Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

Why would the fire danger be different than the laser?

I don't see it, all I see is a labor force that is being freed up to do better things with their time. Of course in our current political environment everyone is extremely selfish and only out for their own gains. Nobody cares about the short term unemployment problems of these people.

In theory our economic system has been set up in a way that structural unemployment is impossible in the long term term. Automation increases the excess savings rate by cutting labor costs, the excess money is then invested into more automation which only causes excess savings to grow. The unemployment caused by automation goes hand in hand with deflationary pressure as automation decreases the cost of goods. The Fed will respond to a fall in the inflation rate by lowering the interest rates, which encourages borrowers to invest their money and create more jobs. If borrowers fail to invest and the excess savings keep accumulating the interest rates will drop until they hit 0% at which point people will switch to treasury bonds and if those fall to 0% they will withdraw their money as cash. As treasury yields drop to 0% this forces the US government to increase the total investment rate of the economy on behalf of the buyers of the treasury bonds. If the government doesn't increase its deficit the economy will have to respond by reducing the total savings rate, which effectively means unemployment because someone must consume more than they earn. If all of the above fails, the government can send stimulus checks to its citizens. This will increase the inflation rate which will eat away at uninvested savings. In theory the Fed could the same thing but it would be called helicopter money with the crucial difference that there would be nothing on the Fed's balance sheet to counteract inflation exceeding expectations.

Of course all of this is in theory, in practice there is zero political will power. Just look at Trump, he could have done the infrastructure bill, but he didn't. It wouldn't surprise me if Biden fails to push it through and we have to come up with increasingly extreme options that nobody wants. Ideas like Keynesian gold digging only exist because the political environment has "collapsed" to the point where no good ideas are left.

It's kind of a shitty job no matter how much you pay. The work is seasonal so the people doing this have to move around following the work. It's also in remote locations, there aren't apartments for rent right next to the farm. Often the farm has to provide housing, which of course means they will do whatever they can to cut costs. Internet and cell reception are going to be abysmal, nothing but farmland for miles in every direction. And you're constantly on the move following the next job. Don't get me wrong, there are some serious things that can and need to be done to improve the industry, but even with all of those fixed it's not a job for everyone.

Generally solid state decides are cheaper to maintain.

Here I was thinking of the film Runaway (1984). It had farming robots which eliminated pests with grippers and grinders -- pick up a caterpillar, drop it into the grinder. I like that a bit better than the laser solution.

Not all of the *cides could be replaced with these, but certainly you could identify undesired plants and insects that way, and destroy them. Insects may be fast enough to require lasers, but who knows? Non-desired plants could simply get snipped and fall to the ground. Fungi ... could at least be identified and marked on a map for later spraying.

I think all of this is do-able (and a lot better place to start for self-driving AI than the lofty goal of cars, given the restricted domain, lower speed, reduced danger ...), but the real question is: can these robots price out lower than the *cides they might replace?