bump
Why “workers in short supply” with the intense foreigner importation efforts of Big Ears & Co.?
Oh, he couldn’t possibly want them to be working for the conservative capitalists? Just be dependent on the liberals?
Uh-huh. And with that I dismiss the entire article...
Kudos though to Big Robotry. Ever since the combine, men have been engineering better and better ways to automate harvests. People will still be needed to run and service the machines, though. It will never be a people-free industry. Nature is too gnarly for that.
This invention could stop the money that props up illegals flooding the country.It's a game changer.
I for one welcome our new robot overlords.
They don’t come here for the ‘jobs’.
They come here for the freebies.................
The rise of robotization is yet another reason we need no more immigrants - legal or illegal. They are being imported for reasons of political and economic power, not because they are needed.
I have friends with very large farms. When they harvest the corn, the guy just sits there and lets the machine do all the work. He takes control if it needs to stop for any reason, but it literally will harvest whatever field or partial field it is set to cover. They are GPS controlled and the guy in the cab only gets involved to over-ride the autopilot - stuff like stopping to clear debris or other “special” circumstances.
My brother in law owns a 115 foot yacht that could drive itself from his favorite cove in Alaska all the way to Seattle.
If the Lord waits, we are going to see HUGE changes in getting things done without human inervention.
Dirt cheap, near slave labor, is the only reason that food production hasn’t been more automated.
The same was true of true slave labor in the old south, it stunted technological developments.
Because of its hardness/density difference to the rest of the plant and uniform ripening, grain harvesting was mechanically achieved long ago. But soft fruit and vegetables that ripen at varying speeds pose a much more difficult problem (and rock hard green tomatoes are not the answer).
A swarm of droids that tend the crops is probably not too far in the future. I doubt that they will be humanoid in design though, just doesn’t make sense.
Later
Paging Mr. Whitney, Mr. Eli Whitney, please pick up the white courtesy phone.
Think a generation beyond this current-crop of Ag-Bots. Imagine a HOME Garden-bot, that will till and fertilize YOUR soil, grow the veggies YOU choose, and harvest them.
Too much produce? That sounds like a job for Canning-bot. . .
Will John McCain pay a robot $50 per hour?
Back when I was fighting the introduction of NAFTA, a small manufacturer invited me out to his plant. When I entered his office, I noticed the wall was covered with granted patents in food processing. (One of ‘em was automating segmenting oranges to make those canned Mandarin Oranges.)
He told me he had invented a machine that would automatically de-stem strawberries without crushing them. The U.S. companies said they were interested but he said it was obvious they just wanted to steal his idea. (This was before China really got into the industrial piracy act.)
So . . . he went to Mexico, but couldn’t make a sale down there either. One factory owner was pretty candid and showed him why. He was led into a large two-story warehouse that was filled with tables each holding about a dozen people, working like fury cutting out the strawberry stems. There was a catwalk on the second level where a guy with a bullhorn was walking around and blasting some table that didn’t look like they were working fast enough.
The owner pointed to those people and said that it would cost him more to wash down the guy’s machine at day’s end than it cost to pay all those people. The guy said there were too many there, even at slave wages, to work cheaper than his machine.
The owner said that half the people there didn’t get paid. In order for those who did, to keep their jobs, they had to supply their kids and relatives to work for nothing.
It’s no wonder those people risk their lives to get out.
AM, I'm taking it would be too much to quote Frank Zappa's song, Sy Borg here? ;-)
