Here are eight ways we can feed ourselves if hostile AI destroys modern agriculture.

According to Joshua M. Pearce, holder a John M. Thompson Chair in Information Technology and Innovation and a professor at Western University, Canada, the capacity of hostile AI agents to wipe out our species within the next decade has recently been a hot topic of debate. The industry itself has expressed fears about the rapidly growing abilities of artificial intelligence. If AI were to choose (or be used) to eliminate humanity, a prolonged disruption of the power grid would be an easy method. Analyses from the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers describe how sophisticated cyber operations could theoretically achieve this – a risk serious enough that Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has held meetings with energy company leaders to discuss how to prevent it. An attack on the power grid would cripple conventional agriculture. The only ones with power would be those who produce it themselves – for example, via solar energy and microgrids. Without fuel pumps, ventilation for livestock, food cooling, irrigation systems, grain drying, and fertilizer production, our food system would quickly collapse. Even small farmers would struggle. However, we do not all need to starve. My colleague David Denkenberger and I actually published a book ten years ago showing that in a global catastrophe, we could produce enough calories without conventional farming to feed the world's population. Here, I share eight ways we can sustain ourselves if agriculture fails. If hostile AI agents shut down the power grid, conventional farming would fail in a predictable sequence. First, we would run out of fuel. Pumps at fuel depots and gas stations are electric, so tractors, harvesters, irrigation generators, and other equipment would cease to function within days to weeks, depending on the extent of the farmers’ own fuel reserves. Next, livestock in controlled environments would die. Many poultry and pig facilities depend on electric ventilation. Losses would begin within hours after a failure in hot weather, and automatic feeding and watering systems would also fail. Food would not last long without refrigeration, packaging, and transportation. Milk, meat, and vegetables spoil within days. In the medium term, the large amount of water used for irrigation would fail, as lift and center pivot systems depend on electricity. Only gravity-fed and rainwater-based irrigation systems would continue, significantly reducing crop yields in dry regions. Then, grain drying and storage would fail. Crops harvested with moisture need to be dried and ventilated using solar solutions. Without drying, mold growth would release mycotoxins and destroy stored grain reserves. The next growing season would mean the end of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. Produced via the electric and gas-driven Haber-Bosch process, which converts atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, this fertilizer feeds about half of the world's population. Without replenishing nitrogen, crop yields would decline by approximately 30-50% from depleted soils. Processing would then become a bottleneck. Many mills, slaughterhouses, and packaging plants are fully electric. Crops and livestock could remain in the fields, but food would still be inaccessible. To complicate matters further, distribution and payment systems would also cease to function. Railway signaling, truck logistics, and electronic payments would fail, causing national food markets to break down and revert to local, almost immediate, markets. Small-scale agricultural communities would fare best, but even these would be challenged. Supply chains that have generated incredible yield increases over the past century would collapse, returning us to yields from the early 1900s. Hybrid and genetically modified seeds need to be purchased anew each year. If only stored seeds are available, they would segregate, and yields would fall. Pesticides, veterinary medicines, and spare parts for equipment would also become much harder to obtain. Even societies that are not dependent on technology, such as Amish communities, would be affected, but conventional farmers would be in serious trouble. It would impact us all. Eight ways to sustain ourselves: 1. The priority would naturally be to shut down malicious AI and repair the power grid. Meanwhile, a return to manual and draft power would significantly reduce productivity per worker, and the global food supply could support only a fraction of the current population. Self-sufficient and rain-dependent regions like Africa would fare better than industrialized nations like North America. 2. We do not all need to starve. Here are some simple actions we could take to feed ourselves: - Stop feeding edible food to livestock. Feeding animals food and then eating those animals is inefficient. Redirecting grain from animals to humans would be the fastest calorie recovery achievable—available on day one when lights go out. - Halt biofuel production. Edible crops currently converted into fuel should immediately be returned to the food supply. - Ban alcohol production. Crops used to produce alcohol in the U.S. could feed 425 million people annually if we simply ate them. - Reduce food waste. We should focus on utilizing existing calories rather than producing new ones. The Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters states that it is most effective to conserve existing food resources during the early phases of a global food collapse. - Plant a high proportion of legumes to fix nitrogen. This would directly replace lost Haber-Bosch fertilizer and is central to maintaining fertilization. - Extract calories from agricultural residues. Straw and stover (leftover stems and leaves) can be converted into animal feed and then into food via livestock. They can also be transformed into sugars and then into edible products via microbes, used to cultivate fungi, serve as substrates for mushrooms, or fermented into single-cell protein. - Fish with wind-powered ships. Sail-based fishing completely removes dependence on fuel. We could harvest large quantities of fish. - Grow food in backyard gardens. Do you have a lawn of grass you can't eat? You could instead use it to produce plenty of food and protein. Cultivating plants like soybeans in backyard gardens could supply much of the protein households need. If things ever get really bad, my research group and others have developed more than a dozen ways to produce the calories humanity needs while conventional agriculture is reestablished. Our last line of defense would be to create so-called “robust foods” to nourish the population. These processes range from converting plastic into food, producing edible single-cell protein from natural gas, extracting protein from leaves, or even transforming 3D-printing waste into a single-cell protein raw material that can be turned into edible food. These methods are more extreme—and hopefully unnecessary. This opinion piece was originally published in English on The Conversation on October 7.