back to little villages to do farming. Farming is a back-breaking and a tough job. You are exposed to all the vagaries of nature. The market forces are also not always in your favour. It is another version of "quit-job-and-open-a-coffee-shop" fallacy.
Well, those who quit their jobs and open coffee shops almost certainly make a bad choice for themselves economically and work/ life balance wise... But they do wonderful things for their community, and - a questionable benefit to society but a huge benefit to some - real estate prices. People love these places. They capture a tiny fraction of the value they create, if we look at it in cold terms.
That can't really be said for downscaling rice farmers, can it? I mean, at best maybe the other rice farmers enjoy having them around.
I meant it as a pipe-dream that people jump into without knowing the hidden asymmetries. Farming of any kind is hard and learning that specific skillset is necessary to succeed.
> My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they can enable people in cities to migrate back to rural places.
Wouldn't it be better, at least for the Earth, for everyone to live in cities? This way, more of the world can remain fairly untouched by humans, and it could still remain easy accessible from the city for recreational purposes.
The solarpunk ideal of living a rural life requires more road infrastructure, which cuts off wildlife routes and natural drainage, and even with EVs, still pollutes the air from tire wear.
That is my understanding too, but many people equate rural life with „natural“. Unfortunately the rural environment is all but natural. The cultural landscape that has been engineered over centuries all but displaced true wilderness and is largely devoid of biodiversity. The better we become at industrial agriculture, the worse the situation is.
That depends on the rural environment. Especially grazing lands, like north European coastal heathlands, may have been managed with controlled burns in between grazing for a thousand years, to the point that they have their own biodiversity, that may get lost if they are disused.
Not everywhere, you are looking at only suburbs vs cities.
We've already touched ~all of the arable and non-arable land that's near to where people want to live. Forests clearcut, swamps (and deltas and the Netherlands) drained, rivers rerouted, reservoirs established, plains tilled, roads built, mountains conquered: We've been shaping and expanding the habitable Earth as it suits us for a very long time.
We're humans. We do that stuff.
And we're natural creatures like the rest of them are.
It would also be better for the earth if there were no cities and everyone went back to village farming and local communities. I also don't see that ever happening nor do I want to ive in a city.
A very large fraction of land (~50%) is currently used to grow biomass to feed 8 billion humans. Nothing about that land is 'natural' - it's a carefully engineered environment that's quite hostile to animal life.
The land that people live on, whether it's in a city, a suburb, or in a rural manner is a rounding error compared to those demands.
This only looks at land mammals rather than plant crops, but...
https://xkcd.com/1338/
> Wouldn't it be better, at least for the Earth, for everyone to live in cities? This way, more of the world can remain fairly untouched by humans
Where's the food going to come from?
Farms - with a near infinitesimal number of farmers compared to the numbers living in cities .. exactly as things are trending now.
It's common enough, here at least, to have a small family cropping 13,000 old school acres - tilling, seeding, waiting, harvesting, etc with big machines and Ag-bots.
eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpNMSSGWnOI
And the best way for Earth is we all migrate to Mars aboard Elon Musk's spaceship.
If you're going to live underground(and you'd have to on Mars) you might as well do it here, at the bottom of the ocean, or if you're feeling particularily ambitious - even on the moon. There is literally zero advantage to doing it on Mars, except for the achievement.
I grew up in North India, close to Ramganga river (Jim Corbet park is on this river). We grew rice in addition to sugar cane.
The smell of paddy (and also of large quantity of cooked rice) is absolutely soothing for me and it brings back memory.
During my grandfather time, it was very common for a crab to grab your fingers when you are planting the paddy. My father would chase turtles and large frogs when he was a kid.
When I was a kid, the crabs and turtles were gone but frogs were pretty abundant. In last twenty years, there are hardly any frogs left. Earthworms are also under stress.
The Japanese style of planting paddy wasn't very common in India before green revolution. Then we had a some new varieties that took over almost all old varieties for a simple reason for yield. My grandmother used to complain about a lost variety a lot. Apparently it had such a strong aroma that whole village would know what rice you have cooked. Glad to see more efforts preserving old varieties [1].
[1] https://ruralindiaonline.org/article/let-them-eat-rice
Honestly the rice varieties in India should be promoted and protected more. The diversity and health benefits of these varieties is immense.
This is so important. Kerala in particular had a treasure trove of varieties, some well suited to low rainfall, resistant to local pests. I am sure other states had/has such diversity too, I am just not knowledgeable enough.
These genotypes are being lost to industrial mono-cropping. The government is doing nothing about it.
Is this the “city experience” in general or specifically for the United States? It famously has very poor urbanism so might not mean the same as in Europe for example.
I have grown up in rural Russia in the 80s and that was also similar - a forest started 50m from our house and I would just get lost there from time to time - not fun for my parents but magical for me.
Then we moved to the middle of a European capital city (Sofia) and I _still_ had almost a forest right next to the apartment block we used to live in - enough of a forest that as a 10yo kid I could find a nook to build myself a small hut with a burning fireplace inside it and nobody complained.
There are plenty of big European cities that are 10-20mins short unsupervised trip to a wilderness that a kid can do.
For example - Valencia has an uninterrupted bicycle highway that gets you from the city center to a wilderness preserve and a beach in less than an hour cycling.
To me all of these nature vs city laments are just US car dependency. Cities don’t have to be this way at all.
A lot of areas in Western Europe are either completely deforested or have very weird low-density half-dead wooded areas, especially Germany. One has to go all the way to Poland/Serbia/Bulgaria to get a real forest experience again.
I was at my wife's hometown for CNY and it seems her mother still does everything by hand. Pretty impressive... not sure how long I'd last doing that kind of hard labor. It does smell nice.
https://gist.github.com/olalonde/8a905bcd87e3bfcd4f6143a337e...
Yea that rice mill machine is similar to what I remember. Our village didn't have one so some guy would show up in harvest season to do it for every house in the village.
I can tell by the houses in your wife's village that their area was likely wealthier than ours growing up. Our houses looked more like this: https://imgur.com/a/Pc9LuKF
When I was a kid, it felt like there were only 2 or 3 villages total in my area since our parents didn't allow us to go too far. As a visiting adult, I found out that there were hundreds of similar villages in the region. Most of these villages are generally empty nowadays as people moved to cities. However, I heard from locals that some younger people are beginning to return to villages and raise their kids there.
Oh, I assumed you meant a powered machine.
I believe it's pretty quiet here too outside of CNY, although there is at least one active school nearby. Nice to hear some younger people are returning. It must be nice for kids to grow up in this kind of environment.
Oh I didn't realize that some people would interpret that machine as powered by electricity.
Our village didn't get electricity until the 90s, I think. I do remember having electricity growing up, and even a small TV. By the time I emigrated, some households had refrigerators.
I think that's a profoundly balanced perspective on a possible future wherein automation has successfully dealt with most of the mundanities of producing the things we need to live and enjoy life.
It allows for supremely-intense end-game levels of automation, and also for personal productivity and a resulting increased joy, and for at least some aspects of free market economics to all work together.
(Can it happen? Perhaps we'll find out.)
> My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they can enable people in cities to migrate back to rural places.
Why? Honest question.
A kid in a town/city has access to a billion opportunities many of which exist only because there are enough people interested.
In a village, everyone knows everyone. Kids play with each other and run around freely. Every house protects all the kids and help each other. Everyone trusts everyone. You never feel lonely. Life is slower, much less stressful.
I feel sorry when I see kids today depressed, lonely, and distrusts society. This just didn't happen when I was growing up in a village. There is a joke that Asian parents don't think depression exists. I think part of that mindset is rooted in how many of them grew up - depression was just not really a thing in a village.
I sometimes hear of people who try to move to the country side, only to hate it and want to move back to cities. I get it. It's not for everyone. But I think it can be aided with technology such as AI+robots helping with your farms or house work, self driving cars taking your kids to school a bit far away, AI doctors who can do most of the basic healthcare work, etc. And if you can build a business with 1 or 2 people + AI, then it also makes remote work more viable. Basically, I think tech can bring a lot of the city quality of life to the country side.
If kids want to move to a town/city for more opportunities or networking, they'd be free to do so when they're older. Most do. But right now, the cities seem like the only path to having a decent quality of life.
> In a village, everyone knows everyone. Kids play with each other and run around freely. Every house protects all the kids and help each other. Everyone trusts everyone. You never feel lonely. Life is slower, much less stressful.
That just means we need to structure cities differently.
I live in a 1 sq km neighbourhood (literally, 1 km square) that houses 10k people.
It has almost everything I could wish for at walkable distance, schools for all ages, parks, a gym, a pool, sports campgrounds, medics, pharmacies, stores, markets, etc.
What doesn't exist (e.g. a movie theater, a library) I can reach by public transit in half an hour. The city has 2M people, there's plenty of stuff to do.
I've lived here all my life, my kids go to school with the kids of my school mates. They walk to school from at least 10yo, they visit each other's houses. During school breaks and weekends, they play in the park with their school friends while their parents grab a beer in a nearby kiosk.
You can build communities like this within cities.
> In a village, everyone knows everyone. Kids play with each other and run around freely. Every house protects all the kids and help each other. Everyone trusts everyone. You never feel lonely.
In Japan that's true in a lot of city neighbourhoods as well. The high trust is extremely valuable but villages are not the only way to achieve it.
> In a village, everyone knows everyone. Kids play with each other and run around freely. Every house protects all the kids and help each other. Everyone trusts everyone.
Seems like a recipe for rampant child abuse.
I never felt unsafe as a kid or abused in any way although my mom would make me memorize our village's name and location in case I get abducted while playing with my friends. We'd often go over to neighboring villages to play because some of our friends from school lived in a different village. We played until dawn and then went home to have dinner.
Doesn't happen that much. Possibly the environment in which people grow up in is so free and kind. Sort of like Hawaii's aloha spirit (search it up).
"A kid in a town/city has access to a billion opportunities many of which exist only because there are enough people interested."
Most of those opportunities involve getting hit by a car.
Cars in rural settings are generally faster and more indispensable for their owners. It is much easier to enact policy that reduces car traffic in cities than in villages.
I see. Have you lived with kids in a village and also in cities to see the difference in reality?
I did and am moving back to the village now.
I grew up in a city and my wife grew up in a village. We now live in a city and don’t own a car.
But you don't have kids yet?
It makes a pretty big difference. Yes, the opportunities in the city are bigger for everything, but so are the dangers. The amount of crazy people. The effort involved in getting to a nice and safe place where the kids can just run around without you having to watch them every second. Those places also exist in some cities, but way too few. So great that you don't have a car, (I mean it) car free places in cities I do enjoy, there are just not many of them.
I have two three year olds. Parks where they can run around with relaxed supervision are not far. A big park is close enough that they can walk the distance and in less than half an hour by bike we can reach a forest and four or five other parks.
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