Square Tomatoes and Robot Bees - Who decides?

Most conversations about AI skip the part that is crucial: who it's built for, who pays for it, and who doesn't get a say.
​This evening goes exactly there.

​We start in 1960s California, where scientists bred a new kind of tomato: square, hard, machine-ready, and wiped out 82% of the state's tomato farms in the process. Farmworkers and small farmers sued the university behind the technology, arguing they were being forced to fund their own replacement. They lost. But the questions they raised never went away.

Today, researchers are using AI, robotics and gene editing to create tomatoes that can be pollinated by robots, crops designed for automated production systems, and even new traits engineered for consumer preferences. AI is having an impact on agriculture, food production, and labour, often with public money, rarely with public input. Sounds familiar?

​What to expect
​A 90-minute interactive evening:

• ​Opening talk connecting the tomato harvester story to today's AI developments
• ​Live audience polling
• ​Conversation with Ildi Carlisle-Cummins (California Institute for Rural Studies): storyteller, oral historian, and director of the Cal Ag Roots project, one of the organisations that grew out of the original lawsuit
• ​Open audience discussion
• ​Informal networking to close

​What you'll take away
​A sharper way to think about who controls the technologies influencing our food, our work, and our world, and what citizens can actually do when change feels inevitable.

If the phrase "square tomato" sounds too strange to be true, you're not alone. Even the TV detective Mr. Monk couldn't believe his eyes!

​Free to attend, free of jargon, no expertise required.
Just bring your curiosity.

​Hosted by Save Our Seeds and Human-Future-Hub Berlin

Tea, coffee, water, beer, win