Posted on 04/24/2015 7:28:14 AM PDT by reaganaut1
OXNARD, Calif.—A 14-arm, automated harvester recently wheeled through rows of strawberry plants here, illustrating an emerging solution to one of the produce industry’s most pressing problems: a shortfall of farmhands.
Harnessing high-powered computing, color sensors and small metal baskets attached to the robotic arms, the machine gently plucked ripe strawberries from below deep-green leaves, while mostly ignoring unripe fruit nearby.
Such tasks have long required the trained discernment and backbreaking effort of tens of thousands of relatively low-paid workers. But technological advances are making it possible for robots to handle the job, just as a shrinking supply of available fruit pickers has made the technology more financially attractive.
...
Farmers of corn and other commodity crops decades ago replaced most of their workers with giant combines and other machines that can quickly cut and gather grain used for animal feed, food ingredients and ethanol. But growers of produce and plants have largely stuck with human pickers—partly to avoid maladroit machines marring the blemish-free appearance of items that consumers see on store shelves.
An abundant supply of workers, particularly from Mexico, willing to plant, pull weeds and harvest ripe crops for relatively low pay also had suppressed the need for mechanization. But the number of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. workforce has been declining since its peak in 2007, according to the Pew Research Center, in part because of increased job opportunities in Mexico, as well as tighter U.S. border patrols.
With workers in short supply, “the only way to get more out of the sunshine we have is to elevate the technology,” said Soren Bjorn, Americas unit head for Driscoll Strawberry Associates Inc., the country’s largest berry brand. Driscoll’s largest berry grower, Reiter Affiliated Companies LLC, is partly financing the development of Mr. Bravo’s Agrobot.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Kind of a common background theme in Isaac Asimov robot novels is the “What are people to do” question.
In one of the long discussions in “Inferno” they talk about people needed to have jobs or interests to occupy themselves. Most people did but there were always a few who turned to crime. They mentioned a planet where the people had effectively bored themselves to extinction because robots did everything and the people just kind of lost interest and died out.
I miss Bender2’s posts.
ping
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.
I agree. What is the purpose for people if they cannot find work within their skill set? Sitting around and being given everything kills the human spirit. We are doomed to become the drone like people in the kid movie WALL-E. Just sitting around on our devices and suffering atrophy, both physical and mental.
AM, I'm taking it would be too much to quote Frank Zappa's song, Sy Borg here? ;-)
Uh-huh. And with that I dismiss the entire article...
You know I'm getting over my second bout of pneumonia in 15 months and it's really bad when I read things like that and laugh uncontrollably!
Until they can do it themselves.
Is it a fair bet that those who don't have jobs today (April 24, 2015) will never have jobs, and that neither will any of their kids?
I don't bean 100% true, but maybe, oh, I don't know, 90% true?
I want one o’ them...
Thought provoking video!
I have imagined for some time that the elites might plan for this endgame. Once we reach that certain point where everything is/can be automated, then the vast majority of the population becomes unnecessary. A superlethal designer virus will be dispersed, that the chosen few will be immunized against. Eliminate huge swaths of swarthy peasants, save the earth and maintain control. What more could an elitist desire?
Back when I worked for the University of Dayton Research Institute, I had a National Science Foundation grant to develop a model of how rapidly innovations get adopted. One innovation we studied was that tomato picker. The really startling thing was that in about two years it took over the tomato industry in California. If you didn't buy a tomato picker, you were no longer in the tomato farming business. We couldn't find any other innovation that took over so quickly. It was even faster than replacement of black and white TV with color TV.
There’s a lot of talk about a “singularity” in which the machine ecology will become self sustaining.
I don’t think so.
But I was talking about the Agribusiness and their lobbyists who have paid members of Congress (I mean ‘donated’ to the congress people of their choice) for years to get cheap labor into the country to pick crops. It was the camel's nose under the tent for decades.
If that group stops pushing for illegals then we can beat the rest of the idiot groups... the one's who want to 'save the world' - at the expense of our existence as a free country.
Yes, American citizens can do those jobs. We can engineer, build, operate, and service robots... We won't need third world uneducated illegals to do those jobs. That's my point. Also the disgruntled illegals who come here can just stay in their home countries and work at making reforms...
Eventually robots will service other robots.
The fact that slavery helped destroy the South in this country showcases the fallacy of short term thinking. In the short run slavery helped Southern Liberal Elites - in the long run it gave a more ethical Yankee North the tools to defeat the evil of slavery...
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