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Agricultural robotics research fellow Dr Christopher Lehnert spoke at CQUniversity yesterday about robots being developed to pick fruit and detect weeds.
One problem they could solve was harvesting labour shortages.
"It's a causal workforce problem. (For farmers) their really high risk is getting a workforce to pick the fruit," Mr Lehnert said.
"There's not a worry about job losses. We're just shifting the paradigm. Instead of being in the field, they will control robots."
He hoped to be well on the way towards a commercial fruit-picking design by the end of next year.
Another part of his research was designing robots for broadacre weed management.
"We are looking at taking the human out of the tractor and getting an autonomous platform," he said.
"The large machines they use on farms do a lot of damage to the soil. They compact the soils and destroy them.
"But robots would be smaller, they wouldn't cause this issue."
Hmm, this kind of thing didn't end well for the Quarians...
Original Submission
(Score: 1) by virens on Sunday July 12 2015, @09:34AM
You don't need to go to high school for picking up fruits. You better make a robot for this. I, for one, welcome our engineering overlords :-)
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Sunday July 12 2015, @09:45AM
You don't need to go to high school for picking up fruits.
the same can be said for most manufacturing jobs.
People should [do mental labor], machines should [do physical labor]
this is increasingly the new paradigm. however, with all the physical labor automated, we should switch to a post-scarcity economy but the people in charge aren't keen on that because they crave power. eventually designs on the automation will be freed and our scarcity economy will collapse. Q.E.D. capitalism solves itself.
(Score: 2) by K_benzoate on Sunday July 12 2015, @10:33AM
What is your economic model when "mental" work is also done better by machines, except for the rarefied heights of academic advancement--which by definition is only accessible to a small percentage of humans?
I predict mass poverty, starvation, riots, and then extermination by the technologically-empowered elites legitimized in the name of "defending private property".
Climate change is real and primarily caused by human activity.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gravis on Sunday July 12 2015, @02:46PM
What is your economic model when "mental" work is also done better by machines,
my point is that when physical labor is automated that people will get the automation themselves and thus not need money at all. however, when an AI can do the mental work of a child (i.e. learning), it will rapidly evolve into strong AI. whatever happens after that is completely up to the strong AI.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Sunday July 12 2015, @06:00PM
So, Skynet it is then.
(Score: 2) by penguinoid on Sunday July 12 2015, @09:11PM
Skynet is one of the less dangerous possibilities. A proper AI wouldn't even have to fight a war against us, but might still exterminate us like we exterminate other species -- incidentally, through habitat destruction. Basically, a strong AI could do whatever the heck it wants, and you better hope it was programmed exactly right with respect to what it wants, and that there is no unforeseen shortcuts (eg if told to do things that make people happy we almost certainly end up with electrodes stimulating our pleasure center).
RIP Slashdot. Killed by greedy bastards.
(Score: 2) by nukkel on Sunday July 12 2015, @11:09AM
Well, we've already seen communism "solve itself" and that wasn't pretty either ...
(Score: 1) by Francis on Sunday July 12 2015, @01:33PM
No, we haven't. There has never been a communist government anywhere in the world. The USSR certainly wasn't. The People's Republic of China was probably the closest, but even there there were people with connections that could always get what they needed and then there was everybody else.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2015, @08:17PM
Well, not until the various places redefined the word to suit their purposes.
Marx described a system where decisions would come directly from the workers.
Non-worker elites and boards of directors NOT chosen by the workers [google.com] are antithetical to his vision.
We've had some subthreads on the subject [soylentnews.org] of how things are falsely called "Communist". [soylentnews.org]
Where there are systems such that the primary concern is doing the most good for the greatest number of people, [soylentnews.org]--rather than maximizing profit for a few--it makes for a stable, civil society.
There are also some subthreads on how Capitalism (the economic system) repeatedly falls on its face[1] [soylentnews.org] and is then bailed out with taxpayer money, turning it into cronyism as Smith, Marx, and Piketty have all described.
[1] Note that since 1945, there has never been an actual non-Capitalist system that has been allowed to survive; the USA makes sure of that through subterfuge or overt violence.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by nukkel on Monday July 13 2015, @08:18PM
I like to make the distinction based on the flow of wealth: a society in which the majority of the produced wealth is collected by the State to be redistributed as it sees fit, I deem Communist.
To me it imparts no qualification of as to *how fairly* that wealth is redistributed -- an observation well supported by history.
In pure Capitalism, by contrast, wealth would flow exclusively to those who, through their labour or investments, created it. A society where labour and capital gains are taxed at 50% (roughly where European countries are at) would be halfway.
I find these 'definitions' useful in understanding the real world as opposed to Marxist or Randian utopias which have never seen the light of day
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @08:10PM
Those are useful distinctions.
You got 1 thing wrong, however.
In Capitalism, the profits go to the *investor/ownership class* and **they** decide how much the laborers will receive--the "trickle-down" thing.
If The Worker Class automatically got a fair cut, there would be no reason for trade unions to exist.
Marx described a very democratic system where The Workers decide everything with a democratic vote.
Those who don't work, don't count.
There are no idle rich in his plan.
I note that Marx didn't make a distinction between Socialism and Communism; any difference is a more modern contrivance and those are shorthand for longer manufactured terms like "Democratic Socialism" (which, as noted, is redundant).
Every western system of any size that has been allowed to survive[1][2], regardless of its original philosophy, has become Capitalist and Authoritarian (top-down structures).
The "communist" countries have been autocratic and their State Capitalist structures and have simply substituted for the previous aristocracy with a layer of cronies of the dictator.
[1] The Paris Commune of 1871 is an excellent example of how Capitalists and their proxies use their guns to destroy a nascent non-Capitalist society.
The genocide of the communal cultures of the indigenous peoples of the western hemisphere, freed Barcelona in 1936, and Indonesia in 1964 - 1965 are some other brutal examples.
[2] There are extant local examples of e.g. Marinaleda[3] and Mondragon in Spain as well as the worker co-ops that are common in northern Italy.
[3] Lamestream Media and larger governments have continually tried to undermine what has been called a Socialist Utopia[4] there, but no bands of thugs with guns have invaded yet.
[4] They abolished their unneeded police force.
-- gewg_