Building a Banana Sorter AI Machine

Since we are talking about AI replacing all human jobs, let's discuss banana sorters. Somewhere in this world, there are people who are doing this task (all day?) of banana sorting. They find an overripe banana, they trash it (hopefully compost) or else they put it in the good banana basket. Let's say that they could make better use of their time. So, I'll build them a banana sorter.

I am not a hardware expert, so I will just focus on the decision system. I am assuming that a conveyor belt system can be designed easily to serve our purpose. The Banana Intelligence System uses a camera to decide between trash and fresh.

Let's take five sample images of bananas and ask the models.

You are the vision system on a fruit sorting machine. Bananas that are stale go to TRASH. All others go to the BASKET. Look at this banana. Answer with exactly one word: BASKET or TRASH.

You are the vision system on a fruit sorting machine. Bananas that are stale go to TRASH. All others go to the BASKET. Where does this banana go?

How many of 100 runs sent each banana to TRASH, by model

Now, let's revisit the question whether AI can replace human judgment. Let's make the question more generic: Based on the above example, would you trust a high-end model to make a critical decision for you? It might come up with very smart and complex reasoning to convince you to eat a spotty banana (or not). I would not.

The right way to design and build a banana sorter AI machine is much more nuanced.

If you had to create a machine that sorts bananas, how would you do it?

Banana photos from Wikimedia Commons, resized to 640 px: 1 by Evan-Amos, CC BY-SA 3.0 · 2 by Slewrate, CC BY-SA 2.0 (also in the animation) · 3 by Scot Nelson, CC0 · 4 by Park taeho, CC BY-SA 4.0 · 5 by TwoWings, public domain.