Comments on: Old McRobot had a Farm, Beep-I, Bzzt-I, O!

By: שווה קריאה

שווה קריאה — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 05:31:02 +0000

המצאה חדשה – רובוט שקוטף תותים…

תעשיית הרובוטיקה דילגה על החקלאים בגלל אתגרים לא פשוטים של חוסר יכולת לדעת איזה פירות בשלים ואזה לא, כמו גם לא לגרום נזק לפירות וירקות על ידי מעיכתם בזרוע הרובוט. פיתוח חדש מיפן מציג רובוט שיודע לקטוף תותים בשלים בלבד ולוקח לו רבע מהזמן שיקח לבן אדם ל…

By: GAC

GAC — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 19:07:09 +0000

Very interesting development. I may be stepping on a joke here, but the “Time Machine” future seems very unlikely even if these robots don’t go anywhere (and it looks like they will). Though social class is a significant factor in marriage choices, over the long term social mobility, as well as a degree of intermarriage, would prevent us from separating into different species, especially if we see a growing trend for societies that allow higher social mobility going into the future, which is fairly likely.

By: ohwilleke

ohwilleke — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 18:00:58 +0000

One of the just coming into use agri-tech applications is GPS guided farm machinery. The farmer trains the machine with a tractor or combine at each stage of farming a wheat or bean field one year, and in subsequent years the machine can drive itself on the same track.

Thus, one farmer may be sowing half a dozen different fields at the same time.

To the tech implications of technologies like this must also be added the demographics of American farming. The average farmer is in his sixties, and a large share of all farms are marginally productive small farms. Sometime in the next twenty or thirty years, the old farmers are going to die or retire and be replaced by a new generation of farmers with much larger farms who buy up the small farms that go on the market.

The implication is continued declines in population density a huge swath of farm country, combined with rising incomes for the farmers who remain. The population densities are going to be so low that the next generation of farm kids may have to be sent off to boarding schools for middle and high school educations — already rural high schools struggle to field five and six man football teams because their population densities have fallen so greatly.