> There is so much of a disconnect between this crowd and the farmers and the people this robot will actually replace. I look at it this way: these machines al

> There is so much of a disconnect between this crowd and the farmers and the people this robot will actually replace. I look at it this way: these machines allow farms to replace workers from one, evidently shrinking pool of semi-skilled labor (farmhands who can and are willing to climb a coconut tree) with workers from a different pool (people who can be trained to operate a remote-controlled robot) that's growing. This article and the comments here make it seem like coconut harvesters are mostly freelance farmhands, so I could imagine a scenario where you end up with, you know, Uber for coconut harvesting. There's no reason the farms need to really care about the costs associated with owning the machine, when other people can take on that responsibility and compete with one another to offer farmers the lowest cost per coconut.