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."

Comments

Wrong Problem

[Joebert]

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.

Re:From bad to worse.

[javaman235]

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.

What to do...

[Statecraftsman]

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!

Re:What to do...

[quantaman]

I've considered the same thing and have come to the belief there are two distinct scenarios that we may encounter.

Either scenario has the same basis, as robots render physical human labor obsolete we will end up with a three class society. An upper class who owns the businesses (and the robots), a middle class consisting of the intellectual lower level professions, ie programmers, scientists, engineers, essentially the people who build and service the robots, and finally a lower class of people who's jobs were taken by robots (manual laborers or even intellectual laborers who's field is better done by machine). The first two classes are probably mostly the same as they are now, where the systems differ is the question of what to do with the lower class of people.

If we simply extend our current societal and economic principals we'll decide they need busywork, most likely this will be involved in somehow entertaining the other two classes. A good portion will probably perform some kind of creative art, ie actors or musicians, and most of their work will consist of live shows (best way to use up manpower and show supremacy of the other two classes). However the vast majority won't be sufficiently creative enough, thus they'll be in the service industry, waiters, butlers, chauffeurs (if we still let humans drive). Note that in both cases the lower class isn't servicing only the upper class but probably the middle class as well, for instance the equivalent of a code monkey would get a couple butlers since there's such an excess of labor available. Interestingly since the benefit of work is so much less society may respond by demanding people work more since large numbers of unemployed or under stimulated people would have the potential to be extremely disruptive to the society. This does have precedent, apparently in the middle ages the idea was if you could get out of working you should, people with inherited money who chose not to work weren't looked down upon like they are today (at least by some parts of society). The idea of everyone having to work and pull their fair share was in part a reaction to the industrial revolution and the creation of the welfare state so that people wouldn't choose to remain unemployed.

This isn't a horrible scenario, it just isn't a very significant improvement over our current society. The happier alternative is that instead of keeping the lower class busy with work we keep them busy with fun. People who don't work just spend their days visiting with each other, going to various clubs, basically keeping themselves entertained with structured activities. This will probably be accomplished through some kind of welfare, the upper and middle class will still get extra money to be rewarded for their work (though most of the middle class will probably be the Open Source developer type who does it partially for fun) but living a life without employment will be a viable and somewhat respectable possibility. The fundamental difference between this system and the previous is in the first system the lower class entertained just the upper and middle classes, here they entertain themselves as well.

This second scenario may seem like a fantasy but I do believe it is a possibility. Just think of the life of an unemployed person today as opposed to a couple hundred years ago?

What will determine which path is basically how we react when we start to get large numbers of people who are able, competent, looking for any kind of work, and unable to find it. If we keep creating jobs to keep them employed and occupied than we may end up with the first scenario, if however we try to give them a viable alternative (maybe even give them fun jobs) we may get the second scenario.