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Please show me a berry picking robot that pays for itself in 10 years. They don't exist and probably won't exist for another 25 years at that price point. Nor
by KirinDave 7y ago
Please show me a berry picking robot that pays for itself in 10 years.
They don't exist and probably won't exist for another 25 years at that price point. Nor is it clear they'd be faster than a group of humans doing the same work.
What's more, it's just not clear to me why we'd do this. The only demand for this is by mega-farm-corps that want to eliminate all human factors to completely own the idea of making food under robotic patents. While I can appreciate such actors exist, it' not clear to me how it will be competitive with human sustenance farming in our lifespan. The low-hanging fruit of automation in the farm space has already been found. The new frontier there is in informatics and new configurations of farms (e.g., China's extremely efficient and inexpensive greenhouses, Japan's prototype vertical industrial farms). Most farming innovation now is about informatics, and only intersects with robotics tangentially.
If society was such that people who were displaced by this process were not suddenly thrown into destitution and often slavery instead of leisure and plenty, maybe we'd see wider demand. Maybe. But that's not the case. Displacing workers is seen as a net good by capitalists and the displaced are also blamed and shunned by their governments and societies. As such, it's pretty unlikely the technology could see widespread adoption without more alignment of incentives.