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MIT and the Constant Robotic Gardeners
Singularity Hub writes "MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is pioneering the field of automated farming. During a semester-long experiment, CSAIL's researchers created a laboratory farm: tomato plants in terra cotta pots with artificial turf for grass. The goal of the experiment: to see if these tomatoes could be grown, tended, and harvested by robot caretakers."
The caption under the image reads, "CSAIL's precision agriculture robots give us a peek into the future where organic life may be tended by artificial life."
I wonder if they meant the plants . . . or us.
-Peter
You know, most people who go to the garden supply store and claim to be growing "tomatoes" are actually growing a completely different kind of consumable. Could this lead to fully automated pot farms?
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Having robots raising our food is probably a great idea, since it presents less oppurtunity for contamination. Contaminations is a big problem now, there is always some food recall because of bacteria in food or something similar. Not all of these are directly caused by humans, but I would say that a good part of them are. Having robots to do part of the work presents less oppurtunity for contamination.
This might work in the lab, but when robots are working alongside seasonal farm laborers, those poor robots are going to break down real fast, get run over by heavy farm machinery, and just plain disappear under mysterious circumstances.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Not to be alarmist, especially since this technology is very far down the road from being widely used, but what happens if this begins to replace manual labor jobs as has been predicted for decades? I'm sure Asimov has a leg up on me but here goes:
Without education infrastructure in place to train current generations, low cost robots will compete with unskilled laborers for work. While this could be 30-50 years down the road, what happens when the poor huddled masses can no longer do manual jobs? Will their quality of living be raised up since it will be cheap to produce things, or will those who own the means of production horde it for themselves and leave everyone who can't afford their price to starve?
Also, this would certainly make energy needs (and potentially metals/commodities) even more accute. If the robots can't function, then no one (or many fewer people) can eat.
I'm all for automation, but if we don't back up our technology with the understanding that we need to provide other opportunities to people, then we may be doing humanity a disservice. From a very cold point of view, though, perhaps we would just be thinning out the population, which already seems to be far larger than necessary (i don't really advocate this point of view, but I know there are those out there who do).
I'm sure this has all come up before (ie not terribly insightful), just throwing it out there for discussion.
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Might be slightly off-topic, but cannot help pointing out.... "The use of computers in offices is creating unemployment problems."
Not really off-topic at all. It's a valid concern that large-scale automation of labor can displace part of the workforce. For example, automation in the office contributed to massive layoffs in the 1980s.
Historically, the economy has adjusted well to automation. In some cases, the expansion of other industries and creation of new ones has taken care of the problem. In many parts of the world, people have gained increased leisure to squeeze the workforce into fewer slots.
The philosopher and novelist Robert Wilson considered giving people a direct economic interest in automation. Others propose purely communistic solutions. A few, like Yadav there, want to just halt the clock and hope for the best.
My opinions aren't fully formed, although I unquestionably favor automation of labor wherever possible. Given the historical context of automation, I don't think we need to panic just yet, but our societies should be considering the ramifications.
These messenger boys (don't know about typists) were probably there because they come from a poor family and didn't have the means of proper education. However, they could learn much on the job by interacting with and observing the professionals. Some of the brightest who are willing to learn on their own could actually gain a successful career one day because of the experience they gathered doing these low-skill service positions. I'm sure you can find many autobiographies of successful people who began their lives similarly.
Nowadays they are replaced by automation. That means the poor and uneducated lose a valuable opportunity to become successful. Their only chance now is to go through a proper education, and our education system still favors in many ways families living comfortable lives.
I once had a signature.
Kudos for MIT for working on this problem.
But "pioneering" it? Give me a break. Agricultural robotics ("agrobots") has been a going field for decades. The devices are very capable and some are quite inexpensive - to the point that there is at least one organic farm I know about that doesn't use or need the price breaks from exploiting foreign and/or illegal workers to run at a solid profit, despite pressure from the local authorities to hire illegals.
Look at The Mitchell Farm just for starters. (NOT the one I characterized above, by the way.) There are others using various levels of automation in Oregon, California, etc. And those are just places I KNOW about.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way