Robot Ranchers Monitor Animals On Giant Australian Farms (newscientist.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Sheep and cattle farms in the Australian outback are vast as well as remote. For example, the country's most isolated cattle station, Suplejack Downs in the Northern Territory, extends across 4000 square kilometres and takes 13 hours to reach by car from the nearest major town, Alice Springs. But robots are coming to the rescue. A two-year trial, which starts next month, will train a 'farmbot' to herd livestock, keep an eye on their health, and check they have enough pasture to graze on. Sick and injured animals will be identified using thermal and vision sensors that detect changes in body temperature and walking gait, says Salah Sukkarieh of the University of Sydney, who will carry out the trial on several farms in central New South Wales. The robot, which has not yet been named, is a more sophisticated version of an earlier model, Shrimp, which was designed to herd groups of 20 to 150 dairy cows.

Comments

Q: Do Androids dream of electric sheep?

[SuperKendall]

Answered at last - No, but they do herd them.

I'm just wondering

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Why we need to farm Giant Australians.

It doesn't even seem like a very good idea...

Re:I'm just wondering

[Livius]

We didn't respect regular-sized Australians.

We have only ourselves to blame.

Re:Ranchy McRanchface

[Livius]

Shrimpy McShrimpface, obviously.

I fucking knew it.

[nimbius]

1. Scorched baron earth
2. the seemingly endless absence of humanity
3. Robots everywhere, watching, roaming with cold dead gaze...

Terminator 2 was filmed on a farm in Australia.

Re:I fucking knew it.

[Sir_Eptishous]

1. Scorched baron earth

Is that like duke mars?

FTFY

[Sir_Eptishous]

Sick and injured humans will be identified using thermal and vision sensors that detect changes in body temperature

Do Androids herd sheep?

[Okian Warrior]

Bystander: "Hey android! Do you herd sheep?"

Android: "That's incorrect, it should be "Have you heard sheep.""

Cool now can hack for food and I don't care if I

[Joe_Dragon]

Cool now can hack for food when put out of work and I don't care if I caught as then the state will have to feed me + give me an room + a doctor.

Re:Cool now can hack for food and I don't care if

[bluefoxlucid]

Isn't it terrible? Since 1790, we've unemployed 82% of the workforce. Looking at the history of American agriculture, 90% of the labor force was farmers in 1790; by 1850, evil technical progress developing new farm techniques and diesel hardware dropped that to only 58%. In 1900, just 38% of Americans still had good, wholesome farm jobs; and by 1950 it was a staggeringly-low 12.2%. By 2000, farm workers only made up 1.9% of America's workforce, and today it's even lower.

Is it any wonder we now suffer from unemployment as high as 95% in many areas, with a national unemployment rate of 82% among the labor force? Only 41 million Americans have jobs, and their taxes support 300 million Americans on welfare. Our economy has collapsed due to the constant reduction of the workforce as farm jobs have been eliminated by newer technology, disenfranchising the worker with a long and constant stream of lay-offs.

But hey, at least the few of us with jobs are rich fat cats. Rather than spending 43% of the household money on food as in 1900, we only spent 30% in 1950, and 13% in 2000; today we spend under 11.5% of our income on food, and the rich among us can have things like smart phones and XBox video game consoles. Too bad about 89% of Americans being homeless and jobless and hungry.

YIPIEYEYIYAY!

[Thud457]

Git along lil' doggie.
You have 30 seconds to comply.

Re:YIPIEYEYIYAY!

[Rexdude]

The word is actually spelt 'dogie.'

Robotic Death Adders

[PopeRatzo]

Fuck Australia.

Even their sissy short-pantsed football players are deadly.

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.a...

Re:Robotic Death Adders

[Ann O'Nymous-Coward]

"Sissy"? That's hilarious given the HELMETS and PADDING that swaddle the precious baby American football babies, er, players.

Re:Robotic Death Adders

[PopeRatzo]

Australian football players all dress like the cast of 1970's gay porn.

http://cache3.asset-cache.net/...

Re:Cool now can hack for food and I don't care if

[thegarbz]

Cool now can hack for food when put out of work

You were never going to have this job anyway. It's much tougher than most of what people put up with, and that includes sewer workers and IT helpdesk positions.

Re:Cool now can hack for food and I don't care if

[Jason Levine]

82% unemployment rate? Only 41 million Americans employed? What stats are you looking at? According to the ones I'm looking at, there was an unemployment rate of 5% in April 2016 (Source). Stretching those stats as far back and they'll go, the highest the unemployment rate hit was 10.8% (around 1983). Another page from the same website shows 151 million people employed (Source). The lowest number of employed people since 1950 was still over 57 million.

So just how are you assuming that only 41 million Americans have jobs and 300 million Americans are on welfare? (Note that you can't count children as "unemployed Americans on welfare" since they aren't part of the job force.) Or are you assuming that anyone who isn't working in a farm job must be somehow "unemployed"?

I wish ...

[PPH]

... I knew how to quit you.

Ctrl-Alt-Del.

been done

[slew]

Sick and injured humans will be identified using thermal and vision sensors that detect changes in body temperature

Since the SARS outbreak back in early 2002, they already do this in airports... Why not animals?

Farms with animals?

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

Why would a farm need animals? How barbarian.

The future is computer-controlled, plant-based farming. Grow local, from anywhere.

Re:Cool now can hack for food and I don't care if

[bluefoxlucid]

82% unemployment rate? Only 41 million Americans employed? What stats are you looking at?

GPP was suggesting that replacing some jobs with robots would lead to a world of unemployment as all our jobs go away. I did the math starting at 1790 with all the jobs that went away, instead of looking at the real world. Problem?

whoosh...

[slew]

I think that is the sound you are looking for...

Re:Cool now can hack for food and I don't care if

[bungo]

So, it's either -

  Woosh!

Or I have been trolled.

It's hard to tell these days.

Boring!

[nospam007]

How boring. If at least it would have been drones with cattle-prods...then it would have been news for nerds instead of tools for cowboys.

not farmbot.

[Gravis Zero]

there are already at least two different robots dubbed "farmbot" so in the /. fashion, i dub this robot YARNFB (Yet Another Robot Named FarmBot)

Re: Ranchy McRanchface

[Circlotron]

Dang! Beat me to it. The format *y Mc*face seems obvious. Future generations may wonder what we were thinking though.

How bad is that?!

[dohzer]

They gave it a mouth!!!

You're skipping over

[rsilvergun]

about 75 years of mass unemployment following the industrial revolution. It took decades for technology to catch up and create jobs. In the meantime you had poverty and inequlity of a scale that's hard to imagine. That's sorta the problem. You can't imagine it so you don't believe it'll happen.

So yeah, it's gonna suck when A.I.s and expert systems put another 89% out of work. Your grandkids grandkids will probably be posting the same crap to whatever replaces slashdot in 100 years. In the meantime you and I are in for a rough ride...

Re:You're skipping over

[bluefoxlucid]

I didn't skip that; I selected America's economy and the decline of farm jobs. During the Industrial Revolution, America grew as a manufacture base; England was already a manufacture base and took the hit of high unemployment. I was trying to avoid the discussion on time scales in job economics because it's long and complex.

As you say, there was mass-unemployment after the Industrial Revolution; and that is not a required outcome of technical advancement. The type of technical advancement which caused that *is* the type we're discussing, and it's the most common and constant type; that, logically, suggests there is a complex component. That component is time.

Let's first look at the two types of technical progress. All technical progress is labor-reducing, in that the labor required to produce a product is reduced.

In the Industrial Revolution, you have a sudden surge of technical progress in a short time. This technical progress is in a linear-growth (pre-scarcity) production process and does not provide scarcity uncapping. If you want to make twice as many shirts per unit time, you build twice as many factories, hire twice as many people, and overall expend twice as much labor. Factories and factory labor are not scarce, and don't provide a bottle-neck for other growth. The Industrial Revolution brought the Power Loom, which simply cut back how many labor units we needed to produce a given product; this brought on massive unemployment.

In the Information Revolution, you also have a surge of technical progress. This technical progress provided scarcity uncapping. Information management requires super-linear labor growth: managing 1,000 accounts requires more than 100 times as much work as managing 10, as you have to start cross-referencing your various obligations against each other, thus you get communications channel growth (1 way between 2 people, 3 ways between 3 people, 6 ways between 4 people...). American Express also shows us an example of geometric growth: AmEx was hiring 1 clerk per 10,000 accounts, then 1 per 100, then 1 per 3, before they made their expert system; more customers, more transactions per customer, and more data per transaction to analyze to detect fraud meant the load per transaction and the load per customer were increasing faster than linear. Computers made all of these "it gets more expensive per unit as we supply more units" problems go away, immediately making all kinds of new goods and services available and allowing existing ones to grow suddenly instead of making mass lay-offs.

Both of these happened quickly. The first rapidly destroyed jobs; the second also destroyed jobs *and* created new jobs at a faster rate. We know it's a faster rate because population growth increased during this period, while unemployment went down.

It doesn't take 75 years to recreate jobs lost by technology on that scale; it takes 75 years for a devastated market to recover. That is to say: if you make sure your unemployment rates don't go that high, you can actually advance faster than the 100 years surrounding the Industrial revolution *without* having high unemployment rates.

I often argue for replacing the minimum wage and our public aid system with a Citizen's Dividend, a tax I designed which replaces public aid (except for that covering children and naturalized Americans) with an income derived from 17% of the total taxable income (a flat tax on all taxable income--business and individual). This increases the amount of money each consumer receives (through both lower total taxes and an alternate, non-wage income) while reducing both payroll taxes and the necessary minimum wage (the necessary minimum wage to eliminate homelessness and hunger in America is 0). Among the *many* justifications I've given for such a plan, this strategy reduces the likelihood and impact of an industrial-revolution-style economic collapse.

By reducing payroll taxes, we reduce the amount of dollars an employer pays per dollar employee wage; a

Re:Do you even know why you're not vegan?

[HornWumpus]

You're just a beef industry shill, succeeding in making me hungry.

You don't kill the calf straight away, you put it in a box so it can't exercise at all for a week or three first.

The photos in the article are deceptive

[Harlequin80]

They make cattle ranches look lovely, with beautiful green grass. Australian cattle ranches don't look like that..... at all.

They look like this - http://www.beefcentral.com/wp-...

Robot cowboys

[alleycat0]

Now where have i heard about robot cowboys before? Oh yeah, it was here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...