Robotic Nation Evidence

In the previous post we discussed James Miller's contention that robots would drive the value of wages down, but not cause unemployment. Here's another example of why that opininon is incorrect. The article from the NY Times is entitled In Florida Groves, Cheap Labor Means Machines:

Global competition is pressing American farmers on many fronts. American raisins are facing competition from Chile and Turkey. For fresh tomatoes, the challenge comes from Mexico. China, whose Fuji apples have displaced Washington's Golden Delicious from most Asian markets — and whose apple juice has swamped the United States — is cutting into American farmers' markets for garlic, broccoli and a host of other crops.

So even while President Bush advances a plan to invite legal guest workers into American fields, farmers for the first time in a generation are working to replace hand laborers with machines.

"The rest of the world hand-picks everything, but their wage rates are a fraction of ours," said Galen Brown, who led the mechanical harvesting program at the Florida Department of Citrus until his retirement last year. Lee Simpson, a raisin grape grower in California's San Joaquin Valley, is more blunt. "The cheap labor," he said, "isn't cheap enough."

"Cheap labor isn't cheap enough" is one hallmark of the Robotic Nation. Humans simply cannot compete with the price and benefits of robotic labor, and this will mean massive unemployment as robots reach parity with human beings. See this post for a solution to this problem.