1) Getting very close to the crops and intertwining with them to make weeding very hard
2) Looking almost exactly like real crops (as-in, to the point where most humans can't tell the difference and the machines need to start taking genetic samples)
You're totally right though; the machines have an adaption-speed advantage, so I'd expect this to be a very effective technique overall (assuming that the robotics pan-out).
Until the weeds become actually identical to the actual crops, and we just have weirdly recreated the crops. This is hilarious, and actually precisely how Generative Adversarial Networks work (https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Generative_adversarial_networks), although obviously with gradient descent in the generator network, not biological evolution
Give it a few decades and the weeds will find a way of corroding robots. In a century, we'll have to develop robots that can handle the acid that plants will be spraying on them.
1) Getting very close to the crops and intertwining with them to make weeding very hard
2) Looking almost exactly like real crops (as-in, to the point where most humans can't tell the difference and the machines need to start taking genetic samples)
You're totally right though; the machines have an adaption-speed advantage, so I'd expect this to be a very effective technique overall (assuming that the robotics pan-out).