Posted on 07/14/2013 8:33:22 AM PDT by Olog-hai
On a windy morning in California’s Salinas Valley, a tractor pulled a wheeled, refrigerator-sized contraption over rows of budding iceberg lettuce plants. Engineers from Silicon Valley tinkered with the software on a laptop to ensure the machine was eliminating the right leafy buds.
Hired by a Salinas-based agricultural produce company, the engineers were testing the Lettuce Bot, a machine that can “thin” a field of lettuce in the time it takes about 20 workers to do the job by hand.
The thinner is part of a new generation of machines that target the last frontier of agricultural mechanization—fruits and vegetables destined for the fresh market, not processing, which have thus far resisted mechanization because they’re sensitive to bruising.
Researchers are now designing robots for these most delicate crops by integrating advanced sensors, powerful computing, electronics, computer vision, robotic hardware and algorithms, as well as networking and high precision GPS localization technologies. Most ag robots won’t be commercially available for at least a few years. …
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
Will this make Mexicans obsolete?
Automation makes farming cheaper and more efficient but have no fear, somethings will need a human hand for many years to come.
We will need Mexican robots to do the work American robots won’t do.
great....more jobs done away with.....more people with nothing to do...nothing but collect welfare/unemployment/disability.....
Will it make immigration obsolete or can we now be more judicious who we allow into the country?
What happens to the illegals when they become legal and these robots take over? How will these low skill workers make a living when they are no olonger needed?
/johnny
Still going to make ‘the economic case’ for amnesty, Republicans?
It's welfare.
Will need robot mechanics.
Robots will have chrome rims, and ride close to the ground.
This is something that agribusiness has resisted doing for a long time because Mexican slave labor at low wages was too enticing to resist.
Automating and robotizing agriculture will eliminate those Mexican laborer’s jobs. Employers will take the hit to gear up, but once done they will have more production and less labor related problems. robots never get sick, ask for raises, join unions, or have behavioral issues.
This means that millions of soon to be welcomed illegals won’t even be needed for marginal jobs. But the RINOS have as their goal to drive down the wages of the middle class and working poor (because these schmucks don’t matter) and the Dems see a growing underclass that will vote for benefits.
“We will need Mexican robots to do the work American robots won’t do.”
ROFWL
best line of the thread
a can’t wait for the day the WSJ starts editorializng that we are not importing enough Mexican robots
Is that so?
I’d much rather have my eggs from my own chickens that I take care of myself than from an “egg factory”, TYVM.
Used to be that having one’s own farm was a mark of total independence, apart from paying whatever tax was necessary to defend the country from hostile alien powers. Now a higher dependence upon machines is good? Be serfs of the new manor and have to slave to repair and service the non-titular lord’s bots, in anticipation of the next farm bill out of the High Congress?
It does no good to have robots do the farming, if there is no land upon which to farm.
Um, that’s nice.
I was talking about jobs. But feel free to bang on about your unrelated subject until the thread dies.
The thread isn’t about jobs, though.
But lots of jobs can be automated. What happens when there are no other jobs to replace them and the people put out of work can’t afford to buy the products? Can they all be retrained as bot maintenance? Where are the replacement jobs? Working people don’t want to be forced on to welfare.
So then what will we do with the 30 million new workers? Oh not worry we will just give them welfare.
Shades of Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano. Its why we need a dynamic economy that can take the guys who made buggy whips and move them into higher tech jobs. Its chaotic and disruptive but necessay for wealth generation. And Socialism stops it and we end up with what you said. A small number of makers supporting a huge number of takers.
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