as automation really, really starts taking flight for these kinds of jobs (why we started applying AI to things like white collar jobs first I have no idea)
They are, though? And it has massively changed the dynamics in agriculture. They just don't make headlines because they're technical behind-the-scenes stuff
It's something that annoys me a bit when everyone started talking about AI, but only really a small part of it, and then thinking that's the be-all-end-all of the field. It never was, and still isn't. People just don't know about the rest, and don't read up on it either
Side note: farming is an area where the "Internet of Things" is used extensively as well, but when people think of IoT, they similarly only think about smart homes. Same problem as well
To be fair, you definitively can decentralized parts of it using protocols such as torrents, which work great for that purpose. It ensures multiple locations having redundant data, a means of retrieving that data again, and constant checks for corruption
And actually come to think of this, this already does indeed happen, though only for a subset of the data. It's much more tricky legally when it comes to copyrighted works.
If anyone has some spare terabytes of storage space, I do recommend you to see where you can contribute that space with torrents of this sort. It's better to use that free space for good than just letting it sit idly by