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.

Comments

environmental impact

[Nick]

Great for water and energy conservation, and this technology can be moved into places that are difficult to grow produce. But if this really catches on, wonder what this will do to the industry as a whole, and the people put out of work.

Re:environmental impact

[bluefoxlucid]

Hunter-gatherer man used to spend 15-20 hours per week per person to collect food. Now 2% of our population are farmers; the rest are busy building information super highways and rocket ships.

I should start over with this paper. I instead started blogging, as I wanted to study more classical and modern economic theory so as to directly assault the field. One of the biggest problems I'm having is dividing the information: I've got a general theory of economic behavior, covering the growth of wealth, the cycle of (un)employment, scarcity, and population growth and restriction; and then I have things like inflation, supply-and-demand theory (mine explains why high-demand goods are cheaper, while low-demand goods are more expensive--this is what subjective theory of value tried to handwave away), and extension theories all the way out to taxes.

The description of how reduction of labor per good creates a cycle of unemployment and re-employment leading to the production of more goods per person (and thus a higher general standard of living) is *not* in the same class as an explanation of how taxes on labor affect unemployment. My biggest criticism about modern economics is its pathological focus on store prices and stock markets; the base theories I produce may lead to arguments about store prices and unemployment, but they're not about value. I've rejected value as a valid economic concept.

Re:environmental impact

[lgw]

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.

Re: I welcome our new robotic overlords' produce

[Anonymous Coward]

Lettuce wait and see if this pans out.

Red stone is amazing

[Barlo_Mung_42]

People can do all kinds of cool stuff with it.

Re:Excellent!

[LunaticTippy]

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.