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I can't quite decide which will be the tipping point for robots replacing humans: Agriculture, food service, or garments. The first seems ripe (no pun intended)

I can't quite decide which will be the tipping point for robots replacing humans: Agriculture, food service, or garments. The first seems ripe (no pun intended) for disruption but apparently often requires human skill to identify products. The second seems more likely, as fast food is mostly automated with some human intervention; coupled with self-checkout technology in any language, and it might work. Garments, however, I'm not sure that's the industry. Certainly replacing 17 workers with a single robot (costs aside) seems like a good start, but this also seems like an industry that could uproot and go somewhere else. From America, to China, to Southeast Asia, Africa, and beyond, to wherever human capital can be had for less.

michaelbuckbee 9y ago
I recently came across this video of a color sensing tomato sorting machine. https://youtu.be/j4RWJTs0QCk https://youtu.be/j4RWJTs0QCk Really shifted my mental ranking of where agricultural processing was at.
- Danihan 9y ago
  Why? Seems pretty basic and simplistic. I'm more impressed by the various types of field harvesters
- deedub 9y ago
  About 20 years ago (Holy shit!) I worked in a potato processing facility. They had multiple belts all about 8' wide that ran through a machine that scanned 100s / 1000's of dehydrated potato flakes for quality every second and could hit a specific flake with a burst of air to blow it off one line and into another. 20 yrs ago. I believe they went under / were bought up by a more modern company 5 or so yrs ago.
bmcusick 9y ago
All three over the next 10 years. Agriculture: Computer vision is improving really fast. The technology that Amazon is developing for picking products at its warehouses will also allow them to pick apples. Food Service: The real killer app here is that special-purpose automated kitchens (like the ones that produce only fresh hamburgers) will combine with drone and self-driving car delivery to make meal deliver 1/4 the price of restaurants today. Garments: The technology in this article means that production in the EU/USA will cost about the same as Indonesia or Kenya, and the EU/USA labor pool will have more of the high-skill technicians you need to service the robots. Combined with shorter supply chains and faster time to market and you'll see garment manufacturing becoming "local but automated" in most markets. Depending on the supply of "sewbot technicians" the USA might even start exporting clothing to Latin America or wherever.

michaelbuckbee 9y ago

I recently came across this video of a color sensing tomato sorting machine. https://youtu.be/j4RWJTs0QCk https://youtu.be/j4RWJTs0QCk Really shifted my mental ranking of where agricultural processing was at.

Danihan 9y ago
Why? Seems pretty basic and simplistic. I'm more impressed by the various types of field harvesters
deedub 9y ago
About 20 years ago (Holy shit!) I worked in a potato processing facility. They had multiple belts all about 8' wide that ran through a machine that scanned 100s / 1000's of dehydrated potato flakes for quality every second and could hit a specific flake with a burst of air to blow it off one line and into another. 20 yrs ago. I believe they went under / were bought up by a more modern company 5 or so yrs ago.

bmcusick 9y ago

All three over the next 10 years. Agriculture: Computer vision is improving really fast. The technology that Amazon is developing for picking products at its warehouses will also allow them to pick apples. Food Service: The real killer app here is that special-purpose automated kitchens (like the ones that produce only fresh hamburgers) will combine with drone and self-driving car delivery to make meal deliver 1/4 the price of restaurants today. Garments: The technology in this article means that production in the EU/USA will cost about the same as Indonesia or Kenya, and the EU/USA labor pool will have more of the high-skill technicians you need to service the robots. Combined with shorter supply chains and faster time to market and you'll see garment manufacturing becoming "local but automated" in most markets. Depending on the supply of "sewbot technicians" the USA might even start exporting clothing to Latin America or wherever.