4 ms·

> I understand the desire of academics to help agriculture, but they really need to check in with the field before coming up with prototypes like this Do they?

by 9rx 11mo ago

> I understand the desire of academics to help agriculture, but they really need to check in with the field before coming up with prototypes like this Do they? Academia is about the individual. It is not about others. Sometimes what an academic comes up with ends up being applicable to a larger audience, but that's not the goal. Industry is where people try to do things for others.

dekhn 11mo ago
I mean, if you're an academic and you don't care if anybody uses your technology, that's fine, I guess, but the folks publishing these papers want the industry to use their ideas: "In the agricultural sector, labor shortages are increasing the need for automated harvesting using robots." is the very first sentence.
- 9rx 11mo ago
  That's a product of coming up through a school system that emphasizes writing engaging content to please teachers. "Oh no, the farmers can't find help" sounds alarming and draws you in. But as you point out, it ends there. Beyond that, the academic goes off and does whatever is interesting to him personally without concern for what anyone else might actually need. And fair enough. He'd be working in industry if he were trying to please others. And a farmer myself, I can tell you there is no "labor shortage". Quite the opposite. I can't find enough farm work to do! I could easily grow my operation tenfold without breaking a sweat. But there are so many other farmers who want that work as well. It is hard to compete.
  - dekhn 11mo ago
    I mean, many of us in academia (I was previously) have made things for industry only to learn that we ignored something important and obvious that was already known. I wish I could find the nice article that gave a bunch of examples of papers and concluded "John Deere already sells this product and it's being used at scale today; if you want to do better, at least be aware of what's going on in the field"
    - 9rx 11mo ago
      I'll grant you that people who don't understand the difference between academia and industry might mistakenly push themselves towards academia when they really want to be in industry, but we shouldn't take that as an understanding that academia and industry serve the same function. They have different names exactly because they are expected to be different. Academia is where one goes to explore oneself in pursuit of one's interests. Industry is where one goes to explore others in pursuit of serving their needs.
      - dekhn 11mo ago
        I disagree. For example, I work for a company called Genentech that was founded by an academic. They discovered something important (how to clone genes) and shortly after, found medical applications (human growth hormone and insulin) that transformed treatment, We carry out open-ended research on human biology, have many visitors from academia, along with dual appointments (person is both a professor and a scientist at the company), publish in the same journals as academics, etc... And this is highly incentivized by the government: Bayh-Dole act makes universities want to patent tech that gets licensed by industry.
        9rx 11mo ago
        Where do you disagree? You point out that individuals are not statues and can shift between spending time in industry and in academia. You also point out that industry and academia are not confined by who owns the building that the people are occupying. But nobody was ever thinking that wasn't the case. This is the first time anyone has even considered that someone could be forever stuck an academic or industry operative, or that industry can't take place in universities and academics in private businesses. Good on you for coming up with hypothetical alternatives suitable for a sci-fi thriller. You've clearly got a creative mind! But since they are only hypothetical, it is not clear what purpose they serve here or how it even could begin to relate to anything being discussed.
      - lukan 11mo ago
        "Academia is where one goes to explore oneself in pursuit of one's interests. Industry is where one goes to explore others in pursuit of serving their needs." Unfortunately, also in academia you cannot just do what interests you, unless you got unlimited funding somehow. Because also academia requires money. For you to live and to fund your research. And this does not get handed out freely, you got to apply for it - and you only get it, if your needs match the needs of those giving out the grants. Now yes, there is more possibility to do research not bound by a concrete practical application, but the framing is really not correct. You cannot just research what you want (Source, I left academia to do my independent research of what I want, what I could not do there)
  - averageRoyalty 11mo ago
    > And a farmer myself, I can tell you there is no "labor shortage". Are you a Japanese farmer? The context of the paper was Japanese, and there is absolutely a labour shortage. Your section of the world is a timy percentage, and whilst I'm glad you don't have a shortage, your experience is not the worlds.
    - 9rx 11mo ago
      > Your section of the world is a timy percentage That's fair, but the same thing is said here too. It's a common trope that gets repeated because it sounds catchy, not because it is true. > and there is absolutely a labour shortage. Is there? Everything I can find suggests that Japan is no different than here: That farmers want to do more, but struggle to grow their operations under to the intense competition of every other farmer wanting to do the same. What you find here, and seemingly also in Japan, is some farms that have gotten too big for their britches that cry "labor shortage" instead of "you know, maybe I should downsize and let someone else have a turn". That's not a labor shortage. If you can bleed them dry selling them your technology, good on ya! You absolutely should. But there is no need to worry about them. Letting them fail solves the problem just the same. But if what you say is true, please point me to where I can find all this unutilized farmland that cannot be managed because there isn't anyone to do it. I am quite interested in becoming the one to take it over. I may not be a Japanese farmer today, but life is not static.
      - qiqitori 11mo ago
        Determining whether there is an actual labor shortage is pretty difficult. In many cases: * Doing the work in a completely different way would eliminate the need for more people doing the labor. In the case of Japan, there is a lot of small farmland. In the case of the US, farmland tends to be huge. I guess smaller farmland is more labor-intensive. Consolidating smaller strips of farmland into a larger piece of farmland may improve labor intensity. But that means that one person gets to do the farming for a higher margin and everybody else loses their profession. * Lots of farmland is being worked by elderly people. At some point you can't do it anymore. Somebody not working in agriculture would have to give up their current job and go into agriculture. It's difficult to predict whether that will happen. * Labor shortage often means "we can't find anybody who is willing to do it for 1000 yen per hour so there must be a labor shortage". BTW, there are a lot of abandoned houses in Japan; many of them will come with some amount of farmland that could be used, but isn't used.
- zipy124 11mo ago
  That sentence is because in engineering journals you often need to state some problem you are solving. Proving the problem exists isn't necessary, just enough to convince the editor. Most academics don't care if someone uses the technology, just like most software engineers don't care about the user of their product.
  - dekhn 11mo ago
    Yes it's the same reason in grad school they taught us to write grant proposals that cure diseases of senators and congresspeople, while actually working on fundamental research problems that have no direct applicability.
- asdff 11mo ago
  Every single STEM paper there is will have sentences like that putting the work into context and perspective.
- graemep 11mo ago
  > In the agricultural sector, labor shortages are increasing the need for automated harvesting using robots Making things sound useful might help with funding? It does for some people and in some places.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
esafak 11mo ago
This is the Engineering- not Literature department. People expect it to be useful.

9rx 11mo ago
> Determining whether there is an actual labor shortage is pretty difficult. Using the technical definition, it's actually pretty easy. There is also a colloquial definition. But under the colloquial definition it is not just pretty difficult, its is actually impossible as it isn't real thing. > But that means that one person gets to do the farming for a higher margin and everybody else loses their profession. Here's what happens here: One large farmer captures most of the market and then relies on farm workers to get the job done, while small farmers are left under-utilized. It seems the same is true in Japan. After all, we're talking about farm laborers, not famers. The small-plot farmer who is also doing all the work doesn't need legions of employees. Which is all well and good, but when the larger farmer reaches the limits of how many people they can hire, the solution is simple: Cut back. The under-utilized farmers will happily step in to fill the gap. > It's difficult to predict whether that will happen. It might not happen, but if it doesn't happen, it wasn't ever needed. Do you see a reason for farmers to farm for no reason? I don't mean no reason like overproducing to ensure there is still food in the event of a catastrophe. That is actually a valid reason, even if it doesn't always seem like it. I mean like produce it and then immediately turn it back into the ground.
dragonwriter 11mo ago
> Determining whether there is an actual labor shortage is pretty difficult. The only hard part is nailing down what people mean by “labor shortage”; resolving whether one exists under either the normal economic definition or the one people are actually using is pretty easy, but since the whole point of using the term is to mask that the actual complaint is about wages being too high, its really difficult to get people to admit what they are talking about.
- reeredfdfdf 11mo ago
  Yep, almost always in rich world "labor shortage" = I can't / don't want to pay a livable wage. Over here in Europe my country has a sky high unemployment, yet picking tomatoes is mostly done by immigrants from Southeast Asia. The pay for that hard work is so bad that most natives won't bother, but it's okay if your plan is to save for a few years with absolute minimum budget, and then return to somewhere with much lower cost of living. I guess it's just the same with Latin American migrants in America. Japan has historically been pretty anti-immigration, so they might prefer robots over this arrangement.