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Robots To Replace Migrant Fruit Pickers
Vicissidude sends us to Wired for a look at a fruit-harvesting robot being developed in California. Its development has been funded entirely by agricultural associations, concerned by the uncertainty surrounding migrant immigrant labor. Quoting: "As if the debate over immigration and guest worker programs wasn't complicated enough, now a couple of robots are rolling into the middle of it. Vision Robotics, a San Diego company, is working on a pair of robots that would trundle through orchards plucking oranges, apples or other fruit from the trees. In a few years, troops of these machines could perform the tedious and labor-intensive task of fruit picking that currently employs thousands of migrant workers each season."
This is why the "guest worker" (wage slavery) program being argued in the immigration bill needs to die. Slavery kills technological innovation- see Greek history, Roman history, and the American civil war for reference.
It amazes me that Horticulturists can come up with thousands of varieties of flowers, fruits, & vegetables, Engineers can come up with robots that circle a tree numerous times to clean it of any fruit, but the two can't work together to make a tree that's easier to harvest from.
Maybe they will now.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
In theory we could have a civilization where people only work if they want to. Isaac Asimov and Roger MacBride Allen explored one possible society in the Caliban trilogy.
We could have robots making our fast food, doing the gardening, mining metal, making robots, maintaining robots.
To be frank, though I agree I think you're also missing the worst part of this whole idea; the fact that we are headed for an energy crunch. The absolute last thing we need to be doing now is having our food supply more reliant than it already is on cheap energy.
-The art of programming is the pursuit of absolute simplicity.
Not to take this story for more than what it is but this gives me an opportunity to share a vision of the future that has made me think quite hard. What if robots could do every menial and every physical job that needed doing? Imagine robots as dexterous and with visual recognition as good as your average skilled craftsman.
Would each person own a robot and collect a check from home or would the more likely scenario be that a few large companies would run huge armies of these robots? How might all those people who never heard of 'knowledge work' make a living? I'm thinking that the current scheme for distribution of wealth based on labor might not work in that scenario. Finally, I wonder what system, short of some socialist or communist nightmare, would.
I'm interested to hear what people think. Discussion or not, we'll only find out when it happens so bring those cotton-pickin' robots on!
Mod me down for defending Marx, but I feel like he's pretty misunderstood, and far more insightful than people give him credit for, and his views relate directly to the topic.
Apologies for the long post, and if it's not very readable, well, it's friday night and I'm a bit drunk... But it can be summed up as "Robot society as you describe it is communism, and that's a good thing":
Well, setting aside issues like Peak Oil and more general limitations on the energy to power all these robots, which make me wonder if this is a realistic future scenario...
If what you're describing comes true, you are basically describing the technological conditions for "end-stage communism." I don't mean the Communist Party violently overthrows capitalism to create a worker's paradise - I mean what Marx was actually predicting; a great deal of his theory has been "creatively modified" by people like Lenin and Mao.
Marx was basically just arguing (revolutionary and unique at the time, not really that unique now, after people have been discussing it for 1.5 centuries) that technology shaped society. Far from saying capitalism needed to be destroyed post-haste, he was arguing that capitalism as an economic and social system was simply a structure on top of industrialism as a technological system - a way of organizing resources and people, and justifying the downsides, of industrial factories, etc. Marx was pretty clear that he admired the ingenuity and resourcefulness of capitalists, he just disapproved of the way that the people at the top ignored the downsides of their own methods.
Capitalism is good, Marx said, because it stimulates the development of production technology that alleviates and overcomes the great problem of scarcity. The profit motive
causes business owners to reinvest in their business, automate it, produce more at lower cost, drive costs lower, etc., etc. This makes more stuff, which is good, because people have generally not had enough to survive, or at least to survive comfortably.
But as capitalism develops, Marx argued, it faces some "internal contradictions". As automation becomes more and more prevalent (thanks to the profit motive), there is less and less work for people to do. When you're out of work and run out of savings, you can't buy stuff, no matter how cheap it is. So there will be a growing class of hungry, pissed-off people; at the same time, there will be greater material abundance thanks to automation.
Eventually, this situation will have to change, if for no other reason than that the unemployed masses will simply start taking things, because it's that or starve to death. At that point, the society will naturally convert to socialism - that is, the workers will just start running things themselves, first by democratic government, then without any government at all. As the situation stabilizes, individuals can pretty much do their own thing, as long as the means of making necessities (automated factories) don't come under any individual's or any particular group's control.
Now, you can stave off this situation, and keep the basic structure of capitalism in a few ways. We see the US, for example, doing all of these in the twentieth century. More specifically, if you've studied the history of these things, you'll notice that consumerism, New Deal, dramatic increase in neocolonialism, welfare, etc. all either start or dramatically increase - a quantum leap - around the 1920s-30s in the US. The Great Depression basically is the contradiction Marx described coming to fruition (remember, it was part of a global depression in all advanced nations), but it got "band-aids" to alleviate the problem, and then WW2 and the Cold War began generating a lot of jobs:
1) Develop new industries that take on the unemployed workers. Eventually these tend to be automated themselves.
2) Develop/enlarge new markets by:
A) "Strongly encouraging" developing countries to buy your stuff instead of making it themselves - in essence, shifting the unemplo
I believe that robots are here to help... to release people to do non-robotic tasks. For those worried about robots replacing humans here is an article that addresses those questions: http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm If you want to contribute to this effort by coding open-source here are some links: http://miarn.sf.net/ and http://playerstage.sf.net./
I live in the town where these robots will be put to use. I've grown up with the migrant workers that will be displaced by the machines. I've been welcomed into their homes and eaten at their dinner tables. This white boy loves Christmas time because I always receive bags of tamales from these proud hard working families. Every spring I would see my classmates disappear to work the fields. One summer I decided to join them. I lasted four hours.
I love the friends I have made. I enjoy the people and the culture that have become a part of the California Central valley. These are proud, hardworking people. I also welcome the advancement of technology and I believe that the robotic fruit pickers are the natural progression of man. It's a shame that we Americans live off of the broken backs of immigrants.
People never look at the real issue of the immigration debate. We spend too much time and money tending to the symptoms and continually ignore the cause. The living conditions in Mexico are horrid. The gap between the rich and poor is massive and their government doesn't care how many poor people it lets die in order to preserve the ruling class. The United States likes the play World Police when it comes to humanitarian efforts. We invaded Somalia to feed their hungry, we over threw an evil dictator in Iraq, but somehow we ignore our next door neighbor. The only way to fix the immigration problem is to remove the corrupt government of Mexico and instill one that cares about improving the economic conditions of that country. California continually pays the price of Mexico's apathy. We could spend that same money dropping food in Mexico and then watch our border traffic ease up. But the fix is never to give a man a fish, but to teach him how to fish. Their government must be fixed or the United States should annex the whole country as the 51st state. Rich Americans will love all of the new coastal land. Plus we will have a bigger pool of young poor people that we coax into joining our military to fight our foreign wars.
I will end this before I get even further off topic. My point is simply to improve the living conditions in Mexico so that they are like our neighbors to the north. Then embrace innovations, like the robotic fruit picker, so that the mass exodus of Mexican labor doesn't kill the Californian economy.