Robots To Replace Migrant Fruit Pickers 409
Vicissidude sends us to Wired for a look at a fruit-harvesting robot being developed in California. Its development has been funded entirely by agricultural associations, concerned by the uncertainty surrounding migrant immigrant labor. Quoting: "As if the debate over immigration and guest worker programs wasn't complicated enough, now a couple of robots are rolling into the middle of it. Vision Robotics, a San Diego company, is working on a pair of robots that would trundle through orchards plucking oranges, apples or other fruit from the trees. In a few years, troops of these machines could perform the tedious and labor-intensive task of fruit picking that currently employs thousands of migrant workers each season."
Cheaper than wage slavery? (Score:1, Interesting)
Wrong Problem (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe they will now.
Finally some progress (Score:3, Interesting)
We could have robots making our fast food, doing the gardening, mining metal, making robots, maintaining robots.
Re:From bad to worse. (Score:4, Interesting)
What to do... (Score:4, Interesting)
Would each person own a robot and collect a check from home or would the more likely scenario be that a few large companies would run huge armies of these robots? How might all those people who never heard of 'knowledge work' make a living? I'm thinking that the current scheme for distribution of wealth based on labor might not work in that scenario. Finally, I wonder what system, short of some socialist or communist nightmare, would.
I'm interested to hear what people think. Discussion or not, we'll only find out when it happens so bring those cotton-pickin' robots on!
Re:What to do... (Score:4, Interesting)
Either scenario has the same basis, as robots render physical human labor obsolete we will end up with a three class society. An upper class who owns the businesses (and the robots), a middle class consisting of the intellectual lower level professions, ie programmers, scientists, engineers, essentially the people who build and service the robots, and finally a lower class of people who's jobs were taken by robots (manual laborers or even intellectual laborers who's field is better done by machine). The first two classes are probably mostly the same as they are now, where the systems differ is the question of what to do with the lower class of people.
If we simply extend our current societal and economic principals we'll decide they need busywork, most likely this will be involved in somehow entertaining the other two classes. A good portion will probably perform some kind of creative art, ie actors or musicians, and most of their work will consist of live shows (best way to use up manpower and show supremacy of the other two classes). However the vast majority won't be sufficiently creative enough, thus they'll be in the service industry, waiters, butlers, chauffeurs (if we still let humans drive). Note that in both cases the lower class isn't servicing only the upper class but probably the middle class as well, for instance the equivalent of a code monkey would get a couple butlers since there's such an excess of labor available. Interestingly since the benefit of work is so much less society may respond by demanding people work more since large numbers of unemployed or under stimulated people would have the potential to be extremely disruptive to the society. This does have precedent, apparently in the middle ages the idea was if you could get out of working you should, people with inherited money who chose not to work weren't looked down upon like they are today (at least by some parts of society). The idea of everyone having to work and pull their fair share was in part a reaction to the industrial revolution and the creation of the welfare state so that people wouldn't choose to remain unemployed.
This isn't a horrible scenario, it just isn't a very significant improvement over our current society. The happier alternative is that instead of keeping the lower class busy with work we keep them busy with fun. People who don't work just spend their days visiting with each other, going to various clubs, basically keeping themselves entertained with structured activities. This will probably be accomplished through some kind of welfare, the upper and middle class will still get extra money to be rewarded for their work (though most of the middle class will probably be the Open Source developer type who does it partially for fun) but living a life without employment will be a viable and somewhat respectable possibility. The fundamental difference between this system and the previous is in the first system the lower class entertained just the upper and middle classes, here they entertain themselves as well.
This second scenario may seem like a fantasy but I do believe it is a possibility. Just think of the life of an unemployed person today as opposed to a couple hundred years ago?
What will determine which path is basically how we react when we start to get large numbers of people who are able, competent, looking for any kind of work, and unable to find it. If we keep creating jobs to keep them employed and occupied than we may end up with the first scenario, if however we try to give them a viable alternative (maybe even give them fun jobs) we may get the second scenario.
Robot society = communism, and that's a Good Thing (Score:2, Interesting)
Apologies for the long post, and if it's not very readable, well, it's friday night and I'm a bit drunk... But it can be summed up as "Robot society as you describe it is communism, and that's a good thing":
Well, setting aside issues like Peak Oil and more general limitations on the energy to power all these robots, which make me wonder if this is a realistic future scenario...
If what you're describing comes true, you are basically describing the technological conditions for "end-stage communism." I don't mean the Communist Party violently overthrows capitalism to create a worker's paradise - I mean what Marx was actually predicting; a great deal of his theory has been "creatively modified" by people like Lenin and Mao.
Marx was basically just arguing (revolutionary and unique at the time, not really that unique now, after people have been discussing it for 1.5 centuries) that technology shaped society. Far from saying capitalism needed to be destroyed post-haste, he was arguing that capitalism as an economic and social system was simply a structure on top of industrialism as a technological system - a way of organizing resources and people, and justifying the downsides, of industrial factories, etc. Marx was pretty clear that he admired the ingenuity and resourcefulness of capitalists, he just disapproved of the way that the people at the top ignored the downsides of their own methods.
Capitalism is good, Marx said, because it stimulates the development of production technology that alleviates and overcomes the great problem of scarcity. The profit motive
causes business owners to reinvest in their business, automate it, produce more at lower cost, drive costs lower, etc., etc. This makes more stuff, which is good, because people have generally not had enough to survive, or at least to survive comfortably.
But as capitalism develops, Marx argued, it faces some "internal contradictions". As automation becomes more and more prevalent (thanks to the profit motive), there is less and less work for people to do. When you're out of work and run out of savings, you can't buy stuff, no matter how cheap it is. So there will be a growing class of hungry, pissed-off people; at the same time, there will be greater material abundance thanks to automation.
Eventually, this situation will have to change, if for no other reason than that the unemployed masses will simply start taking things, because it's that or starve to death. At that point, the society will naturally convert to socialism - that is, the workers will just start running things themselves, first by democratic government, then without any government at all. As the situation stabilizes, individuals can pretty much do their own thing, as long as the means of making necessities (automated factories) don't come under any individual's or any particular group's control.
Now, you can stave off this situation, and keep the basic structure of capitalism in a few ways. We see the US, for example, doing all of these in the twentieth century. More specifically, if you've studied the history of these things, you'll notice that consumerism, New Deal, dramatic increase in neocolonialism, welfare, etc. all either start or dramatically increase - a quantum leap - around the 1920s-30s in the US. The Great Depression basically is the contradiction Marx described coming to fruition (remember, it was part of a global depression in all advanced nations), but it got "band-aids" to alleviate the problem, and then WW2 and the Cold War began generating a lot of jobs:
1) Develop new industries that take on the unemployed workers. Eventually these tend to be automated themselves.
2) Develop/enlarge new markets by:
A) "Strongly encouraging" developing countries to buy your stuff instead of making it themselves - in essence, shifting the unemplo
Robots rule, my opinion and free software (Score:2, Interesting)
Stop expecting California to fix Mexico's problem (Score:1, Interesting)
I love the friends I have made. I enjoy the people and the culture that have become a part of the California Central valley. These are proud, hardworking people. I also welcome the advancement of technology and I believe that the robotic fruit pickers are the natural progression of man. It's a shame that we Americans live off of the broken backs of immigrants.
People never look at the real issue of the immigration debate. We spend too much time and money tending to the symptoms and continually ignore the cause. The living conditions in Mexico are horrid. The gap between the rich and poor is massive and their government doesn't care how many poor people it lets die in order to preserve the ruling class. The United States likes the play World Police when it comes to humanitarian efforts. We invaded Somalia to feed their hungry, we over threw an evil dictator in Iraq, but somehow we ignore our next door neighbor. The only way to fix the immigration problem is to remove the corrupt government of Mexico and instill one that cares about improving the economic conditions of that country. California continually pays the price of Mexico's apathy. We could spend that same money dropping food in Mexico and then watch our border traffic ease up. But the fix is never to give a man a fish, but to teach him how to fish. Their government must be fixed or the United States should annex the whole country as the 51st state. Rich Americans will love all of the new coastal land. Plus we will have a bigger pool of young poor people that we coax into joining our military to fight our foreign wars.
I will end this before I get even further off topic. My point is simply to improve the living conditions in Mexico so that they are like our neighbors to the north. Then embrace innovations, like the robotic fruit picker, so that the mass exodus of Mexican labor doesn't kill the Californian economy.
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:1, Interesting)