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World's First Robotic Farm To Produce 11 Million Heads of Lettuce Per Year (inhabitat.com)
MikeChino writes: Japanese company SPREAD is preparing to open the world's first robot-controlled farm. The facility is designed to produce 11 million heads of lettuce each year, and it's expected to ship its first crop in Fall 2017. The new 47,300 square feet Vegetable Factory in Kansai Science City will also reduce construction costs by 25 percent and energy demand by 30 percent.
"It will put people out of work" is never a good reason to reject adoption of a new technology. The fundamental purpose of such tech is to eliminate human labor. It is supposed to put people out of work, and that is exactly why we pay for it!
The proper response is to adapt our culture and laws to work well in an economic environment that relies on such tech. If we are afraid that a bunch of poor people will be unable to survive (because of this tech), then we should address that problem through better use of our tech (to meet their needs), and/or better laws and cultural practices.
If you are unwilling to do this, you might consider joining a nice Amish community, as they always have plenty of work to do! Alternatively, you could try your hand at rejecting all tech and living as a nomad out in a forest, but I am willing to bet you will get pretty fed up with that lifestyle right away.
And we'll keep moving, and keep getting more efficient - that's called "technology".
The only thing we really might "run out of" is fossil fuels (it's not like we're going to run out of aluminum or something), and we can always fall back on solar and nuclear. Solar has quite a high ceiling on total available power, it's just currently not the cheapest way (and of course you need something at night). Sometime in the next few hundred years fusion will stop being "just 20 years away" and actually happen, and fossil fuels will be a moot point.
It's also only a matter of time before heavy industry moves to asteroids - I used to think that wouldn't be this century, but it's mostly a robotics challenge and that field is moving so amazingly fast these days that I think I might live to see the beginnings of the shift. Long term, we don't need to be "self-sufficient" as we'd describe it today, and "next few hundred years" is a long time in terms of technological progress.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Maybe not. >90% of jobs today didn't exist a hundred years ago. I have great faith in humanity finding stupid ways to busy itself for money. Once we figure out how to cleanly make cheap power and robots are taking care of necessities we can all live like kings and do stupid stuff for cash. If things keep progressing faster our culture won't be recognizable in another hundred years. We simply can't imagine what people will be like or do with their time.
It is truly astonishing to think that there are people alive who remember a time before radio, electricity, computers, antibiotics, etc.
People worried about the cotton gin and so forth, but nobody can argue that conditions were better back then for anybody.
Man, you really need that seminar!