There is a wide diversity in motivations people have for permaculture, and this view that permaculture focuses on "the efficient production of useful goods in a ways that require minimal maintenance by letting other creatures do all the work for you" is one of several types of views I have come across ("lazy farming"), and is by no means the exclusive one. There is very much a strong contingent of permies who also focus on restoring the earth, and stewardship of the land, even food sovereignty.

It's true, but all these alternative reasons would be non starters if the approach didn't work for lazy farming. The core reason to do permaculture is that your food (and other resources) produce themselves. These other reasons may be primary motivators for some people to do permaculture, but without that core benefit nobody could do it even if they wanted to and have a viable farm.

I think you're coming from an anthroprocentric perspective and behaviorialist paradigm, where natural processes are understood in the lens of humans and human actions ("The focus is on the efficient production of useful goods in ways that require minimal maintenance by letting other creatures do all the work for you"), and the reason someone does something is because it benefits themselves or other humans ("without that core benefit nobody could do it even if they wanted to and have a viable farm").

The ethical principle of "Fair Share" isn't just about the yields the land owner has, but also the yields other inhabitants of an ecology have. For people who are motivated by stewardship, for example, humans obtaining benefits is not elevated into its own thing. As an example, some of the Native tribes would say something along the lines that when you plant, one is for the plants, one is for the animals, one is for the birds, one is for us. It is certainly not about maximizing production efficiencies for the benefit of humans alone.

That motivation and attitude shapes the way someone views and experiences their life, and their place, and in turn shapes how we go about caring for land, caring for people, and fair share.

I know I'm cheating here a bit. I'm using the work of Carol Sanford to identify world view and paradigm, and that way of thinking through these things are not spelled out in the original works of Mollison and Holmgren. Sanford's work on regenerative paradigms and living systems world view goes a long way towards sorting out the different ways people approach things in the permaculture community, and is generalizable more broadly than food systems.

Regeneration is a characteristic exclusive to living systems. It's not something that can be approached from a world view that everything is a machine, or the paradigm that one can control behavior through incentives and disincentives. Only living systems can regenerate. It's the broader paradigm from which "your food (and other resources) produce themselves" comes from. Living systems are capable of growing and adapting on their own; they are nested -- so that is you and I, within larger living systems of family, community, organization, ecology. It is because of regeneration that "food and other resources produce themselves".

My point in all of this is that there is a diversity of motivations and views, and the view that "without that core benefit nobody could do it even if they wanted to and have a viable farm" is not as universal as it sounds like. "The core reason to do permaculture is that your food (and other resources) produce themselves" might be your core reason, but it is not true it is the reason that everyone in the permaculture community applies permaculture.

If this doesn't go so far as to convince you this is possible, I hope it at least opens you up to the idea that it is an ideal we can get close to:

https://t2tile.com/

I realize how much I sound like I've fallen for a cult or am about to sell you some essential oils. Perhaps I have and I'm not really sure how to NOT come off like that given how excited I am. Perhaps a step in that direction is providing some other/adjacent projects that have also made me feel similar

1. See this video by Lionel Penrose from the late 50s on a pre-digital version of "cellular automata":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sIph9VrmpM

2. See the, now defunct, outcome of Bret Victor's attempt at building a more communal form of computing:

https://dynamicland.org/

This also reminds me of Gerry Sussman’s talk “We Really Don’t Know How to Compute!”:

https://youtu.be/HB5TrK7A4pI

Granted, the assumption he made is that computing power would grow increasingly cheap (which is basically the opposite of the point here), but I also wonder if techniques like those shown in that talk could be used effectively with a network of smaller, lower-power computers.

(I mean, the talk does mention the use of small low-power computers specifically, but more in the context of e.g. sensor networks.)

This looks really cool, can't wait to watch. Thanks so much for sharing. Seems like a good fit for my "computing paradigms that make me actually excited to work in tech" list

You might be interested in the book "when computers were human".

"Computer" in 1940 meant a woman who does computations

> You'd basically need living computers.

Sounds like a sweatshop.

There were some interesting articles on HN a few weeks ago about doing backpropagation in a machine learning system with physical systems, the particular example I remember was a natural language processing system using a metal plate and sound. Everything that happens in the universe is a computational process. You could build a living computer with enough knowledge about genetics and feedback mechanisms between species and specimens. A living computer doesn't have to be a human brain, or even resemble a brain at all. It might resemble a forest or a fish tank.

or a mycelium network! :)