The (stereotypical) farmer can surely tell you what would be useful to him and be a great beta-tester who gives valuable feedback.
But if the product is, say, some kind of automatic corn harvester, he’s pretty unlikely to give you much insight into the way to actually build it.
The SV techies have no monopoly on expertise in robotics and hardware and software engineering, but they certainly have expertise. They’re in a much better position to automate farming than farmers are.
You're underestimating farmers, I'm pretty sure a good chunk of them could have very valuable insight on building an automatic corn harvester. A lot of them have second jobs in fields related to natural sciences and engineering, and they have farm machinery and buildings that they probably do a good chunk of the work on.
Show me where I made any claim that SV knows anything about farming.
My point is that SV knows about robotics, software engineering, ASIC design, machine learning, LIDAR systems, compilers, operating systems, networking stacks, open source libraries, debugging, venture capital, and all the rest.
Composers vs. piano makers is exactly what I'm saying.
All of that will certainly help you build a... Juicero, say. Something very high-tech but absolutely useless. To solve real-world problems it very much helps to be aware of them, which isn't something SV has been particularly good lately.
So your farmer understands this real world problem really well. And now he wants to automate a solution to it. And to do that he needs... all that stuff that the SV guys know. And they know that stuff really well, better than anyone else. But they don’t know the first thing about farming. Which leads me back to my original post.
Not really. The point you were replying in apparent contradiction to said, "a farmer's problems are best solved by interacting with the farmer... not suburban SF techies".
Nobody's denying that there's a concentration of technological knowledge in the valley. But the only time technological knowledge is useful when combined with an understanding of the actual problem. And for farming, that's with farmers, and on farms.
The SV-centric approach leads to impressive technological innovations that don't actually solve the problem. Juicero is one, for example. Another is The Melt, the VC-backed, tech-focused grilled cheese restaurant. In retrospect, it's pretty obvious they didn't have a clue.
Sure, the right kind of technical knowledge is useful. But the wrong kind is useless. And the standard SV arrogance is actively harmful.
The point, really, is that SV guys may know some cool tech (although with SV's chase for the next shiny JS-frameworked AI-based noSQL-stored , whatever else is trendy now-thing it is arguable if that tech is any better than tech people in saner places know just as well) -- but they have no idea what to do with it to solve any real-world problems; because they don't live in the real world. So they come up with Juiceros, $600 "smart" locks, app-based gas delivery. Not even First World problems, that's like Zeroth World problems.
Unless you think the VC-fed bubble can grow indefinitely, it is SV techies who need people from the real world. Not necessarily the other way around.
Fair enough. A juice machine will not automate farming.
But is not SV also the home of companies like Google, Apple, etc., that make real, cutting edge stuff? (And lots of unsexy companies doing boring work too, nevertheless with real customers).
I think it’s fine to give credit to farmers and the insights they have. But SV has a great deal of unique skills, and casting them as somehow unable to solve real problems seems, to me, quite unrealistic.
I am trying to think of anything worthwhile Apple had ever delivered that was actually their idea, but somehow fail...
Sure, there are companies that make real, cutting edge stuff in SV. As there are in other places. But SV has far more noise that just would not even appear any any saner part of the world. Although I would really question whether Apple does (or ever did) anything cutting edge that wasn't... eh... borrowed from somebody else.
But really, what unique skills does SV have? Chutzpah isn't a skill, after all.
But if the product is, say, some kind of automatic corn harvester, he’s pretty unlikely to give you much insight into the way to actually build it.
The SV techies have no monopoly on expertise in robotics and hardware and software engineering, but they certainly have expertise. They’re in a much better position to automate farming than farmers are.