11–20 of 178 posts
This would be a good time to implement regulations and taxes on all robots to diminish all margins gained from automation.
You point is so delusional I really wonder how you can develop this kind of mindset and still end up in a technology/startup community like hacker news.
It seems like picking a lot of fruits are easily in the realm of what computer vision is capable of these days. What would be the first steps to doing a start up in this space? Anyone interested?
Other issues arise if the orchard is on uneven ground, or their are irrigation lines in the way.
Certainly not insurmountable, but not easy. Then there's the distinct problem of adoption.
This would be a good time to implement regulations and taxes on all robots to diminish all margins gained from automation.
It is definitely worth considering but there is the other side. Do you want prices to continue to rise as labor costs and healthcare grow? Or would you prefer these prices actually drop even as your income grows? I'm not saying either is right or wrong. Maybe this is solved with UBI or some other approach. If the taxes are super high, the incentive to automate is diminished.
Or they could, you know, offer higher wages.
http://nfwm.org/education-center/farm-worker-issues/low-wage... [0]
I've mentioned those machines before. They're still prototypes, nowhere near rugged enough for field use. Agrobot: [1] Too many parts, too many places that can catch dirt, too slow. If they can solve the sensor problem, they need to do a complete mechanical redesign to make it field-ready. Abundant Robotics: [2] Too slow, too fragile. For comparison, here's a Festo vision-guided robot picking up randomly oriented obj…
The hard parts are not damaging the crop and most importantly not doing the wrong thing.
Or they could, you know, offer higher wages.
It's not that simple with farming, unfortunately. Worker pay is necessarily based on individual productivity, which can only increase so much [0]. Margins are razor thin for producers to begin with. The vast majority of profits are captured by the manufacturing and distribution. This is why the IRS taxes farm workers and farm employers differently from any other kind of commercial activity. http://nfwm.org/education-…
Or robots, I guess.
They could also, which is notably mentioned no where in the article, pay more? In a market driven economy...which companies want...employees have market power as well when their is a shortage.