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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."
Really? How much exactly do these robots cost?
Is it more than about $3 an hour, including maintenance?
And do they reproduce themselves?
Cuz, you've got some strong competition there.
I've been wondering why this hasn't happened yet for years. The answer, of course, is that the ag industry could rely on incredibly cheap labor, so it wasn't worth developing a technological replacement. But if anything is proof that the debate about illegal immigration has turned a corner, this is it.
Once you've seen the back-breaking labor involved in the California agriculture industry, it's impossible not to applaud the development of technology that will make it obsolete. Nobody says after years of work in the strawberry fields, "Gee, I'm sure glad I got the opportunity to explore my full human potential in that career!"
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
We already have fruit f*cker robots, why not fruit pluckers too.
f ruit+fucker
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/search?keyword=
Dirt doesn't need luck.
The ag lobby has been claiming that we need "guest workers" (or illegals, or others) to pick these crops.
This is not unlike the H1B scandal. If you pay enough, you'll find people to do almost any job. The "need" isn't for workers per se, but people who will work a brief job for roughly minimum wage and then move on as a rootless nomad.
We should view this as cruel. We shouldn't maintain an underclass which picks fruit or maintains gardens. Machines can do this work without becoming tired, bored, getting disabling injuries, suffering reactions to ag chemicals, or any of the other hazards of human labor in orchards and fields. Machines can be built as needed and scrapped when they become unusable or obsolete.
If a machine is stored in a leaky barn, it's the farmer's problem. It's not cruel to ask a machine to work in high temperatures or without toilet breaks. A machine doesn't need compensation if drought or frost or fungus ruins the crop and there's nothing for it to do one year.
The taxpayer ought to have a say too. A machine isn't going to bring in a family which immediately qualifies for food stamps and Medicaid. A machine isn't going to overwhelm schools with ESL students. A machine isn't going to add to traffic congestion or law-enforcement expenses.
People who build and maintain machines have pretty good lives. People who do the sort of jobs replaced by machines often don't. Designing and debugging and improving machines means paychecks for geeks like us.
Instead of asking anyone to do jobs we won't do ourselves, or pay enough to attract folks like us, let's make machines to do them. Anything less is hypocritical.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Low cost, low value added labor is a loser. So is importing millions of people to form a permanent slave class.
This argument was what Southern Slave owners used with Cotton.
Funny, how that chore of cotton picking got automated.
Machines don't get tired. They don't die. They don't need medical care or costly medical plans. They can be made over and over again, and always get cheaper when you make enough of them. The whole advance of human existence has been to make more and better machines, that do more to leverage people's labor.
Hello that is WHY you are reading Slashdot.
Machines replaced slave and later tenant farmer/serf labor in the South. Machines replaced lots of deadly hand labor in coal mines (not entirely but a lot). Machines replaced a line full of low skilled labor on the auto assembly lines with a few high skilled positions.
But hey, for some people having a subservient near-slave class is a plus. Not the kind of society I'd want to live in, but some folks only feel better when they have helots to lord it over I guess.
Tomaron nuestros trabajos!
1. Do you think the migrant workers are going to be hapy to be out of jobs?
2. What will you say when automation renders YOUR occupation redundant?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
This one is worth a few "Funny" points, if not something else for the thought behind the sarcasm.
I doubt it. I read it as a stereotype parody of anyone who is against illegal immigration. See, if you are not for completely open borders, you are automatically a racist, xenophobe, bigot, red-neck...whatever. He refuses to consider that maybe illegals have no rights, no protection under the law (as far as they know), and they are taken advantage of and abused on a regular basis because they are illegal and are afraid to seek their rights. It makes his side a clear winner when he doesn't mention that people who want a secure border aren't against immigration. We just want a name and simple background check. We are not bigots. Hell, for that matter, I feel the immigration quota should be raised to the number of estimated illegals in the country. What is it, 12,000,000. The number of legal immigrants is capped at 250,000. That's a joke! NO wonder there are so many illegals!
Anyway, this machinery is the modern day equivalent of the cotton gin. Only, instead of helping to end the oppression of blacks, it will end the oppression of Hispanics.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
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.
Developing technology is extremely expensive. And while there is no pressure to change, usually driven by shortages in supply (whether labour or raw materials), the status quo is maintained.
It took more than one gas crisis for the American car manufacturers to design fuel efficient engines. Because while gas was cheap, there were no incentives to invest in technology. And while labour was (and still is) cheap, robotics cannot compete. I am sure that the technology for those robots has been available for at least a decade, but it wasn't cost effective in comparison to migrant workers.
But this is the way our society SHOULD have developed. So many manufacturing processes could be automated, if not for the initial investment.
Actually genius the cotton gin prolonged the oppression of blacks.
You see picking cotton just wasn't as profitable as growing other things, until the cotton gin made it more profitable.
Sure it saved some work, but it created much more.
I dont think they come here to pick fruit per se,
they come here because economic conditions are better,
and there are jobs that pay more. So, if the
ag jobs go away, I would not expect immigration
to stop or reverse. It might find a new equilibrium,
and slow a bit.
"Think of it as evolution in action". A reader of
"Oath of Fealty", perhaps?
emt 377 emt 4
I remember when this subject first came up back in the 80's in California. There was a loud protest by the U.C. students against this type of research. So much so, that it was definitely a politically unacceptable subject, and the research seemed to be moved to the back burner.
You see, students were concerned about the impact on the Farm Workers back then, and didn't want to jeoparize their jobs. It might be a little hard to fathom now, but it was a different time back then. The grape boycott by the Farm Workers Union was still a fresh topic, and people were more radical about liberal causes then.
Plus, believe it or not, at least some Farm Workers considered themselves Middle Class. I once saw this statement in a local newspaper, because the Farm Worker being interviewed could actually own a home.
Oh yes, I was one of those students that shared that belief, though I wasn't vocal about it.
Today is a completely different world. The number of illegal workers in this country have pretty much destroyed any hope of being "Middle Class" for the farm workers. And a good number of students from then have had to shift their job asperations (or are thinking about it), due to the unmitigated number of H1-B's that are flooding the market. That's if they actually have a job (and I know many in this age group who either don't, or are underemployed).
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.
We're already dependent on cheap energy for our food supply - it is just that instead of coming in power lines it's currently in tortilla shaped fuel cells.
www.voiceofthehive.com - Beekeeping and Honeybees for those who don't.
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!
"Tree shakers" have been used since the 1960s. A big net in two section is clamped around the tree, a big arm reaches out and grabs the tree trunk, and a vibrator shakes the tree while the fruit falls off. Some early versions damaged trees, but that was fixed. (Linear shaking good, orbital shaking bad.)
Tomato harvesting was partly mechanized back in the 1960s. A tougher tomato plus appropriate machinery did the job. This was controversial at the time. Today, it's established technology. Check out the Pik-Rite 190 Tomato Harvester. 30 tons of tomatoes an hour. And that's the small model. This still doesn't work all that well for the softer varieties of tomatoes intended for sale whole, but Roma and cherry tomatoes are routinely picked by machine now.
Picking machines are getting smarter. The newer ones have cameras, computers, and air jets to sort produce by size and color.
There will be the typical outcry that it's being proposed to either stop Mexicans from migrating, deprive Latinos work and money (vast chunks of central America and Mexico are now completely dependent on migrant labor money that is sent home) And there will of course be comments from what is typical of ignorant people that call themselves liberal (and aren't).
The fact is immigration reform that removes illegal migrants and eliminates even agricultural migrant's will be good for America in every way. The US economy has moved to a very strong dependence on what can only be called slave labor. Illegal migrants are frequently put in job's that pay less than US minimum wage standards and don't meet US minimum safety standards. There can be no argument that the continual immigration of people to the US helps the American economy, even illegal migration helps, the question is does it help more than controlled immigration does. But the fact is, how illegal workers are treated in this country is akin to the sharecrop system of virtual slavery that developed in the south after the civil war. It's also a fact that eliminating the cheap slave labor will force technological solutions that in the end will generate a significant number of high paying tech jobs.
As citizens we have to decide if we believe in the values we enshrine. If the wholesale exploitation of people to keep fruit and veggy prices low fits with our values. Sure, the migrants will tell you that they love living in America and that they do the hard work so their children have a chance that they wouldn't have in their home countries. Again, we have to ask ourselves, wouldn't it be better to allow REAL immigration instead of speaking out about illegal migration while we turn a blind eye to the illegal migration (US policy for the last 20 years).
How many people do you know that have turned in the local small businesses that are employing illegal migrants and in the process pricing out everyone else that is playing by the rules ?(Construction is by far the worst for this)? Illegal migration artificially deflates labor prices, it's the reason the republican's have used to keep the minimum wage from changing and it's also the reason that some jobs have such low labor rates that no one but illegal migrants can afford the job, thereby providing an excuse to right wing policy makers that the migrants are only taking jobs that American's won't. Without illegal migrants in the equation labor rates would be forced by supply and demand to provide a real living wage.
It will never work - those robots are huge, they will never make it across the border undetected.
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Your inclusion of the American Civil War alongside Greek and Roman histories regarding slavery denotes the sad lack of education too many Americans have regarding this issues.
Once and for all the American Cvil War was NOT about slavery. It was about the economic leverage slave owners tried to weld against the indentured servant labor force of the north
And now, for a brief history lesson.
(Disclaimer: I am speaking abstractly of the slave trade and of the historical fact regarding it. While this may seem cold and even racist, by no means should my assessment of the slave trade itself be construed to imply some approval or condoning of the ownership and/or trade in human beings. I am merely trying to relay facts about what was, not what should have been.)
What most people do not realize is that only about 2% of the entire African slave trade reached American shores. The US outlawed the importation of slaves in 1808, over half a century before the Civil War. Thus, what slave trade existed in the US was an internal and self-sustaining one.
Slaves were listed as assets on slave owners books in much the same way as any other asset. In fact, in Georgia, the expected lifetime output of a slave was factored into the Return on Investment (ROI) of his/her purchase, and leveraged accordingly in any bank loan or finance maneuver on the part of the slave owner seeking to expand his operation.
This became more prominent as the 19th century wore on and northern states relied on cheap immigrant labor or an indentured servant to fuel industrialization while the south continued its reliance on the internal slave trade. The fact slaves reproduced at far lower rates than imported indentured servants led to a premium on the slave him/herself. Supply and demand created a workforce shortage for the south and surplus for the north.
This, in turn, lead the politicians of the north to turn the moral issue of slavery into a political one in order to enforce an economic advantage, such as when they did the same against the Mormons in the Utah territories.
What resulted was the retaliation of southern slave owners to protect what they viewed as legitimate assets, leveraged against mortgages they had taken out from northern banks in order to compete with European textile mills, from which the northern states had been importing from more than the southern states.
The American Civil War wasn't about slavery or even states' rights. It was about economics. The northern states had the lion's share of the GDP of the young US and, thus, had a greater attention from the Federal government. Factor in the hot-button moral issue of slavery and the northern states had a sure-fire win from a political standpoint.
The true shame is that all this resulted in actual warfare, with the southern states refusing to budge on the obvious moral bankruptcy of the internal slave-trade and insisting, blindly, that the issue was about states' rights.
I agree with you 100%. The US is a nation of immigrants, and it's insanely hypocritical to keep the immigration caps as low as they are, especially with the costs of domestic labor skyrocketing through the roof.
People of any nationality should be given a legal and reasonable path of immigration to the US, as long as they are willing to work, and attempt to integrate into the society. Considering the poor (by American standards) conditions that most illegals put up with to live and work in the US, it's pretty clear that there are a TON of people who WANT to be part of our society. Denying them that right is nothing short of inhumane. Considering that most illegals are already able to find employment that pays enough for them to subsist, it's not exactly like the US is going to turn into a refugee camp, and, if anything, will help the US economy by preventing the outsourcing of manufacturing and agriculture to other countries. It's also not exactly like the US is overcrowded -- we have more good land down south, and out west than we know what to do with.
The problem is, that, unlike yourself, many many Americans ARE bigots towards Latin Americans (and overwhelmingly so). The current immigration restrictions are more likely than not a result of this sort of person.
My local newspaper's website offers a comments section, much like most blogs offer. Whenever a story about immigration is posted, it is immediately flooded with some of the most potent and passionate bigotry I've ever seen (outside of documentaries on the civil rights movement). The newspaper now disables comments for these stories. It dealt a serious blow to my faith in humanity.
The locale of this newspaper? New Jersey. I would say that it's not unreasonable to peg over 50% of Jersey's population as being direct decendants of Ellis Island immigrants from the 19th and 20th centuries.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
...can't wait to live off the fruits of robotic labor.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
-Tom