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Car driving is one good app and one being intensively developed. How about McDonalds? Surely robots could do as well as the average beginner they put at the first point of contact. And back in the kitchen area, hate to put a good cook out of work, but couldn't robots do all that?

Whether you google, shrimp china sewage, or vegetables mexico sewage, the results are bad news.

From "Some Aspects of the Shrimp Farming Industry in China:" [start excerpt] The environment around shrimp farming areas was partly responsible for the shrimp farming recession in China. One reason is the pollution from industrial waste water and sewage.According to Jiang (1994a)about 6 billion t of waste water drains into Chinese coastal waters from 43 coastal cities each year,of which 4 billion t is industrial waste water and 2 billion t is domestic sewage.Unfortunately,many shrimp ponds are concentrated near estuaries where polluted water drains directly,and many shrimp farms suffer heavy losses from this pollution... . .[end excerpt]

And it's not just China. It's Asia.

You'd think some of those smart lawyers who float their yachts in Big Tobacco hundred dollar bills would go after Big NAFTA and Big WTO while there are enough .Americans left alive to have a "class action" lawsuit. They could name Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) and Export-Import Bank as coconspirators

"Car driving is one good app and one being intensively developed. "

Good to hear. Other than military work on it I hadn't heard of much. But the same vision recognition skills for driving would help many areas of robotics.

McDonalds and other fast food restaurants are a great application. They certainly have enough workers to justify the research. Actually I was thinking McDonalds was already doing a lot of work in this area.

Cashiers would be another great application, because that crosses the line and picks up fast food, retail, grocery, etc. But I'm thinking something a lot more robust, than self serve ATM style checkout stands.

I think construction workers, miners, and similar labor intensive dangerous jobs would be another ideal app. (How hard would be to program six robots to stand around and watch one worker do something? just kidding)

Another area that I think we could all get behind is automation of government workers.

Obviously traffic cops are already being automated with the intersection and roadside cameras. (I hate those, even though they haven't got me yet)

But all that paper processing, that goes on in government should be put on the internet at light speed, and some of it has been.

Another area, that I think should be automated, and could be easily, is education. Why on earth do we have 410,000 elementary teachers in this country, when computers taught my daughter to read a fifth grade level by the end of kindergarden. Education should be largely automated, all the way through college.