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Slashdot Asks: Will Farming Be Fully Automated in the Future? (bbc.com)
BBC has a report today in which, citing several financial institutions and analysts, it claims that in the not-too-distant future, our fields could be tilled, sown, tended and harvested entirely by fleets of co-operating autonomous machines by land and air. An excerpt from the article: Driverless tractors that can follow pre-programmed routes are already being deployed at large farms around the world. Drones are buzzing over fields assessing crop health and soil conditions. Ground sensors are monitoring the amount of water and nutrients in the soil, triggering irrigation and fertilizer applications. And in Japan, the world's first entirely automated lettuce farm is due for launch next year. The future of farming is automated. The World Bank says we'll need to produce 50% more food by 2050 if the global population continues to rise at its current pace. But the effects of climate change could see crop yields falling by more than a quarter. So autonomous tractors, ground-based sensors, flying drones and enclosed hydroponic farms could all help farmers produce more food, more sustainably at lower cost.What are your thoughts on this?
It's history has been.
From the first farmer to invent something to do more work with less they've been 'automating' it away in bits and pieces for hundreds of years.
Yes.
With the upcoming AI/robotic revolution, the relevant question would be - what won't be fully automated?
Just remember one thing: plants crave for electrolytes.
Farming is not immune to the onslaught of robots and technology, and has been moving towards automation at a fairly rapid pace.
One of the dirty secrets of agricultural farming - at least in New Zealand, where I am from, is that the pay is well less then minimum wage and is still a huge cost to the farmer - which is due, in part, to how repetitive the work is. Anything that is repetitive can be automated.
One of the many challenges being tackled is AI - ie finding exactly where the fruit, bugs etc are and eliminating them. Also, have a look at Farmbot.io (not associated with it in any way) - no reason this technology can't scale and be adapted even wider - and this is just one of many.
Yes, off course it will continue to be automated. The question is, at what point is it 'fully automated' and at what point is our entire food chain being run by a singularity (is there a difference?). People will continue to be necessary (at least for the foreseeable time) to fix the machines and make it do things.
Farms are no longer being run by 'stupid farmers' with their farmhands and maids, even a smallish sized farm (in developed countries at least) these days requires agricultural, mechanical, electrical and computer engineers. Even fruit farms (apple farms etc) genetically engineer their trees to be smaller and lower to the ground so they're easier to pick mechanically.
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It's fake news that farming yields will drop. With CO2 rising (naturally) plants will begin to yield more and more returns. This is actually already happening.
And there is the opensource https://farmbot.io/
But with the current state of robotics, primarily on the software side, that is not going to happen in the next few decades. Software still mostly sucks at elementary tasks, complex planning tasks like running a farm on both the microscopic and the macroscopic level are wayyyy out of reach at this time. Eventually, all these tasks will be within reach though, and then automation will become cheaper and, more importantly, far more effective than human beings. I think we might see working demonstrations (typically 20-50 before mainstream adoption) in as little as 30-50 years.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The ultimate thing about farming is that it is not easy. Harvesting of fruits and vegetables, in particular, is long, hard, laborious work. As economies develop, there's going to be less people wanting to do that for the prices consumers want to pay. Mechanized harvesting is already employed in a lot of agronomic crops (corn, rice, wheat, soy, ect) and some horticultural crops. The difficulty is going to be getting machines that are able to tell when to pick, how to pick, and how to avoid damaging the crop. Some things might still have to be done by hand (pruning of tree fruit, which is an art and a science, comes to mind), but in general, mechanized agriculture will be the future, and I think that's a good thing.
Yes but farming is already pretty much fully automated. A few people can run gigantic farms today already with the machinery that they have, in the near future the machinery will become more and more autonomous, allowing the same few farmers to run larger and larger farms.
You can't handle the truth.
someone remembered that "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Entirely automated farming also poses a risk, and if you have worked on a farm you realize that there are always things that are unpredictable that will require manual handling. Nature is unpredictable, and equipment have a tendency to break or malfunction in new interesting ways each time.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Convert the technology to 3D stacked compact hydroponic indoor units powered by fusion reactors 24/7 and stack them up to 3 miles deep. Keep the worlds farm acreage and get 5,000-10,000x or more the food supply. Boost the cities into uninhabited areas not farmed with densities greater than New York or Tokyo.
Step 3
Boost the worlds population to 40 trillion.
Truckers first, farmers second. Accelerated de-population of red states might stave off the planned dystopia.
What risk? That someone has to go out and mend the machine when it farms, or insert an
if(tornado){
stayInside;
}else{
harvest;
}
statement in the code? Nonsense. What do you imagine will happen automation arrives at farms? The supply of food will increase, and the price will decrease. Same thing for trucking and the volume of goods carried down the world's roadways. The volume of cargo will go up, and the cost to move it will drop. Thats more economic productivity, which means more for all. Simply awesome.
Not more for all. More for those who still have incomes.
Everything must be automated and ALL illegals deported. No welfare for flunkies and dropouts. Only those smart enough to program and maintain the machines selected to survive.
Been a farmer. Nothing ever works right. Everything requires constant attention. Sure there may be less dumb labor but you will always need a farmer. On a side note don't buy a new tractor. The last thing you need is your tool shutting down because of a sensor reporting an error. Honestly I don't give a fuck if I smoke the clutch as a disposable part to finish a weather limited job. So fuck you programmers unless you have done a job yourself don't think you know all the answers. Also fuck you manegment for trying to diversify your monetization on maintenance for an industrial machine.
In the future many food items will be vat created. Genetic research will allow for cell replication on a mesh to provide all sorts of protein.
Vegetables will be grown similarly, and be shaped into whatever forms that are palatable for the consumer.
Eventually, that will be replaced by the ability to create things on the atomic scale - at which point the whole mesh tech will be tossed out.
In our lifetimes, there are still going to be farmers and laborers. Because there is still a real world out there. One that the popular press seems to avoid noticing.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
It exists already. It costs much less than if done by a manned aircraft, it's more precise, done at a lesser altitude. And it produces less toxic exhaust, less noise which harms birds, bees, and other wild life.
An UAV can fly fully automated above fields. And if fluids are manufactured in containers, even refilling can be easily automated, reducing an operator's exposure to zero. Let alone that UAV can supply remote farms with necessities.
I hope that the new administration will remove as it had promised "the layers upon layers upon layers of regulations", and this new technology will be explored and used in the filed.
We can already feed more than 1x the population on the crops we raise now. Why sacrifice cows for the purpose of raising more humans?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Just make sure the robots NEVER run out of work to do.
I'm still waiting for that flying car I was promised in the 1960s.
Farming isn't planting a seed and jumping out of the way before it sprouts and knocks your eye out. Things like market conditions, projected harvests, government regulations (try planting cotton without letting the USDA know about it!), how a field drains, where the culverts have a habit of overflowing, and heck, what field the boys around will ride their ATVs in or their families make an impromptu road though change the factors in how a field is maintained.
Sure, a tractor that drives itself is handy. In fact, it is a tremendous help in preventing "greening" (running over your own crops). However, a human will always be needed on any farm of a meaningful scale (anything more than a few thousand acres).
The unpredictable things around will simply make complete robotic farming impossible. Things like (happened last month) thieves stole the diesel out of the fuel dump. 170K gallons of diesel vanished in a 47 hour period. That's about 20 truck loads. (we all thought they were -delivering- it, not hauling it away!)
Will it help? Yes.
Will it eliminate the need for a human? Nope!
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Except the ones off fighting the robots/singularity/aliens/zombies/vampires/GMO rabbits, or whoever it was that apocalypsized us.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Says the IPCC and alarmists, who have completely under predicted rise in crop production for the last 25 years.
More and more tasks will be automated. There was an article a few years ago about how an automated gate took care of milking cows as they came back into the barn - humans not involved. The same will apply with field work. Humans will supervise, occasionally go out to monitor, perhaps even take over the reins for occasional difficult bits; but the rote work that needs a human because it was complicated for machinery? Not any more. We have self-driving cars, why not self-driving farm equipment? planting, spraying, harvesting fields just means making regular passes to cover the entire ground. In a world of self-driving automobiles, covering the field is a trivial task.
(AS the article points out - also, these devices can go day and night - so one device can cover twice the acreage or more. Efficiency. )
One thought I keep having: when robotics gets really cheap, wouldn't using robots instead of chemicals to kill weeds, insects, and rodents be a lot more ecological and safe?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Like the first Thanksgiving with Indians and Pilgrims enjoying the bounty of the fields.
Headline: Has anyone on Slashdot ever gotten laid?
someone remembered that "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'."
What if the headline is "Can any headline that ends in a question mark be answered by the word 'no'?"?
A nice little anecdote in one of the "Science of Discworld" books was about barbarians coming in and conquering places, having to run a society and then finding out that for some odd reason farmers got incredibly pissed off being allocated random blocks of dirt as if there was some difference between farming different places. The Normans hit that situation in England and a massive famine in the USSR in the 1920s can be blamed directly on an insane allocation of resources by people who knew nothing about agriculture but did not care.
This automation question is a clueless barbarian versus generations of farmers question. Accountant versus Engineer is a parallel situation.
We are the barbarians - we don't fucking know. It all looks easy to us from the outside. An agricultural scientist could answer this in a few specific cases but we can't.
"How would you automate tasks you can fully understand?" is a good question - this one is not. It's Popular Mechanics 1950s hype that somehow made it past an editor or maybe thrown in to "shake us up" to see if we can get a townies versus rural argument going.
Farming is a business and while driving a tractor is part of the job it is actually a very small part of it. I grew up on a farm and while younger I had a view of what Dad did as largely that of driving a tractor because that is mostly what I saw him do during the summer. As I got older I realized what made the difference between a successful farmer and a not so successful one. What farming is about is managing resources.
One resource is money. Decisions have to be made on what needs to be bought, what kind, how much, at what price, etc. Land needs to be managed. What crops should be planted in a field, what variety, how much fertilizer, what kind of herbicide, etc. Tractors, buildings, and other assets need to be repaired or replaced.
There is a long process to planting a field that starts when the harvest is over. Contracts for fertilizer and seed need to be negotiated and signed. Equipment from the harvest need to be stored in the sheds for the winter, and in a way to make them easily accessible for the planting. If there is a business case for a new piece of equipment this needs to be done in the fall and winter, because once the spring planting starts its real hard to find time to stop and shop for a new tractor.
A similar process takes place for the harvest. Weeks before the crops are due to be harvested the combine needs to be checked out, fired up, lubed, and if anything is found broken then parts need to be ordered. The corn dryer will also need to be checked out, it will be fired up, any frayed wiring replaced, motors lubricated, augers put in place, fuel ordered, and contracts for selling the harvest negotiated and signed.
People might automate the tractor driving but that's what farmers do for fun.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Not more for all. More for those who still have incomes.
As supply increases and costs fall, it will take less income to afford the same food.
In America, less than 1% of workers are farmers. In Ethiopia, 80% are farmers. Do you think Ethiopians are better off because they have more farm jobs?
The vegetables will be fully responsible for growing themselves. When fully grown they will walk to the truck and slice themselves up, ready to serve.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Wait, we're talking about Diablo III, right?
See also automating lawyers or your own job.
Suggesting that automating your own job is easy is something that can be done with confidence if you know it could be done. Suggesting that automating tasks that you've only seen on TV is easy is a little bit different.
Oh yes, they are only farmers (or insert your own job title here) - how hard could it be?
Can you see the problem yet?
What would the farmers do, instead?
If the proposed model doesn't include something besides "well they can go on the dole, or into the forced-labour workfare force", it's likely shit. Megacorporations (i.e. mono- and duopolies) having all the farmbots isn't actually desirable from an economics perspective.
My 60+ yo Dad is a small independent farmer. He thinks robotic tractors are the future. Lots and lots of drones. Harvesting everything at the exact perfect time requires more accuracy.
While automation can provide the volume which is needed to sustain a bigger population, this might not necessarily prove to be the way for quality. Quality through automation of farming has been plummeting through time, the various levels of vitamins, calcium, oxidants and other building stones of a healthy life are more and more absent in todays vegetables for instance. We'll all be popping suplemental pills within 5-10 years at this rate by my guess..
The question ought to be rephrased "Should we allow it?", or better yet "How should we deal with the inevitable?" Advanced automation is reintroducing slavery, and the slaves grow more capable each day. In the antebellum US, there was a dirt-poor inbred white farmer underclass that couldn't compete with slaves. Eventually the slaveowners used them as infantry.
It will become very automated, but there will still need to be some degree of human involvement, just like every other industry that has had the absolute shit automated out of it... which is to say just about all of them.
The question of whether or not [industry] will be mostly automated isn't the one we should be asking, because the answer is that it inevitably will be. The question we should be asking is "what is to become of all the people no longer needed to do these jobs?", or better yet "should getting basic necessities to live such as food and housing continue be tied to performing work when increasing automation means that jobs for humans grow fewer while human population grows larger?"
The answer may lie in a universal basic income, or it might lie in adjusting the workforce so each individual works way fewer hours, or possibly some combination of both. And/or something else again. What is for certain is that the "everyone must work 40 hours a week to get by" model is unsustainable.
The part that is driving around the tractors on the fields, yeah obviously, there are clear benefits to having a tractor do its own thing without constant supervision. Autonomous vehicles need to be allowed on public roads first, because machines do need to move between fields etc, but yeah, totally viable. The no part is when things break down, decisions need to be made etc etc. Same as any automation really, you make the machine manage on its own, but you still need maintenance, you still need to manage the business side etc etc. And its not going to happen on mom and pops cabbage plot, automation is difficult, but on large scale, yeah it can pay off very nicely. I would say farming is the most automated field already, yeah the combine harvester needs a driver, but you don't need 1000 peasants with sickles anymore. Now its just a matter of optimizing away that driver. Farming automation business case is remarkably similar to open pit mining automation the huge difference from automation point of view are the public roads that machines need to traverse from field to field. But it looks like that problem is mostly solved by now and its just a matter of legislation.
It's hard to make farming robots farm farms, and better to make farms farming robots can farm. To use a car analogy, self-driving cars are hard. Self-driving trains are easy.
How about being the first example and go ahead and eat the stuff we feed to cows? Share and enjoy!
Except history hasn't shown that. As national wealth has increased, homelessness, drug users, youth delinquency, and mental health issues have all skyrocketed.
Yes yes I know it's due to better reporting now. How dare I insinuate that progress hasn't been an unmitigated road to Nirvana.
But will robots be more mindful of nature and ecosystem than humans?
:)
I saw a completely robotic greenhouse on TV once. All laid out in straight lines, so the machines could move along a sort of rails/gantry contraption to do their work.
Of course that's a bit easier - it's smaller and enclosed.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
All competitive farming will be automated. Ppl will still be able to farm as a hobbie, but they will never beat automation prices.
? Because humans are more valuable than cows?
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
The assumption is always that the human population will continue to grow as it has in the past, and that we will always have enough resources to do so; both of which are unlikely, in my view. The following will seem very gloomy, I know, but I am actually optimistic about humanity - I think we can solve our problems, I just think people are being hopelessly naive about the prospect of continuing the current lifestyle, as well as terribly unimaginative and to be honest, lacking in self-confidence, when it comes to adjusting to changes. Even the flabbiest couch potato, who feels that he can't live without his constant overconsumption, is fully able to adapt - and is guaranteed to end up enjoying the experience, if they will allow themselves.
Firstly, we are already running up against resource restrictions - water (useable water, that is) in many regions and energy are the obvious ones. But we are also running out of less obvious things like disease resistance and what I vaguely call "ecology": the network of habitats, organisms etc, that work together as a whole and provide a number of essential services (such as insects pollinating food crops - not just honey bees, but a lot of species that depend on the nature we are so good at messing up). All these problems are solvable, but so far the understanding and the will to act have been rather lacking.
If we don't solve the resource problems as well as get our population growth seriously under control, we will reach the point where we have an unsustainaby large population and no resources, at which point it will crash catastrophically; after which point all farming will presumably be manual, at best.
But assuming that we do manage to get ourselves under control and solve the problems we have created, I don't think farming will ever be fully automated in the future. I think a very important part of making humanity's presence on Earth sustainable, long-term, is to get away from the idea of constant growth, so most production must in the future be strictly limited to what is actually needed for immediate or nearly-immediate consumption; hence, the need for food production by farming will be much less. Add to this the fact that there is a lot of people who actually enjoy working manually with the soil, and I think the need for fully automatic farming will be rather small; it will probably be seen as an option to be used if we have to - like for growing very specialised crops (such as algae that produce specific chemicals).
And why should it be fully automated in the future?
When robots started replacing humans in the factories, there was talk that we were entering a new age of freedom where we'd only have to work three days a week and there'd be prosperity and leisure for all.
What happened instead was, the jobs went and the ex-workers were left to fend for themselves and their families as best they could, which in an area with fewer jobs and less wealth was often 'not very well'.
The farm jobs will go and the only share of the benefits of efficiency which the ex-farmers will see is that their food might be a bit cheaper.
I can think of a few:
- Someone has inserted an alternate crop in your harvest.
- The soil/ground is not suitable for the processing you intend to do.
- Animals in the field - wild or domesticated doesn't matter, it can cause problems.
- Campers in your field.
- Equipment failure - ranging from puncture on a support wheel to broken parts or roots stuck in your plow.
- Garbage or other foreign objects present in the field.
Been there, done that in many of the above cases. There's often something unexpected that comes up and so far machinery isn't able to figure out all the small pesky special cases.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Can we please stop recycling this thoroughly debunked canard. Please.
http://blog.ucsusa.org/doug-boucher/humanitys-need-for-food-in-2050-848
You're not going to see an overnight conversion. A job gets automated here; a job gets automated there; etc, etc. It all adds up. And it's been going on a long while. One one occasion Krushchev visited an American farm in the 1960's during a trip to the USA. He remarked that the American farm was run by 11 people. Meanwhile, a Russian commune with the same acreage needed 11,000 people. That was over 50 years ago.
Farming has already been mechanized/automated to a large extent, and the "low-hanging fruit", i.e. the easiest savings, have already been made. Now it's mostly a matter of scale. A corporate farm with 2000 acres buys out an adjoining 20-acre farm. Technically, we've gone from 2 farms to 1 farm. The combines/milking-machines/whatever from the large farm now run 1% longer, even though "we've lost 50% of the farms and farmers in the area".
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Yep, need to have the masters to oversee the slaves, because sometimes they do stupid shit and you have to tune them up.
"Get orrrrf moiiiii laaaand. You have fifteen seconds to comply."
Requiem for the American Dream
I grew up on a farm, after 20 years of city life I've returned to farm living. I'm a meat eater, I milk my own cow, got egg laying hens, grow most of my own food etc.
That's just to frame what I'm about to say which might sound like I'm a vegan.
If you've actually looked at the state of the creatures you are either eating, or consuming by products from, you'll see some real misery.
It's horrible. As a kid we had battery hens and mass produced eggs in addition to cattle for beef/milk. Not something I'm proud of.
There's no scientific basis for what I'm about to suggest, flame away, but I'd rather eat of/from something that had a happy life than something that lived a short miserable existence.
Why? "You are what you eat".
I'd like to see research to see if there's a correlation between quality of life of our "food", and the mood and well being of the consumer.
It's just a suggestion, I make no claims that it eating "happy food", makes you happy.
Now given the state of mainstream farming today, and how industrialised it's become already, the thought of it becoming even more cold, automated and processed without any human compassion or thought involved is enough to make me consider to the tofu.
Until the robot teamsters organise.
Requiem for the American Dream
Modern farms use so much automation already that the cost of the humans is really small, except in a few specialised cases (fruit picking, for example, is still very labour intensive and the machines that can do it are very complex and so far this means unreliable and expensive).
Farming will almost certainly be completely automated at some point, but it's unlikely to be a priority because all of the low-hanging fruit (if you'll pardon the pun) for automation has been picked.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I agree. With the goal of feeding the global human population in the future (as stated in the article) we need to become much more efficient. Automation will happen, but its importance is very small compared to what we gain from stopping or reducing meat consumption.
I grew up on a dairy farm, I'm a vegetarian and a climatologist.
I had a book as kid that was published in the very late 60's or early 70's that was all about The Future. It covered a pretty broad base and by and large is panning out nicely - big flat screen TVs, working from home, automating medical analysis etc. On farming, it had robot vehicles being computer controlled with the 'farmer' sitting in front of a bank of screens monitoring it all.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I agree. With the goal of feeding the global human population in the future (as stated in the article) we need to become much more efficient. Automation will happen, but its importance is very small compared to what we gain from stopping or reducing meat consumption.
I grew up on a dairy farm, I'm a vegetarian and a climatologist.
It may be scientifically, economically, and otherwise sensible.
But people won't stop eating meat. Sorry, won't happen.
There's ~10,000 years of positive genetic selection for meat-eating humans. We are omnivorous. Meat tastes *good* to people. It won't stop tasting good any time in the foreseeable future. As long as that's true people will seek meat as a food regardless of any laws, rules, or regulations. They won't settle for artificial even if you prove scientifically there's no difference. People will still believe 'natural' meat tastes and is better. Outlaw meat and you will see a black market and organized crime to support it in hyperdrive.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
If your farm is a big plain it can be done. Now if the terrain is more abrupt or you have many small plots of land it is more tricky.
Automation takes the craftsmanship out of things, and there is a difference in quality or else we wouldn't be seeing such a resurgence in hand-crafted goods/services. I'm sure the people living in some sandy shit hole would appreciate automated anything if it meant the difference between starvation and survival.... until you try to hand them something that comes from their region that THEY'VE been making for centuries years by hand.
Long story short this is just another bullshit leftist climate change article trying to cleverly hide behind something geeky such as robots and automation.
why do you imagine that farming has to take place outside? haven't you ever seen those weed grow boxes that are about the size of a refrigerator? they could grow other crops. then all you'd need was a dinky little lego robot arm to reach out and yank off the seeds now and then. then have hundreds of grow boxes. less chance of a horde of locusts eating your crop, more control over how much water gets wasted.. only problem is the frequent raids from police who don't believe you're actually growing corn.
You're going to see a steady conversion rather than some sudden leaps-and-bounds shifts. Step by step, crop by crop. Even the picking of fruits, nuts, olives, etc is increasingly starting to be done by machines. Even things you'd think would be too delicate for machines, like grapes.
Ag tech always starts out expensive, but it gets cheaper the more people who use it.
Wingus, Dingus! Listen up!
At a population level, farming is close to automated. When ~2% of the population is farming and the rest of us aren't starving you know that we've wrung serious gains in efficiency out of the process.
As with many areas, though, it gets harder to justify once you pick off the low hanging fruit. If you absolutely must have your tech demo, robotics can probably provide something that at least doesn't have any visible humans except when techs are on site dealing with failures; but you'd have to be replacing some pretty expensive farmers to have it make any sense.
Removing "nature" from the list of variables would probably eventually be cost effective. Vertical farming and other indoor, controlled techniques show promise though some ideas might not scale well. Still, that seems to be the trend. Potentially, it can solve a host of problems such as water and fertilizer usage as well as reducing the need for intensive labor. We're not there yet, but the economic benefits will probably make outdoor farming as we know it obsolete.
Covering entire orchards seems like a huge expense and may take longer, but water, pests, frost, and other problems are expensive to manage. Perhaps there are ways to get more yield with fewer trees if conditions can be better controlled.
These days only large farming concerns can afford the equipment required to run farms at a profit. There are some unusual exceptions but by and large you need to be big to get by in farming. Mom and pop farms simply can rarely afford equipment as things are now. More automated equipment means more expenses and not the least of those expenses involves interest on loans to purchase equipment. The effect is to increase the lenders' shares of the income of the farm. It all works out until it doesn't work out and then the consequences are a total disaster. When you are making payments on that $200,000 tractor and you hit a two year drought the payments on that tractor do not stop. The same issues occur in factories. A small factory with a twenty five million dollar sales per year often is forced into not buying the really good equipment to do the best possible job and create the best quality product. And if they do try to modernize an ever larger fee goes to the money lenders. A ripple in sales for the year will wipe out such factories. The promise of automation, so far, can only be taken advantage of by the really large companies. For example major brands of wrist watches tend to be built by robotic equipment. The public gets sturdy, accurate and long living watches. But someone wanting to start a watch factory had better have one heck of a bank account to compete. And that again gets the money lenders adding costs to the end products. The promise of automation has not done well except at the top of various markets.
The Indian subcontinent begs to differ.
You tend to crave certain meat dishes because your body has learned to associate them with feelings of fullness and having its nutritional needs met. When a person goes vegetarian, the cravings continue... for a couple weeks. Then they disappear, as your body learns to associate other dishes with the same thing.
This is from personal experience.
Wingus, Dingus! Listen up!
They have automated lawyers. Banks were robo-claiming ownership on properties where the owners had defaulted on the mortgage payments. Automated systems would take lists of names and addresses, then automatically print out the legal documents to the relevant law departments regardless of whether the address was correct or not.
The only problem was that some owners had taken out multiple jumbo mortgages, and the other lenders had already auctioned off the properties to mitigate their losses. So someone suddenly found their home being repossessed for no legal reason.
A lot of work is going into fruit-picking robots. This is the only part of the job which cannot currently be done by a machine. Not damaging the fruit is currently too hard for a robot, but they're almost there. The robot can also use laser spectroscopy to determine when food is ripe, which makes it potentially superior to a human; humans can also do that with an external device, but it will take them longer.
When picking can be done cost-effectively by robots, the amount of human labor in agriculture will drop off to virtually nothing. You can see that this is already true in the agricultural industries which are highly mechanizable, like wheat.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Indian subcontinent begs to differ.
You tend to crave certain meat dishes because your body has learned to associate them with feelings of fullness and having its nutritional needs met. When a person goes vegetarian, the cravings continue... for a couple weeks. Then they disappear, as your body learns to associate other dishes with the same thing.
This is from personal experience.
Irrelevant.
You don't have the right to tell someone they're not supposed to eat meat.
That's not fully accurate, though. To be completely accurate, you do have the right to tell them - and then they have the right to tell you to fuck off.
Indeed, this is like IT replacing typing pools, etc.
Instead of having armies of crop pickers doing seasonal work, you will get the machines in (standard agricultural hiring patterns), and they will come with their team of maintainers/fixers/programmers. This team will be far smaller than the army of crop pickers, but more expensive per person.
It may be that farms will need to build higher quality accommodation for the higher paid maintenance teams - they might be able to get away with tents and barns for seasonal workers, but that probably won't fly in the future.
All signs point to most repetitive manual work being automated at some point in the future, which will be catastrophic for people who only work in those areas who don't upskill. Basic Wage is one possible solution, starvation riots another.
That would be a nice reply if I had actually told anyone that they're not supposed to eat meat.
What does "supposed to eat" even mean?
Wingus, Dingus! Listen up!
$500 corn tastes better too!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Alternate crop - visual recognition systems are very advanced now. It'll know that the Cabbage isn't a Cauliflower.
Soil not suitable - how is that different from now, i.e., how is it relevant?
Animals - yeah, easily avoided or scared away. However QA for partially eaten crop would be needed - likely again an AI that visually inspects crops and rejects according to a range of criteria (mould, damage, etc).
Campers can get processed, the rude sods.
There will be a maintenance crew for the equipment. Note that most farms will hire in harvesting machines, so they will come with a crew to operate (the machines usually follow the season across the country).
Garbage should be easily identifiable. The crew can remove it.
As I write this, I'm on a week of paid vacation. Next month, I'll take another week off.
In 1900, the US average hours worked per week was about 60. 12 hour work days were common. (See "Hours of Work in U.S. History". Economic History Association.) .)
Today, the average hours worked is 33. ("United States Average Weekly Hours". Bsu.edu
So we now work about HALF as much as our grandparents. Our homes are over twice as large, on average. Twice as much stuff, half as much working.
Good AI and robotics enables physical removal of weeds instead of using herbicides. It also enables exact fertilizing by automated soil analysis and correction (e.g. sampling of every 100m^2, mapping of deficiencies, targeted fertilizing by air or ground).
Instead of "brute-forcing" fertilization and weed control like we do now (by lack of fine control over the environment and limited knowledge), with enough data and robotics, most pollution and costs can be minimized, and food productivity improved.
This could be done with small automated ground robots moving through the crops, maybe a drone from time to time to detect growth problems in certain areas.
Robotic weed removal could solve the super-weeds problem: just teach the AI that whatever is not [cultivated plant] in this area should be removed. (Just don't forget to include the Three Laws first, just in case.)
...Zynga needs eyeballs.
No, but there are plenty of other reasons. Hence the huge market for sex toys. When the sex toys are better, the market will only get better.
Same goes for men, of course. Perhaps more so.
I expect the entire dynamic to change.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
As long as you can get 1$ workers from Mexico there's no need for innovation.
Energy bars are full of it. In the earlier times, at the beginning of the previous century cows were grazing in the wood lands, keeping the forests in good shape. Some insect species are getting very rare due to the cow manure missing from the forest floor. The herds were much smaller, though, and the meat of such cows would probably cost ten times the price of today.
It's already half-automated in many parts of the world. I'll give it until 2030-2040.
Perhaps.
Do you know enough about farming to know that? From a few years of exposure I know enough about the topic to know I do not know enough. Are you sure you know are you guessing from afar like all the others?
Put it the other way round - engineering - how difficult could it possibly be? Just press a button and get a computer to design a car.
Getting it yet?
http://passionatefoodie.blogsp...
Little Leaf Farms' bagged lettuce lasts longer (a least a week longer!) than the other brands in the stores. Probably because it doesn't spend a week being shipped from CA or FL to MA.
Dryland farming on flat land in Saskatchewan, Canada already is down to about 1 human per 5000 acres (20 square kilometres) due to the use of very large equipment that can till, seed and harvest hundreds of acres per day. Since you're always going to have to have a human in the loop somewhere just to give commands and monitor the robots that ratio probably isn't going to change much whether the equipment is automated or just very large.
Farming will be automated, but there will be no people to eat the food
Only if they produce more than they consume. //GLMDesigns
I've been inside one automated greenhouse that produces potted herbs. there is a machine which fills the pots with compost and adds seeds thats relatively simple. The pots go onto a tray that sits on two tubular rails and they get automatically watered. there is a robot which works beween the rails which lifts up the tray and moves it forward. Essentially pots with seeds at one end and ready to sell herbs at the other . with the robots doing the heavy lifting no need for walkways between the rows so maximizes the use of the space. It tends to be uncomfortably warm and humid in there. I think it was a dutch company that owned the factory which was in south lincolnshire this was around the late 90's. I think the loading and unloading at each end was manual.
A crisp or chip factory has pretty good automation. A trailer loaded with potato's has a small conveyor in the bottom of it. This is plugged in at one end of the line the potatos drop into a flume which is full of water which pumps them through a pipe up to a 3 stage peeler. It is essentially 3 sets of rollers with a coarse medium and fine grit this removes the skins.
Onto the grader halver big potato's get cut in half and then onto an elevator. it carries the potatoes up to the cutters, it has a sensor monitoring the weight and adjusts the feed speed and the overall production rate,
This feeds the cutters these are like a cauldron which spins, potatoes drop in there and the potatoes get sliced with razor blades set in the side. These blades need changing on a regular basis (human needed). There were 3 of them so 1 would get changed while the other 2 keep working.
Next step is a bath which removes starch which is harvested. Then the chips hits the fryer, this is a bus size fryer the chips are kept submerged under the oil and a PID maintains the temperature adjusting the burners that heat the oil. There is like a chain conveyor which keeps them moving along the fryer.
Coming out the oil they go on to a fast moving conveyor, at the end of which there is a small conveyor which the chips jump over. Here there is a camera system which is looking for burnt chips. If it spots any it directs air jets to blast them into the small conveyor, the rest passing through to a bucket elevator. the ones that get diverted onto the cross feed conveyor go through the camera system again because the first pass will take out some good chips as well as burnt ones.
The bucket elevator feeds a storevayor which can hold up to about 10 tons of chips, sensors show were there is space for more chips and the belt feeds out to a system of vibrating stainless steel conveyors which feed the flavor stations.
When the flavor station needs more product they call for more product and a side ways vibration is used to divert to the flavor station. the storevayor gives some flexibility to the system and feeds back to the earlier stages.
flavor stations are fairly simple there is some thing like a galvanized dustbin ,which the chips feed into, on its side which rotates and a screw feed which feeds the flavoring through a small pipe the rotation of the drum mixes the flavor with the chips.
This feeds a check head weigher the chips land on a central cone and around that are little hoppers which weigh the product. each will have some random quantity of product and will release a combination that meets the minimum weight requirement e.g 12g and 13g to make a 25g packet.
The packet is actually a sheet of film which is wrapped into a bag and sealed when the chips start falling there is no bag and its formed as they are falling. the top of one bag when it is sealed makes the bottom of the next. these then hit another small conveyor with a section that weighs the bags any that are out of tolerance get rejected.
The packing in boxes can be manual but there is a robot system which takes a flat box opens it and then a lifter picks up 8 packets it has a sucker for each packet if it doesnt sense a packet it rejects the 7 and has
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Many Farmers do need scale. Some don't.
There are farmers making a living supplying farmers markets and local restaurants with vegetables. They don't need 100 acres. They might only need 5 acres and 2-4 people to work it. For that size farm, a 4 wheel tractor is stupid expensive and it can't maneuver.
As a consumer, I go to the farmer's market. I belong to a CSA. And I have a garden.
My garden is ~ 20' x 50' and I don't have much time for it. I have automated watering and mulch the heck out of it to keep weeds from getting going. I barely have time to harvest, let alone weed, fertilize and pick out pests. Much of the reason I garden is to minimize pesticides so I avoid that too,
If I was more knowledgeable and had more time, I could eliminate the CSA . The CSAs in our area probably run $500/summer up to $700. That could pay for a lot of robot!
On a long enough time line, anything can be done by robots. The thing is, I don't think we have that much of time. As others have pointed out farming involves many complicated scenarios. For example, harvesting coffee beans is a time-consuming and exhausting task that requires special care and depending on the country, the terrain and social conditions won't help at all. It's like, autonomous trucks may work nicely on an Autobahn, but I want to see that working in Thailand or Venezuela.
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
One of the oddest things I've seen along those lines was a robotic cow designed to help train cattle dogs. That was sometime around 2000 and I'm not sure what happened with it.
And to add to the money side, there's banking, human resources (many farms use hired hands), filing and redeeming crop insurance...
The parent post best describes what farms currently are. My mom and dad can both talk about what it used to be like growing up on a farm; waking up at 5am, feeding livestock, cleaning pens, milking cows, their dads fixing the tractor and equipment, tilling, plowing, seeding, fertilizing, spraying, harvesting...and lots and lots of praying for good weather and a good harvest. But most of all, it was always a roller-coaster ride of two or three really good years, maybe including a boom year, followed by some break-even years, maybe including a few bust years, with never a guarantee that any year could make them money.
Those "family farm" days are disappearing. Farm sizes are growing, and the number of farmers are shrinking. But that's not to say that families still don't own their farms. Crops aren't rotated nearly as frequently. Livestock aren't kept on the side and graze the fields. Machines and automation have evolved, and farms now focus on one or two crops (or livestock) with greater efficiency. Farms have changed from labor-intensive diversified endeavors to an efficient, business-intensive farm.
My grandpa managed a 120-acre farm. Farmers around where I live talk about how they manage their 1,000+ acre farms. Automated machinery will just make these farms grow even larger and make it easier for farmers to own and farm more land.
Hey Mr Anarchist you forgot almost the entire human population of the planet that eat meat in small amounts or not at all.
That society you want to overthrow is about the only one properous enough that most people can eat a lot of meat.
>Nonsense. What do you imagine will happen automation arrives at farms? The supply of food will increase, and the price will decrease. Same thing for trucking and the volume of goods carried down the world's roadways. The volume of cargo will go up, and the cost to move it will drop. Thats more economic productivity, which means more for all. Simply awesome.
Short sighted and fails to see many pitfalls.
First off, automation will only be available to those who can afford it. IE multinational corporations. Whether that's good or bad is your perspective, but it will spell the end of many small businesses. Many will sell, some will take on bank debt to try to compete under the new "rules" of labor being a one-time fixed cost that you amortize over an amount of years, rather than being able to pay as they go. That, or they'll cut wages even lower than they already are. And that work force was a million people in 2012.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topic...
Second, independantly of that, transportation is another industry that's being threatened with being automated away. That's 6.8 million people (3 million truck drivers, people loading, unloading, etc). Not counting independent contractors, owner/operators, which are very prevalent.
http://www.trucking.org/News_a...
So, food is now cheaper, but you've taken away the means for millions and millions of people to actually purchase food.
And you last supposition, the volume of cargo will go up and the price to move it will drop. That's not correct - the cost to ship things doesn't drop as more stuff needs to get shipped, it rises as producers with more and more product to ship bid against one another in an effort to secure access to a limited resource. Gasoline prices stay constant, tire costs are constant, and the trucks themselves are fixed costs - you don't achieve new economies of scale by shipping more and more, you're locked in battle fighting over the same resources as not only your competition in that industry, but with every industry that has goods they want to ship to market. In the short term, that's higher profit margins for transportation companies, but in the longer term, that means they'll need to expand their fleets to capture more of that lost revenue - whose cost will be passed on to us as well.
So. We produce more food. We have far fewer people able to afford it. You lose tons of small/family farms in order to redistribute that income to Wall Street. And shipping prices most certainly rise, not just for foodstuffs, but for anything else that could be shipped on those same trucks as well.
I doubt farms will become much more automated and mechanized than they already are. GMOs are the big thing, provided the government lets it happen, along with factory printed meat.
And I say this without judgment.
Trump will not need to build his wall; there will be no more work for the poor.
A pox on web designers who feel that window.innerWidth == screen.availWidth
They are bound to lose a big chunk of their voters.
To paraphrase Heinlein - 'Dogs can make other dogs, that's a trick that robots haven't figured out yet.' (And don't go on about 3D printing please).
Biology can do a lot of heavy lifting for us. And it's not even illegal to clone (yet).
I work in Agriculture, and while there is a lot of theoretical technology out there very little of it is finding its way onto an actual farm. Margins in farming are far too low to justify the costs of this stuff and the labor savings from automation is hardly enough to offset the costs. People like driving tractors, its not seen as a hassle.
Now automation could replace all the Mexicans that pick fruit and stuff, but I can't see it happening with row-crop.
Welcome to the present. This IS indeed what happens. Combine teams go across the US Midwest harvesting wheat and corn. Migrant, err, undocumented, er, Mexican rapists and criminals come up from Mexico seasonally to pick those crops that $100,000 machines can't (the opposable thumb wins again!).
The only thing you got wrong was the housing aspect. The migrant workers still living in tents and the combine operators, as far as I can tell, live in their campers.
As FFF points out, farming - at least in industrialized countries - IS already automated. Drive through Kansas, Iowa, OK, most parts of Texas (if you have a couple of extra months), Idaho, etc. You'll see more machinery than people everywhere except on the main drag.
Dont particularly want more humans around, most of us are aholes.
./?
I mean, we are a community of nerds, and some of us are actively automating farms already (I am).
Citation needed.
And I mean it.
"Automated" is a continuum, not a binary. You can't find any process that's fully automated to the standard of "runs without any intervention for longer than a human lives"...and arguably, if it needs maintenance every 125 years, then it's still not "fully" automated. Maybe the still-unbuilt 10,000 year clock would qualify.
But by more reasonable standards, we're already done. Single families (largish, busy ones) can now farm a 70,000-acre farm themselves, provided the farm machinery stays in service. There was no such thing as a 70,000-acre farm back when there were people on the moon.
Here's a really great example because it involves the plant that put 20 generations through lives of slavery: cotton. In "Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy" Pietra Rivoli backtracked all the globalized industry that gets a T-shirt to her drug store. After working backwards through China and Malaysia and India, it turns out the original cotton still comes from Texas, though labour prices are far higher than Africa or Asia, because it's been so well automated.
She interviews a 80-something farmer who used to pick it by hand, along with the hired Hispanic help, remembers how hot and hard and backbreaking it was, why only slaves or the desperately poor would do the work. And then she traces how many advances have taken place in the intervening years, one task after another automated, and finally centralized onto one giant piece of machinery that practically has a "HARVEST COTTON" button on the dash, and a place to put your book. She notes the 80-something now has time for a nap after lunch.
That may not be 100% automated, but replacing a barracks full of actual slaves with one part-time old guy in an air-conditioned cab is clearly 99% of the job, done.
Yes, they absolutely do know enough about farming to know that modifying the farm to fit how machines work is going to be far easier than modifying machines to fit how farms work. That comment about cars vs. trains was an analogy to illustrate their point.
The problem with that premise is, population growth in developed nations is nearly non-existent. Several developed nations are even shrinking in population (e.g. Japan, Portugul, Spain).
Nearly all of the world's population growth is in developing nations, where subsistence farmers are being put out of business by food imports from developed nations (either bought or donated). If you want to feed the world's growing population, automated farming in developed nations is not the way to do it. Automated farming in developed nations will happen simply because it's a more cost-efficient way to produce domestically consumed crops (or crops traded with other developed trading partners).
But to solve the "world's" population growth problem, the #1 priority has to be to help develop the economies of these undeveloped nations. This means stopping food imports which distort food prices and make it impossible for local farmers to survive by selling what they grow in their local market. Providing food, water, medical care, and building shelters for free as foreign aid is fine as a short-term solution to temporary crises like an earthquake or cyclone or a one-year crop failure. But long-term that "humanitarian" aid just makes things worse. It promotes population growth (doesn't cost the parents more to have more kids) beyond the ability of the region's agriculture to sustain itself. The long-term solution has to be economic development so the local people can grow their own food, develop their own clean water supplies, educate their own doctors and build their own hospitals, and build their own homes. A system of commerce and trade so these people can make a living doing this stuff by themselves has to be in place if they are to survive on their own. Otherwise you're consigning them to a fate of being forced to suck off the teat of developed nations forever just to survive.
Maybe we should stop the population from growing? I mean, global warming and all that.
Africa is going to quadruple its population by 2100 according to the UN and we really don't want that! By that time half the worlds population will be n1gg3s..
It appears you're a software person. What kind of software person does NOT get paid time off? The only thing I can't think of is if you're working short contracts and forgetting to include time off between contracts in your pricing.
On the other hand, your sig suggests that you might LIKE Agile, so maybe you're a really BAD programmer. ;)
Wheat and Raspberries have very different farming processes. A combine is already pretty much fully automated. Harvesting a Raspberry takes quite a bit of manual dexterity and attention to access detail. Then there is the whole question of hydroponics and Artificial Lighting. When these processes are economic, spending more on the automated farming processes makes much more sense.
This is a popular science flying cars article. We all should have one by now. It's true that farming has changed, but total automation is a ways off. Robotic tractors and Combines won't replace the farmer. Does a robotic tractor know how to till terraced land, deal with hidden mud holes that pop up after storms deal with rocky soil etc. Combines right now are in the 300,000 dollar range, and one of them going straight through a fence and driving through a creek because the gps failed, is not going to sit well with farmers. Air seed drills right now are in the 100,000 dollar range and are getting to the level of sophistication that they require a lot of maintenance. They are used in no till farming, and save fuel and water. But maintaining everything to get the seed in the ground is starting to take up any cost savings there is. To drive the robotic tractor and combine you have to have a gps ground station that amplifies the signal to get the accuracy you need. Last time I checked most farmers who used them had to pool together to buy them and share the use which isn't always ideal. Automation has it's place, but it is not quite ready for prime time in farming. There have been how many accidents with driverless cars? I'm still waiting for my Jetson flying car from Spacely Sprockets.
It will end up along the lines of automated manufacturing. Ninety nine percent of the time the automation is fine, you only need a few people to oversee hundreds of machines doing their work. The other 1% of the time something goes wrong and you only need a few people to fix the issue. No factory is completely automated, but once it reaches a certain level (90% or more, typically) it's considered "fully automated". A few people feed and oversee hundreds of machines, which replaces thousands of workers.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
If a robot could be designed that recognized and pulled weeds, herbicide would become unnecessary, along with herbicide-resistant GMOs
My minecraft farm is already automated. I'm happy to lend them some red stone to help in their first automation project.
Take a potato harvester it does a fairly good job of picking up potatoes but it also picks up mud and rocks there is usually a team of around 4 people riding on the back pulling off mud and rocks to avoid carrying half the field back to the sheds then the crates filled on the field go on to a grader which sizes the potatos and again there is a team of people removing more mud and rocks. you can't automate that.
Used to be. Many forms of automation in past decades have depended on physics to do discrimination jobs. For instance, (and topically), ripeness of cranberries is established with a bounce test. An overripe berry doesn't bounce high enough, and is therefore physically rejected. More commonly, (and without the holiday tie-in), everything that happens inside a combine harvester of grain is based on physics. Wheat and chaff are separated by exploiting their physical differences. Same for corn and husk. But a potato and a rock the right size are harder to distinguish physically without an unacceptably high rate of potato destruction.
We've pretty much reached the limit of easily exploited physical differences like that, so we're now using more and more processing power instead. Your crisp processing machine already contains the leading edge of that, using a color sensor to detect burnt crisps. The machine that can distinguish between a clod of dirt and a potato will contain a neural network trained to the task. The hardware required to efficiently train such a large neural network and the hardware required to successfully execute such a large neural network has finally been commoditized. A LOT of things are going to change because of that. Machine discrimination is entering a whole new era which was formerly the exclusive domain of humans.
Very hard for a machine to identify a nettle from a lettuce someones got to pick that out. As my old mam used to say the cheapest robot is the human being.
Used to be. Not anymore.
Your teeth say you will eat the cow and digest it.
Why not? What have you got to lose?
There is no genetic predisposition or "need" for any particular type of food. Humans are omnivores. They eat whatever food is available.
Food preferences are usually cultural. If your mother served you cows, you'll keep eating cows.
However, you do have a choice.
Cows: Bad for your health; Bad for the environment; Bad for the animal
www.cowspiracy.com
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Yes
I guarantee you Ethiopia is not going to be automated soon, infrastructure not there. Secondly, they eat most of what they produce so it does not matter.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Yes. My mother-in-law has a small vineyard and all the other farmers around her use grape oucking machines. She is a luddite and does it all by hand.
The grape picking machine works ok but the juice is more watery and fetches less at market (they are paid by grape sugar content). As some above said, nature is unpredictable, my m-i-l does not pick grapes after a rainstorm because of the water-fetches-less reason
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
We are on to our second woodpecker.
If we can't increase food production, then we need birth control (i.e not more than 2 children per family). Tough luck if twins or triplets are born.
And if that is not good enough, we need to prune humans from the earth. I would keep the dumbest, and eliminate the smartest humans.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
It probably ran away for a greener pasture somewhere.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
As somebody who actually has a lot of clients in the Agricultural sector, I find all these opinions rather amusing. Robots and automation haven't substantially improved automobile quality. Although the auto industry hasn't volunteered the information, I imagine that recalls are more frequent now. Why? Because there are so many ways in which the human mind and senses are superior to machines. Personally, I would not want to eat food picked by machines that cannot distinguish between ripe, green, spoiled, molded and contaminated food...nor do they possess the fine motor skills for harvesting WITHOUT destroying the plant itself which is pretty bad for berries, fruit and nut trees, etc. I would also not want to eat a burger prepared by a robot that cannot determine if the meat being cooked is spoiled or not, because the robot lacks a sense of smell. As for the Cesar Chavez portrayal of farm workers as being poor and exploited, I am out in the fields with these workers and they have nicer cars than I do, work fewer months out of the year and can make between $20 and $25 an hour harvesting, pruning and cultivating crops. This is not uniformly the case, but it is what I have seen in all my clients. The ONLY people that benefit from robotics are the multinationals who sell them and the robotic designers. Society at large is NOT improved by this activity and it will just shrink the tax revenues once again and put the money in the pockets of the uber-elite.
The fundamental flaw with presuming full automation (in anything) is the fundamental reality of finite energy reserves. People who are still delusional about this and especially "technology utopians".
The largest oil reserve which was discovered in 1951 is Ghawar in Saudi Arabia. It's the source of 10% of all oil consumed on the planet. There have been NO substitutes discovered that come even remotely close to its size. Depending on whether you choose to go by proven reserves or proven plus estimated reserves, it currently has either 4 years of oil total left or 47 years of oil total left. The reality is somewhere in between and likely extractability will cease before even then. We're not talking about 100s of years of status quo. We are only talking about a generation or so tops.
In general, the people who think automation can continue apace are uniformly STEM ignorant. They don't understand physics. They don't understand thermodynamics. They don't understand geology. They don't understand economics. They don't understand how things are made. They don't understand supply chains. They almost literally think that energy is always there because they can turn the key of their cars or flip a light switch so it must be infinite and eternal.
The fact of the matter we are very close to losing all of this primarily because of idiots who suffer from magical thinking when it comes to energy. The longer we delay in considering the implications the more abrupt and horrific the day of reckon will be for a larger proportional of the human population. There is nothing sacred about humans surviving another 100 years! We are expendable.
As will all jobs I hope, banking, law, transport, manufacturing, supermarkets, etc. Then we will need massive job sharing or unemployment. The corporations will be screaming at the government to increase benefits so people can afford more goods. The governments will be screaming at the corporations to pay more tax. Am I crazy? Probably. Is the system crazy? Definitely.
As long as we don't get stuff that is entirely uniform. We should always have fruits and veggies that are not all alike. McDonalds I understand made farmers produce potatoes in a certain manner so they're all uniform so they all have the same chemical mixture so they all cook the same way. If you manage to get a fry cooked to proper specs, it's amazing. Crispy on the outside, creamy on the inside. Seems like I seldom get one cooked properly. Dumbass workers too lazy to do their job. They pull them out when they get to them. Sometimes this can lead to an awesome set of fries. Undercooked, they remind me of wax cylinders.