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Man Finally Makes the Weed-Removing Robot
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to the Ludington Daily News, Michigan, Danish agricultural engineers have built a robot to help farmers with weeds. The Hortibot is about 3-foot-by-3-foot, is self-propelled, and uses global positioning system (GPS). It can recognize 25 different kinds of weeds and eliminate them by using its weed-removing attachments. It's also very environmentally friendly because it can reduce herbicide usage by 75 percent. But so far, it's only a prototype and the Danish engineers need to find a manufacturer for distribution."
I for one, welcome our weed killing friends... As long as we remain friends.
I am going to hunt this thing down and destroy every last ounce of it's evil metal body...
Right after I get up off the couch
I'm just curious as to how it works. Anyone have pictures?
They say it identifies 25 types of weeds but at what accuracy? I would think accuracy is more important than total number of detectable weeds. If it misidentified your crop as weed you might lose a lot. Imagine coming home one day and it has pulled out or burned your entire crop and it just sits there with a grin.
This is Monsanto...
weed GROWING robot, or even the weed SMOKING robot..
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
We want more weed, not less. Oh, wait..
(Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
Why has it taken so long for man to make one? Woman worked out how to do it long ago!
When will they learn that the war on drugs is a lost cause?
And I'll short circuit you Johnny Five !
By "weed-removing attachments" they better mean lasers, or I'm going to be mighty disappointed.
Ya'll are missing it... This robot is like the bomb-removing robots the bomb squad uses. It's a measured, thought out response to events like this, so in the future law enforcement won't become "dying" when gathering evidence from a drug crime scene.
...is self-propelled, and uses global positioning system (GPS).www.purevolume.com/martyd
Well we are one step closer to having robot overlords, we are now equipping autonomous robots with flame throwers!
god gave us weed to injest, not to destroy. down with whitey!
How about it? That would make life much easier.
I grabbed my weed removing attachments and am ready to party.
[/doing the Bender]
I've sent a flash to Art Bell, I think we're being invaded by space aliens! I took video of some strange lights nearby, other people in my neighborhood saw them as well. They definitely sounded like I imagined the first attacks from extra-terrestrial beings to be!
Note: This looked like a boring story, so I figured something could spruce it up. You can't have a robot article without a multi-dimensional conspiracy!
they seem to be funding all types of zany ideas nowadays. the laser thing is especially attractive.
If you're interested in facts I'll tell you what they are and I'll give you sources - Chomsky on The Big Idea
"Man Finally Makes the Weed-Removing Robot"
In other news, Bush announces a major victory in the war on drugs.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
you're not kidding anyone, you dont believe in your God. you do deplorable things in the name of your God and see no problem with it. you lie and hate on a daily basis and see nothing wrong with it. you have no problem trying to poke holes in scientific theories when it suits you yet have no qualms about believing some people living in a cave that the Earth is 6,000 years old by tracing david's line back to adam and eve even though your holy book warns you about doing such things. you hate people because of what they believe yet in your book Jesus had pity for even the adulteresses and those who later killed him. you disgust me.
HortiBot - A Plant Nursing Robot
Doesn't look like they've gone too far yet, but interesting nevertheless.
I think i know how you feel.
www.purevolume.com/martyd
What would be even cooler, would be a weed growing robot. And if they come up with this, I think a fitting name would be Bender.
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
"DIE, human WEEDS!!!"
better to have a robot burning all the weed otherwise you might end up like that: high reporter
It's a good thing that humanity is a virus, not a weed.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
I, for one, welcome our flame-spitting and laser-shooting overlord. Just imagine a beowulf cluster of these Linux-running robots, what kind of profitable business plan can you come up with? Or, if you are just a gamer type, imagine a lan party, priceless.
The only thing missing now is a console so that we can issue the command "sudo make me a sandwich".
"The labor problem will bring this in, when the government gets done with their immigration laws," Jim Schwass said.
I would appear that the farmers expect to have severe labor problems if the federal government succeeds in preventing hundreds of thousands of Mexicans from entering the US without documentation. Farmers depend on lots of low-cost seasonal labor to get their harvest picked. Not so much for grains, but for fruits, berries, and vegetables.
Presently, as I understand the situation, thousands of migrant laborers follow the harvest and provide the long, hard bend-pick-stoop labor needed to get the produce off the ground and onto inspection belts and shipping boxes. Most (I believe, and I may be wrong) of these migrant labors are Mexicans and Central Americans living in the USA without immigration papers. This situation has been like this for about 100 years, since the mechanization of farm planting equipment led to much larger harvests. Using low-cost labor has been the only way to harvest the food. And low-cost has come to mean illegal immigrants. These people have been ruthlessly exploited and little had been done to improve their situation until Cesar Chavez energized the United Farm Workers union in the late 1960's. However the massive overpopulation of Mexico has led to the need for Mexico to send millions of their people to the USA. Stoop labor during harvest season has been the main source of employment for these people, so the cycle of exploitation begins anew.
The introduction of high-technology into a field dominated by serf labor clearly upsets the standard order of things. The robotic technology has always been too expensive and the serf labor too cheap for the any high-tech developments in food harvesting. But if the cost of labor goes up (due to effective immigration law enforcement, a really big if ) at the same time that technological costs go down, then this will lead to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers.
Maybe, and not all at once. For the robots cost a lot of money. A migrant worker can pick a lot of food for the cost of the robot at $70,000. And immigration laws are never seriously enforced after a certain period of 'clamping down on illegals', a period which we are going through now. There simply is no other option to getting the food picked. This situation isn't going to change. Expect all the high-technology in farm work to take place in Europe where they don't have the masses of undocumented and untrackable migrant farm workers to pick the food.
In reality, there is a real need for harvest robots. But it is not in harvesting food; it is in harvesting land mines. No one is going to just walk out into a mine field and just pick up the bombs by hand (regardless of how many little plastic 'keys to heaven' the mullahs give them). And do it day in, day out, for very little money. Even if for some insane reason they actually wanted to, they would eventually all get blown up. This is true robot work. The harvest robot manufacturers should get some NGO to finance all their R&D in return for donating thousands of robot units to clear the vast minefields. Unfortunately, there is no one like Princess Diana around anymore to champion this cause. Shit, maybe we could get Paris Hilton to rally the cause. Good luck!
Agriculture could benefit from the use of robots. It's good to see developments in this area, especially considering that global crop output could be affected by climate change and we may need to more drastically upgrade our agricultural efficiency in the future. However, I think more research should be taken in the applications of nanotechnology and molecular machinery on agriculture. While a robot is good, a swarm of nanorobots or molecular machines would be much better and with greater efficiency, taking care of our crops at the molecular level.
pick the stems and seeds out of a bag, and roll a nice fatty at the push of a button...
"Take me to your weeder!"
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I'm going to get shit for this but:
So the Danes finally managed to clone "Mexicans"?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
http://www.hortibot.dk/index.html
does that make the farmer a Luddite ?
"Farmers depend on lots of low-cost seasonal labor to get their harvest picked."
Even though I am not Mexican, and a US citizen, I was one of those low-cost seasonal laborers when in my teens. Cucumbers were my specialty. Believe me, that work sucks; Backbreaking, hot, miserable, endless, and not much to show for it at the end of the day. And I had a home to go back to, and dinner waiting for me when I got there, so I had it better than the current crop of immigrants. It's about time the ag-bots went into production. I want to see lots of the little things in John Deere green, or Case red, or Kubota orange. I don't care which.
Here in Washington State, the Mexicans don't even want to do farm work anymore; they can get better jobs doing other things like construction. So the low-end of the agricultural labor force is starting to go away on its own. We'll need these ag-bots sooner rather than later.
And if Monsanto tries to sabotage this, I really hope John Deere hitches their biggest and best to Monsanto's pretty research lab and pulls it to pieces. That said, I doubt Monsanto would get in the way of this, as herbicides for broadleaf plants are too non-selective. You can't kill the Canadian thistles without also killing the strawberries. You can kill the grass and leave the strawberries (Thank you Select!) But the thistles, and pigweeds, and dandelions all can hide untouched in the strawberry patch.
Random memory, a movie with Tom Selleck, runaway robots in a cornfield, and some sort of evil assassin spider robot. I hope they put a good kill switch on these 'bots. (If no wi-fi, then shutdown all motors, start distress beep?)
The weeds are finally winning the battle and I hate weeding my garden. I really want one of these.
The Haughtibot who is fluent "in over six million forms of communication."
SLM
main() {1;}
if this thing works they are going to be "rich beyond the dreams of avarice". I know I'd like a few of them guys like yesterday. I was actually thinking before of something a little simpler and more hardwired, just a fence patrolling bot, lay a guidewire down or mount it on the fence itself, have it crawl maybe 6 inches away and spray or burn or mow, your choice. but *this* thing, man, ability to ID different weeds?? Laser zapping?? Just too cool....
I am sure ESP was available before 1997. I was certainly using it before then. Wikipedia says the technology "surfaced around 1992-93," which sounds about right to me.
In Soviet Russia, weeds kill YOU!
You are reading a sig. Cancel or allow?
migrant labors ... living in the USA without immigration papers
What a long-winded way of saying "illegal immigrants" (yes I see you used it later in the post).
Get rid of minimum wage, and give unemployed Americans the jobs until the robots are ready.
Look at his user history, glance at a few of his other posts, then decide if this is someone being serious or a troll trying to get people mad at Christians.
I love my sig.
When I wake up, my head looks like someone forgot to cut the lawn for the last two weeks. Should I be worried about having crazy robots trying to rip out my hair now?
Ok, I'm just wondering if the developers of this thing smoked too much. With 1,000 acres of grain crops, and a weed population of 200 - 400 plants / acre, how long will it take this thing to weed the field? How does it NOT trample the field? Sure, it costs $70,000, and a sprayer costs $150,000 (which isn't all that true, sprayers are around $30,000 - $70,000) however, that one sprayer can do those 1,000 acres in less than a day. How many 70K robots will it take to do the same work? This "automatation" in agriculture is all jim-dandy, but show me something that makes sense please :)
"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price.
This robot could be even more environmentally friendly if it were made from bamboo. Or even better, from some composite made from the weeds it pulls. If it could make extra weed pulling capacity out of the weeds it pulls, that would be perfect.
Just as long as we can stop it from "evolving" or adding humans, or our food plants, to its list of "weeds".
--
make install -not war
No pictures of at least a draft design?
I'd love to see what it looks like, especially if it's 3' by 3'.
Surely we can teach these things to recognize other things! Slow drivers! Stupid people! Luddites! Conservatives!
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
You may think goats eat anything, but they are actually particularly choosy. Depending on what your weed problem is, they will actually eat the weeds preferentially and keep them under control. They find things like blackberry, etc especially tasty. Very important to keep them out of your garden though, because they also like roses and other flowers.
Of course if your problem is bracken, bring on the Robot. Nothing eats that stuff.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
... what I really want is a robot to scoop dog poop in my yard.
"Hi, everyone, my name is Paris Hilton, rich bitch extraordinaire, and I'll be picking up these little KAFUCKINGBOOM!!!"
So...which is worse, the migrants being 'exploited', or being displaced by robots so that they can't be exploited any more?
So you're arguing that we shouldn't use robots because other people will be out of a job?
Hate to break it to you, but it's been happening for 100+ years and there has been no disaster yet. It's called progress, you're living in the wrong age if you don't like advancement.
As someone else already pointed this out, this guy's just your garden variety troll. Here's the link, and I quote, 'go feed yourself to a lion, christfag.' You were dead on about the fool part, but something tells me this guy's not much of a Christian.
It was mainly conservatives who killed Bush's so-called amnesty bill. Nationalism vs. cheap labor, so hard to choose...
Until they decide the most prolific species of weed is man.
Sarah Connor?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I just had a vision of ED-209 busting a hydroponic marijuana operation.
We use goats: http://www.canada.com/vancouverisland/star/story.h tml?id=5f6a9175-79c7-4925-b35a-ac673c1ada5f
IT'S A TRAP!
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
Hello, I posted my long-winded comment after twenty or so joke comments that had nothing to do with the actual subject.
I don't think that robots are going to harvest because at the present it is still too expensive to do so. Migrant labor is still much cheaper.
If the robots suddenly became very cheap, and that is always a possibility, then putting tens of thousands of migrant workers out of jobs would have consequences. One is that many of them would stave, and two is that many would turn to crime to get money. They are not going to become middle-class.
I don't know the ratio of illegal to legal migrant workers (harvest food pickers). I do know that a significant number of them are Anglo-American and have been doing migrant food picking for generations. The Grapes of Wraft descendants.
It's a touchy subject. Because an introduction of high-tech such as robots into serf labor occupations means someone is going to lose and lose big. And these are people that have little or nothing to lose. When you take things from the very poor, like their livelihoods, they can be expected to react violently.
To introduce changes that can be reasonably expected to induce starvation and violence among the people at the bottom of the economic ladder is not progress, or advancement. Some thought should be given to alternatives before simply just doing it. That was my point. It's a subject that can fill many books. It should be handled with care in a little Slashdot message.
Thanks for the reply. I also did farm labor for several summers, picking shade tobacco in Western Massachusetts. I also picked up the spoiled crop of orange overripe cucumbers. You're right, it sucks. It's hard to put that in delicate language in a public forum as diverse as Slashdot since you never know who your audience will be and you don't have a lot of space to convince people that you're not a bigot( or if you are, you're not a stupid bigot).
I have to agree, technology is the way out of lose:lose situations. I think that is why we are all so into it, almost to point of being an alternative religion.
In Soviet Russia the weeds robot you.
Yet again /. is incoherent:
Title: Man Finally Makes the Weed-Removing Robot
Text: engineers have built a robot to help farmers with weeds
Help or remove?
Atheism is a non-prophet organisation
All 'funny' responses here, and then some cannabis jokes. Legalize cannabis and grow up. Then such childish jokes aren't funny anymore...
It seems nobody addresses the questionable assumption that weeds are somehow 'bad'. Nature lives in harmony without us humans quite well (arguably we rather disrupt the harmony), and there is a reason weeds grow near crops. Hint: the reason is not to be exterminated by man-made robots. Weeds actually often replenish the soil! For those interested, I can name several examples (by Latin name; I don't know English ones) which do this. Some weeds which contain flowers, such as Taraxacum officinale, are besides that good for our bee population. Many weeds also have medicinal properties. In other words: weeds are not 'bad' or 'evil'; they're herbs which are often medicinal. But besides that, they also replenish the soil.
Herbicides do the exact opposite to the soil! Given our soils are in quite bad conditions, we need less herbicides (this thing does that), not necesarily less weeds (this thing exterminates them). Organic farming, IF applied correct, is better for the soil than robots like this. The robots too, lie on a faulty assumption, just like shit like round-up.
Besides all that, the definition of 'weed' is ignorant as it is too much from a human viewpoint; not from a nature viewpoint. Once humanity is able to put itself in nature's shoe (perhaps after a few cataclysms?) this may improve, I presume.
WE DON'T NEED NO BLOG CONTROL.
Maybe we can have a new tall tale for our times.
John Henry versus the steam engine, except John Henry becomes a migrant farm worker and the steam engine becomes this weeding robot contraption. Actually, I think someone is working on a robot that can pick crrops that traditionally needed the human touch, so maybe that would be better.
I'm up too late. Not making sense.
Personally I hate how people want our plants to fight with weeds...
Anyone ever hear of no-till farming? Although it sacrifices a lot of land per amount of production, the quality of the produce is much higher than can be expected. The fruit and roots compete with the weeds and even bugs...you have to weed periodically in the beginning, but once your plants adapt to your soil its just a matter of collecting your produce. The insects will most likely (assuming they are native) go for the weeds enough so that pesticides aren't needed (assuming too that you know how to cook) and the food you get is also tastier.
Also, on a side-note, each person can produce enough food for 10 people. Theoretically its a possible method, but not given the state of the world as it is today, as it is not "efficient" for modern consumerism. But its sustainable.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
Won't somebody think of the stoners?
for Moore's Law to hold a true course for some time to come. Extrapolate, will you, to the day a machine can be used to remove problem points from your body. The results range from a cure for cancer to much longer lifespans.
I suppose we should also pray that is not a day people will feel free to neglect themselves.
I wonder how agriculture might change if a machine can really push a crop through (or in other fields, get whatever job done), like the next generation of iPhone.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Weed-killing robots are not out of ordinary in agricultural research. Even in my institution http://www.ivia.es/, a robot that killed weeds by means of a 20.000V discharge was built some years ago.
My photography
especially in the EU and the US, where we have huge subsidies for farmers to buy herbicides to grow more stuff.
Maybe they will buy the robot to destroy it just like the oil producers buy every car running on water to destroy it.
Pulling Weeds is just the tip of the iceberg...
Just suppose Robots and AI based computers could do ALL our WORK ?
NOW, more ROBOTS means more FREEDOM for HUMANs !! as long as we take it ALL the way and restructure the economy into what you will come to know as TEAM INFINITY's WAGELESS ROBOTIC ECONOMY.
http://TeamInfinity.com/TRANSFORMER_WAGELESS
Robotics & Artificial Intelligence together can ELIMINATE ALL HUMAN JOBS, and MONEY in one fell swoop, there will no longer be a connection between consumption and production, HUMANS will be EMANCIPATED from the MACHINERY of ECONOMY ONCE and FOR ALL, and we believe only ROBOTICS and AI can accomplish this. Be see below.
TEAM INFINITY is planning to team with SIMULEX's technology to prototype and fine tune TEAM INFINITY's WAGELESS ROBOTIC ECONOMY.
http://TeamInfinity.com/TRANSFORMER_WAGELESS The Age of Recreation via the Emancipation of Humanity from the Machinery of Economy via the ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY
http://teaminfinity.com/transformer_robo_economy
The Age of Recreation via the Emancipation of Humanity from the Machinery of Economy via the ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY
Believe it ! Expect it ! Demand it ! from your Leaders TODAY !
Just suppose, "saving" jobs that are not fit for humans, is NOT HUMANE, just STUPID
Just Suppose, and, Ask yourself the following questions:
MAGNA CARTA 5.0© The Age of Recreation via the Emancipation of Humanity from the Machinery of Economy via ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY http://TeamInfinity.com/TRANSFORMER_WAGELESS
The Future is already here, just unevenly distributed... THE ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY NOW! http://RoboEco.com/slash
Mwhuhu huhuh... he said weed =)
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (A. Einstein)
The new hortibot looks suspiciously similar to a remote controlled lawnmoder that tragically killed a danish gardener 2 months ago. Do we really want to add autonomous control to that machine?r -kills-danish-man-begins-resistance/
http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/31/robot-lawnmowe
http://www.hortibot.dk/index.html
Not meant to completely reject, that in the short-term at least, there can be problems caused by mechanisation, but there's a great quote from That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen (Frederic Bastiat, 1850) on this subject.
This sig all sigs devours
The official website is: http://www.hortibot.dk/
1 7094942622 Btw. I am the guy with not so much hair :-) If you search using "Hortibot" and "Feederant" on google video, you will find a lot more fun videos.
A video from a presentation in Wageningen, Holland: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-81546812
A little tech info: The Hortibot and Feederant field robotic vehicles are controlled by a Field Robotics Embedded Computer based on a PC/104 PC running Debian Linux from a CF-Card. Sensors and actuators are handled by small embedded computers designed using Atmel AVR microcontrollers. Communication is based on the CAN bus. Technicians entry to the Hortibot is handled using Wifi and SSH. The Hortibot software (written in c) will be published under GNU license on the official homepage as soon as I can find the time to look into it.
Kjeld
Now all we need is a Bush removing robot. That'd do the world some good.
See also: Cotton gin
Apparently we're all past our problems with Piquepaille?
Everytime he posted, everybody was saying to "Boycott Piquepaille"- mostly due to linking via his blog usually..
Have we all just forgotten or has something else gone on? I never really cared- but I'm just curious what happened?
It works badly/not at all. Any horticulturalist will tell you that weeds are just flowers no one likes. Try teaching that distinction to today's robots.
http://kernow.curtin.edu.au/www/Agrirobot1/frutro
This is coming much faster than most expect. Which (to stand up on a political soapbox) there really is no need for a permanent underclass of immigrant laborers to supposedly do jobs locals are unwilling to take. Because machines will take over those jobs very soon anyway.
Don't we have hippies for that?
Basilisk Digital
And drives around in a 15-year-old Toyota with no muffler.
Notice first that this is being developed in Germany, not the US. The idea of using computerization on farms is nothing new in Europe.
When I toured Europe I stayed with a family who ran a chicken farm. The father had developed a way to harvest the eggs and feed the chickens all on his own using computerization and robotics. He says his biggest labor expense is going in and cleaning out the dead chickens about once a week. Purdue gave him an award for developing this system, and it's being used all across Europe.
His attempts to market this to farmers in the United States, however, were thwarted by the low cost of labor. He told me "Why would someone spend $150,000 on a system like mine when they can just hire some Mexicans?" It was hard to argue with that logic.
So this will be huge for European farmers who, because of the lack of cheap labor and the strict laws regulating pay and hours, require labor saving devices such as this robot. A $70,000 robot that's capable of weeding a whole field on its own would be amazingly useful to European farmers, especially since it would put them one more step closer to certifying their crops as organic, thus allowing them to charge more for their produce.
Not only that, it would allow European and American farmers to compete against farmers in the third world without subsidies, meaning a better standard of living for all involved.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
have they been testing this thing in UK crop fields? It makes mighty elaborate geometric shapes. And to think people blamed "aliens."
is what grandkids are for. At least, that's what my grandparents told us.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Oh no, my weed!
(Don't worry, the link is a google cache of lyrics to a song. The link is safe for work, home, men, women, children, small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri, etc.)
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
Or do it the German way. You want social wellfare money? Be prepared to do slave labour!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
All we need are these things running wild on us.
BTW Where's Gene Simmons? Anyone seen him lately?
Your are the opposite of lucid. You have no right to use "LuSiDe". Half of your... typing... is incoherent and the other half is not in proper sentences. I have no idea what the fuck you said.
What if it were programmed to recognize marijuana plants? According to an NPR story I heard this week, Columbia is shifting to manual uprooting to destroy drug crops, because spraying the revolutionaries' crops from the air is fairly ineffective and problematic both politically and health-wise. This is very dangerous work. Dozens of workers have already been killed, mostly by booby traps set by militants. Robots would probably be more expensive, but at least if they get blown up, no one has lost a family member.
If the use of these things become the norm, it'll be only a matter of time before natural selection kicks in, and all weeds in fields will be those that the robot either can't recognize or discriminate from the "good" plants.
It could happen fast, too. If some common weed varies enough so that the robot can recognize and kill about 99% of its brethren but the 1% variant survives and reproduces, very quickly you'll have fields full of the hard-to-recognize variant.
Of course, refinement of the recognition algorithms might outpace the adaptation of the weeds, but I'm not willing to place a bet against Darwin.
You know it used to be that only skilled trades people could be put out of work by robots. Now, thanks to modern technology, even unskilled immigrant labourers can be put on the streets! Yay robots! (Read in the voice of Stephen Colbert).
----------------------------
Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
Would crops grown with the aid of a robot weeder (even if it wasn't armed with nasty chemicals) be automatically ineligible for organic status, just because a machine had been used in the course of tending them?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
It's really quite simple. You just give the plant a nice tug. If it comes out easily, it's a weed. So, give everything in the field a tug and map which ones come out easily. Then re-plant the entire field, but plant the weeds inverted. The new weeds will cancel out the old ones but the new crops will add constructively. Badda bing, no more weeds, and twice the crop to boot!
See kids, there's nothing a little frequency analysis can't solve.
Hilarious how an article posting praising the progress of civilization makes use of an archaic and insulting term like "man" instead of "humankind" in this context.
Brilliant idiocy, people.
What, exactly, does this have to do with weed-removal devices, or robots, or anything remotely resembling the topic?
People must build this robot, and repair it. It will also need power. So, the existence of the robot creates jobs. Those jobs require payment, all of which ultimately figures into the total cost of ownership of the robot.
Is this total cost of ownership greater than or less than the cost of doing the same work without a robot?
If it is greater, then the robot is not economically viable. No one will buy it. If it is lesser, then effectively the robot has eliminated more human labor than it has created (not in terms of head count necessarily, but in terms of how much money winds up flowing in to the hands of laborers).
If we continue automating labor like this, eventually a small handful of people will be able to maintain an army of worker-robots, and there just won't be enough jobs to go around. How will the population respond?
I know it is an age-old axiom of economics that something always needs doing...however...our technological advances (which did not exist when these principles of economics were established) can reduce the amount of stuff that needs doing to be less than the amount of people there are to do it. So what happens then? Do the jobless ones just turn to crime? Or do our capitalist policies slowly become more and more socialist?
Serious questions: Do we want to address overpopulation in Mexico? What's causing it, and is this a problem anywhere else? Should we stop it? If so/not, why?
http://www.google.com/products?q=wood+burning+stov e&hl=en&um=1&sa=X&oi=froogle&ct=title
Cesar Chavez was against illegal immigration. Look it up. It led to exploitation and lowered wages.
At Iowa State University, one of the professors in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department is working on robotic combines. The project is still in the early stages, and probably won't affect most of the jobs that migrant workers are used for, but is still an interesting development. Details can be found here.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
But can we get it to moderate slashdot?
I haven't RTFA, but if you have a homogenous crop, wouldn't it make more sense to have the robot just recognize say, wheat, and remove anything that's Not Wheat?
Even if you have a mixed crop, it still seems more practical to make the robot recognize the few plants that should be growing than the dozens that shouldn't.
That's a fundamental problem with our economic system there. Every time someone invents a labor saving device, it puts someone out of a job. We're not producing any less, so those people COULD be fed, but they're not. Instead, they have to go work at something else. So labor saving devices don't actually save any labor. How backwards is that?
What's the point then? Shouldn't labor saving devices actually increase the amount of leisure time we have?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
now there's a direct threat to "guest workers"-- being replaced by weed-pulling robots!
Some how, all I can think about this story is this Penny Arcade comic from a few years ago.
The real Fruit Farker Prime will probably be made in Mexico, sneak in illegally, scare small animals, and have a tendency to trap itself under the lawn furnature.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
When the evil Magnoilatron and the Dandelicons invades your backyard, it is up to Optimus Primula to Roundup the badguys.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
oh... those kinda weeds :p
No one in the USA will deploy this due to costs, not as long as Mexico is in the state it's in.
Not sure how many folks remember the 1984 movie Runaway with Tom Seleck, but the first robot going crazy that Officer Jack Ramsay had to deal with was an agrobot that worked in crop fields killing bugs.
So how long before the personal heat seeking bullets are perfected?
Or Dicks ;)
Or maybe we looked at him oddly because we were already highly automated?
My cousin put her three daughters through college (back in the day) by buying an acre of land down the road from her home in Mississippi, and putting up a VERY long building - workroom in the middle, with a football field long chicken coop on either side. The egg company trucks arrived a few days after it was inspected and approved, and FILLED those coops with chickens. I have a photo somewhere looking from the workroom into the door of one of the coops - solid wall of chickens over a slat floor (for obvious reasons), with roosts up high over a mechanical conveyor belt.
Early each morning, she and the girls would walk to the workroom and turn on each conveyor belt in turn (her husband was already at his day job by then). Then they'd load the eggs into boxes, separating the double-yokes, of course. I had the opportunity to do this with them once, for "fun". The eggs came fast and furious when they worked, because they didn't waste time on the scales - they could "size" the eggs by looking. I wasn't that bright. After a couple of hours they were done with loading eggs, so they'd refill the automatic food hoppers and head home for breakfast.
Every couple of days her husband would "walk the coops" after work to remove sick or dead chickens. She tried it once, but when she tried to wring the neck of a sick chicken, the head came off in her hands and she emerged in tears. After that, her husband had THAT job to himself.
Once the chickens were well past their egg laying prime, the trucks returned and carried them away for slaughter. Then came the profit - the slats were removed from the floors, and front-loaders filled dump trucks FULL of (ahem) fertilizer, pure aromatic gold. Once that was carted off and the money banked, the coops were pressure washed and allowed to air out for a few weeks while the family recovered. Then came more chicken trucks...
All this automation, and not an illegal immigrant in sight. In fact, ALL of the farms around where I grew up were highly automated, with (at most) one hired hand to help oversee the machines - and that was many hairs ago. Maybe vineyards in California have had more challenges automating (grapes are quite outside my experience) and need flame-throwing robots, but the soybeans, cotton and animal farms in Mississippi have been highly automated with straight mechanical devices since I was a child.
The girls have long since graduated college and moved on with their lives, but the coop still stands as a monument to automation and the value of well-seasoned chicken droppings.
Which country? Which years ? What does "thanks for playing" mean ?
Just suppose old style COMMUNISM was simply CAPITALISM "PERFECTED" ? Think of it this way, under old style communism private property was outlawed for everyone EXCEPT those running the show of course, their PRIVATE OWNERSHIP included NOT only PLANT and EQUIPMENT, BUT ALL THE PEOPLE TOO!!! Talk about arrogance. Thats right, under old style communism the few running the show actually owned EVERYTHING, including all the people !!! Now that is CAPITALISM on STEROIDS.
Now please keep in mind that this is NOT what we are talking about under TEAM INFINITY's MAGNA CARTA 5.0's ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY , and also remember that old style communism USED PEOPLE to DO ALL THE WORK, and WORK THEY DID, MILLIONS WERE WORKED TO DEATH.
Under TEAM INFINITY's MAGNA CARTA 5.0's ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY , the WHOLE IDEA is that PEOPLE DO NOT WORK, ROBOTS and COMPUTERS DO.
Are you aware that the USA actually created communism in Russia as a Social Experiment by the Rockefellers and Kuhn Loeb Bank of New York, that the US, via these banks and high level collusion on the part of President Wilson and others, supplied the GOLD to launch the Bolshevik revolution, that this gold traveled from New York through Canada, was intercepted by Canadian Authories, that President Wilson personally allowed the gold to proceed to Europe via Germany on train to be disbursed to the rebels on the ground to overthrow and kick off the Bolshevik Revolution ? Did you know that Trotsky, the Bolshevik leader, was actually from the lower east side of new york city ?
Did you know that American Industrialist, Financier, so called "Capitalist" Armand Hammer, son of American Communist Party Found, Dr. Julius Hammer, during the so called "COLD WAR", regularly flew directly into Stalin's "Man of Steel" Russia into a mansion set up for Hammer by Stalin. This all with the full knowledge of high officials in the US Government during what was supposedly a full scale "COLD WAR". Hammer's visits were to prop up the failing US EXPERIMENT known to 99.999999% of the world as Russian Communism. Armand Hammer was named Armand because of the Arm and Hammer is a Communist symbol. More on Hammer here: http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a391d17f80f34.ht m
Did you know that former US Senator Al Gore, and Gore's Father, were proteges of the Hammer's, and Al Gore's daughter, Kareena Gore actually married Andrew Schiff, the great great grandson of Jacob Schiff, one of the bankers of Kuhn Loeb, who with the Rockefellers supplied the Gold which kicked off the Bolshevik revolution, and that all banks in Russia were sacked EXCEPT Rockefeller banks... Did you know that Hammer's father Julius was actually a trusted Lenin associate, and the only American to receive the ORDER of LENIN ? The Gore's wealth is directly linked to the Hammers.
Point being that WE, THE USA, actually created Communism in Russia, that the entire COLD WAR was a FARCE at least among those who knew the big picture, that the American Democratic and Republican Parties were actually different wings of Communist parties, one trotskyite, the other stalinst. Yes, American UN Ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick and others have even said as much, and Reagan's parents were actually members of the Communist party. Yes truth really is stranger than fiction sometimes...
Now please keep in mind that this is NOT what we are talking about under TEAM INFINITY's MAGNA CARTA 5.0's ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY , and also remember that old style communism USED PEOPLE to DO ALL THE WORK, and WORK THEY DID, MILLIONS WERE WORKED TO DEATH.
Under
The Future is already here, just unevenly distributed... THE ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY NOW! http://RoboEco.com/slash
Well ... for those outside academia, we'll let you in on a secret. The working language in Science, Engineering, Economics, and Mathematics around the world is ... [drumroll please] ... English.
You will find no Science, Engineering etc. faculty of repute anywhere around the world where you cannot walk in the door and have a meaningful technical conversation, in English, with just about anyone who is tenured or on a tenure track. It's something the French e.g. don't like, calling it 'cultural imperialism'. Hehe.
And did you have a look at their publications? Did you notice how and where these researchers *publish* their work? Just look at this link and http://www.hortibot.dk/Publications.htm and look at the publications.
Seven out of eight publications are *in English*. And two out of eight are mere weblisting; of the remaining six 'real' publications, two are in American conference proceedings (the ASABE: American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers}. Apparently the good old US of A still counts for something in the field of engineering.
Just fine, thank you. In many aspects, it was actually better than the rampant capitalism we now have.
Yugoslavia, while it still existed.
It means that you have accused me of having capitalism deeply ingrained in my psyche, while the opposite could be said to be much more true. So you have lost.
As for the rest of the crap you've put in your post, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. You combine the worst features of conspiracy theoreticians, religious fanatics and multi-level marketers, and you use random capitalization to boot. And all that has nothing to do with what we're talking about.
You've disproved nothing I've stated so far with at least some fairly coherent argumentation; therefore, I repeat: TFP. YHL. HAND.
Ignore this signature. By order.