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Let me know when they automate picking of watermelons, tomatoes, etc. Not highly paid work, but indispensable to get the produce out of the fields.
by cosmicray 16y ago
Let me know when they automate picking of watermelons, tomatoes, etc. Not highly paid work, but indispensable to get the produce out of the fields.
- kovar 16y agoStudy your history, in particular the effect of Eli Whitney's cotton gin. Tomatos are being genetically engineered to have a consistent size and shape, partly to enable better automated harvesting.
- Unseelie 16y agoThat said, the point stands that its actually getting easier to build machines to do the thinking work than the work requiring highly articulate hands: Cotton piking may be out, but sandwitch making is rather hard to conquer.
- gentschev 16y agoReally? I actually think sandwich making will be dead easy within 10 years. You just need a robot arm that can recognize and manipulate ingredients that costs less than maybe $300k.
- Unseelie 16y agoThree hundred Thousand? Assuming the 300k is the total cost of the machine, that's replacing, in a shop open 16 hours a day, 365 days a year, a machine that lives for over six years. Six years, without maintenance... Furthermore, a small sandwitch shop (a subway franchise) is worth only 90 to 300 thousand dollars. You're suggesting adding a machine worth the cost of the entire shop, on a very high end shop. You may be able to build an arm that can make sandwitches, but selling it to firms over cheap minimum wage labor (which is easily replaceable and already has all the software necessary for the process...
- kovar 16y agoWe've conquered sushi making with machines - http://sushi-master.com/usa/index4.html http://sushi-master.com/usa/index4.html . I don't think sandwiches are all that more difficult. Someone patented one in '73 - http://www.freepatentsonline.com/3762306.html http://www.freepatentsonline.com/3762306.html