Robotic Nation Evidence

Ag. Engineers Create Robot Farmers

From the article:

University of Illinois agricultural engineers have developed several ag robots, one of which actually resembles R2D2, except that it's square instead of round. The robots are completely autonomous, directing themselves down corn rows, turning at the end and then moving down the next row, said Tony Grift, an agricultural engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The long-term goal, he said, is for these small, inexpensive robots to take on some of the duties now performed by large, expensive farm equipment. As Grift asked, 'Who needs 500 horsepower to go through the field when you might as well put a few robots out there that communicate with each other like an army of ants, working the entire field and collecting data?'

Also:

Grift would like to someday see an experimental farm where all of the work is being performed by autonomous robots. And he said the logical place for such an ambitious farm would be Illinois.

This is the point of Robotic Nation -- nearly every business that we see in the economy today will be a place where "all of the work is being performed by autonomous robots." Every factory, store, restaurant, farm, hospital, airport, amusement park, school, etc. will be staffed by robots, not people. That future is 30 years or so away. See Robotic Nation for details.