Robotic Nation Evidence

It's about time. Who wants fruit touched by human hands anyway?
 

CNN just picked up this story a couple of days ago and are running an animation of the fruit picker. What really amazing to me is that I went looking for it and instead found this story about this very same technology in their archives from 1985, that essentially describes this as a two step step process with one robot acting as the "Scout" and the other as the "Harvester" which is exactly what these machines do today.

Took 22 years to get to this point and they are very, very close, and it won't take another 22 years from now for the citrus fields to be farmed by nothing but these machines, which ought to please Lou Dobbs for about 10 seconds, until the streets are over-run with all sorts of newly unemployed.

One thing that keeps coming up in all these stories in the corporate media about emerging automation technology is the refrain:

"But it's not quite cost-effective, just yet... but soon will be..."

Been hearing and seeing versions of it a lot lately, which tells me that that will be a key selling point for this tech not too far down the road. Yes the prototypes cost millions, but once you've got figured things out, you can start stamping these things out cookie cutter style and all of a sudden your machine becomes a lot less of a "cost" than a human worker ever will be.

I agree with you, Mr. Brain, we are so not ready for this coming economic revolution.

~Nyc
 

please don't let go of this topic Marshall!

This is the big one!

At least in the past people could be sharecropper farmers if they couldn't find work; not any more!