Fruit-sorting robot ‘will disrupt the industry’ | Hacker News Reader

Fruit-sorting robot ‘will disrupt the industry’

drivesncontrols.com

55 pointsFuturebot122 comments

Fruit sorting systems have been in production use for years. They're very impressive. Vision systems, AI, robotics, and the ability to handle huge quantities of produce.

Here's a production scale apple sorting and packing system.[1] The part of the video for "big plant" shows the most automated version.

Here's a system for sorting peas.[2] Each individual pea is inspected using computer vision. Each individual pea. Anything that doesn't look like a perfect pea is kicked out by an air jet. Take a look at the speed at which the system is running, as a wide conveyor belt feeds hundreds of peas per second through the machine, with the good ones coming out on one conveyor and the rejects on another. That one machine is doing a job a thousand hand sorters could not do.

Automated cherry grading.[3] This video has a good explanation of what's going on, as size, color, stem length, and defects are all checked by a computer vision system. That system can process over 700Kg/hour of cherries. "We're enabling our clients to massively reduce their sorting staff."

Tomato sorting machine.[4] This video has slow-motion sections so you can see the tomatoes being sorted. The machine is far too fast for humans to even see what it's doing.

There are vision-based sorting machines for almost every kind of produce, and they're in wide use all over the world. All this automated sorting means that customers no longer need to examine produce in the supermarket. The rejects were removed at the plant, and turned into animal feed or something. This makes services like Amazon Fresh possible.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cprDuf0ASzU [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyGR6A5MWG0 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3jlq03Gviw [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz88nsWL4kw

I think you underestimate the quality of a thousand hand sorters. That machine may replace on the order of a hundred hand sorters, but I doubt it's 1000.

6 metric tons of peas per hour per machine. The machine examines the pea from all sides while the pea is in free fall. A human would have to pick up each pea to do a comparable job. A kilogram of peas is about 4000 peas, so 1000 humans would each have to examine 24,000 peas per hour each, or 6 peas per second, to keep up.

Okay, 6000 peas per second is more than a thousand people could do. I was basing my response off your original description of "hundreds of peas per second" while I know humans can sort at a rate of more than 1 pea per second.

Your confusing the sorting aspect with the 'picking' aspect. Right now a lot of fruit ends up on the ground and never makes it to the sorting facility.

The machines showed in these videos seem suited for very large and expensive processing facilities, which probably are cost-effective because one supplies the consumption of millions to tens of millions of people. But how smaller producers can automatize their processing without owning or depending on these facilities? Would robots that cost of the order of tens of thousands euros / dollars, that automate more flexibly but slowly than the machines in the videos, be cost-effective for smaller producers? How big is the market for such robots?

"Once picked, the fruit can also be sorted by colour so that, for example, red apples can be separated from green apples."

So it can compare apples and oranges. Thanks I'm done

You beat me to that joke. Well played.

This is a bit off topic, but this GIF of a carrot harvesting machine never ceases to amaze me: http://i.imgur.com/UkTalyS.gifv

Efficiency is a beautiful thing.

But carrots are easier than fruit. If you go to apple or orange plantages, you'll often see the ground covered in perfectly good fruit, because it's too expensive to pick it efficiently. 20% doesn't even make it to the shop: http://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2012/10/04/un-says...

In addition, being able to remove weeds mechanically, rather than chemically, is a big win for health and environment.

I have some personal experience with applying computer/machine vision techniques to assessing rice quality. In India, rice quality assessment is a high value activity as the difference in per unit weight price is dramatic across different varieties of rice. The longer the grain, as an example, the pricier it is. Discoloration is also an indicator of bad quality rice. Since there is such a huge difference in price, there is naturally cheating, subjectivity and sampling driven errors. We had developed a device that would objectively and quickly measure the rice quality based on a multitude of factors. This was not just software because there had to be way to cancel out any variance due to ambient conditions and it had to be a device that was easy to maintain in a highly rugged rice factory environment. We did really well but where we failed was our inability to break through the powerful rice quality inspectors cartel and even the rice suppliers who were worried about being "found out". Manual inspection was strangely seen as way of having some control over the proceedings.

As an ag/tech startup, I'm very interested in this device. is there a way to contact you for more information?

This was 7 years back my friend. We built software prototype for measuring dimensions, classifying grain type and measuring color / brokenness. For hardware we had some initial designs where the objectives were - to easily put grains on a platform so they are separated from each other, easy cleaning and lighting uniformity. We had conceived some rotating or vibrating disks for grain separation. But the mechanical part of the hardware wasn't actually built. I have moved on. There is nostalgia around that was triggered by this thread, but nothing more at this point. Sorry to disappoint.

I toured a commercial apple orchard 10 years ago. They use massive parallel conveyor system with laser-imaging for quality and gates to sort.

I'd be surprised if this robotic arm+vision system could compete on cost and through-put.

Note this "can distinguish and selectively pick fruit." Right now you either set up nets, have a machine bulk shake a tree and take what falls, or pay someone to pick ripe fruit. The conveyor system would then sort the collected fruit.

This system either replaces human collectors or significantly increases yields compared to shaking the trees. But, you would likely still need the bulk sorting at a later stage.

I'm wondering what is so difficult about this task. I mean, all the "good" fruit looks almost the same, so recognizing it should be simple. Also, there's plenty of training material.

Fruit is not a uniform shape and it typically bruises easily so it can be difficult to design a robotic "hand" to consistently pick up fruit of irregular shape without bruising.

This article from Gizmodo does a good job of explaining the difficulties involved: http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/10/why-is-it-so-hard-for-robo...

Looking from those images, I think they are using the wrong kind of hand. A better hand would simply be a "vacuum cleaner" end, i.e., gripping the fruit by suction power. If it can't be gripped like that, it is probably not fruit that needs to be selected.

Suction would bruise anything but the hardiest and greenest apples, same as a hickey except now it rots all your fruits. Some fruits are already ridiculously sensible to bruising as it is (pears from the family orchards bruise if you look at them funny)

> I'm wondering what is so difficult about this task.

Well, conceptually it sounds simple. But it is certainly a complex engineering problem. You are forgetting building conforming actuators and sensors, controlling these, image registration, the low margin for error, classification performance, real-time processing, etc. etc.

Applying the principle of capitalism, if it was simple to design and if a market and technology enables it, then it should already exist. In this case, the market obviously exists (e.g. farm worker demand in fruit industry), so if the solution doesn't already exist, then it is highly likely to be because the problem isn't simple to solve and/or the technology is inadequate.

Even more generally: assuming things that you haven't done must be simple is not a valid argument, just a silly opinion.

I used to develop food sorters. Color sorting is very simple in principle and much harder in practice. The main difficulties are good lighting, not shaking your cameras and optics to pieces and keeping the optics and lights clean.

For fruit sorting in particular there is the very difficult task of conveying the fruit without damaging it. The best sorter in the world won't help you if it mangles the fruit.

In my old lab, there are solutions to most of the common food sorting problems, not all of those solutions make it out to the field though.

How big is this market?

TBH, I suck at the business sides of things so I'm not the best guy to ask, but my impression is that the market isn't s great as one might think considering how much for we all eat. There ought to be a lot of room for growth if the machines actually move out to the field. Most of them are sitting inside cleaning plants because they are delicate and expensive. Search for Buhler, Sortex, Allen, Satake, Selgron for some example companies in that space.

Capital trumps labour, yet again. Talk about a brave new (terrible) world.

How is anybody without amazing talent, IQ, and luck in the birth-location lottery, supposed to survive?

How are these awful machines helping to advance the wellbeing of humanity? By destroying livelihoods for a few pennies cheaper bananas to those who can already afford to pay more?

How are these awful machines helping to advance the wellbeing of humanity?

Hypothetically, by freeing humanity from hard manual labor and making goods less costly.

Machines have a long history of advancing the wellbeing of humanity. The fire bow, wheel, pottery wheel, bicycle, ox cart, lever, ramp, plow... I could go on and on, from ancient to modern.

The modern textile industry is a much closer advancement, that made clothing manyfold more affordable and freed countless people from unforgiving constant manual labor.

That sorting fruit is "hard labour" is actually coincidental. The real skill is pattern recognition and dextrosity. Skills widely deployed by humans today. We're now on the cusp of destroying this, another whole class of human employability. I am not as confident as you that we can simply extrapolate the past ad infinitum (ie: the "we will adapt and flourish" dogma). It seems to me we're reaching some inflection points in the trend where real, painful adjustment will occur. Recall that the 19th century's "innovations" created vast misery then, and war for 50 years 50 years later, before we adjusted. For those of us (un)lucky enough to be alive today, the immediate future seems very bleak indeed. Thanks to thinking machines.

Well, first of all painful adjustment in the immediate future is worth the permanent advancement after the adjustment. Second of all I feel we have every reason to believe advancements like this are inexorable, so I would rather devote my thoughts to how best to handle them rather than how to stop them or to lament how unfortunate it is.

I would also argue that the greatest skill humanity possess is not dexterity, pattern matching, or anything else like that. But, rather, adapting.

The inevitability assumption. Not borne out by history. There are very long periods of regression if you look at the century-level scale, and it is not unreasonable to contemplate the potential that we might be getting towards "peak tech", right, now.

Will technology move upwards? Most likely. Will technology move in an uninterrupted straight line upwards? most unlikely.

Easy to say, Guy With A Job. Hungry people have other opinions. If we had, say, a Basic Income in place (or other hunger-proof social network) then I'd lean toward a Utopian view of progress as well.

The suffering this thing would cause is a failure of our economic and political systems... not the fault of technology.

In the long run, humanity is better off if we're not paying people below minimum wage under the table to pick pears. If a portion of the surplus value generated by these awful machines can be captured and paid to the people they displace, those people can then do something they actually enjoy.

Very true if, and only if, "a portion of the surplus value generated by these awful machines can be captured and paid to the people they displace".

But a very small group of financiers/entrepreneurs/VCs own all the machines, their ownership of the machines gives them an advantage in owning even more machines, and it is not in their nature (ie, human nature) for them to spread the sunshine. That's the problem. That's why we have a vast underclass already today, and it's not getting any smaller, despite the wishful thinking of the technerati (of which I am one).

The surplus value created by these machines results in a net cost (and thus price) reduction for pears, which consumers (among whom the displaced count themselves) benefit from. Technology drives down production costs, which results in cheaper goods and eventually substitution of inferior goods with superior goods, which is why even the underclass can afford things today which would have once been the strict domain of the upper classes.

If we get enough of this kind of technology, then Basic Income might become a reality, through sheer political necessity.

Cool. Robots. http://www.fanuc.eu/uk/en/robots "With more than 100 models, FANUC offers the widest range of industrial robots in the world."

not sure if I buy this, while the idea sounds cool the complexity of that gripper tells me that there have to be simpler means to grip fruit without damaging it that would be faster, something along the lines of suction mechanisms where you can stack many of them; like on a roller.

What I am getting at is, besides the obvious complexity of the "hand" is how many can you fit into the area and how fast can they move the product? Identifying the good product from bad isn't hard, many food production lines do that and blow off items they don't want.

I don't know, people are really really good at things like this (picking fruit), which robots are generally speaking very bad at, and migrant labor is cheap. Why is this a disruptor?

For starters, not every country is the US, we don't all have vast hordes of illegals willing to work for next to nothing.

Secondly, and without wanting to start a political thread, the US might not either soon because President Trump.

Overall there's a point at which this becomes economical (just as there was a point at which automated harvesting of every other crop became economical starting with the 19th century) and it depends on labour costs in each country. It won't be super-soon, but it will happen eventually.

Never thought I'd see someone endorse trump on hn. September never ends I suppose.

DISRUPT

Automation like this is why I call BS on the "we need more immigrants to keep the economy going!" folks.

We will be struggling to keep our existing population employed. The last thing we want to do is import even more low-skilled labor who will soon be made redundant.

Increasing automation means a declining population is a godsend rather than a problem.

Policy makers must be aware of this. I suspect the call for increased immigration are politically motivated (replacing the existing population with a more reliable voting block) rather than sincere economic concerns.

This recent article is a great example. The author gleefully explains how replacing the existing white population with immigrants will reduce the NRA's base.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/19/...

The calls for restricted immigration are certainly politically motivated (mainly variations on "I don't want them getting mine") so what's the difference? National borders mean less and less all the time. Clinging to them to weather this upcoming economic storm is like using an anchor as a liferaft.

Almost no one in the US is calling for restrictions on immigration.

Really now? No one? [edit: You added almost, I can almost agree now ;)]

Tougher border control is restrictions on immigration. Why do you think various billionaire nutjobs want to build a great wall of mexico?

No, it's not. It's enforcing current immigration policies.

Moving towards an open borders would be changing restrictions on immigration.

That's not true. The border has always been open for people to pass freely for centuries. Restricting border crossings would be a change in immigration policy. I don't think it's necessary.

And then we decided that having government, taxes, social programs, ect were necessary. You are free to feel otherwise, but the issue of society vs anarchy has been firmly resolved.

We already had gov't, taxes and social programs. It may not be apparent to you, but homesteading on indigenous lands was a social program. I'd love to see if you could make 4X the salary and 2X the quality of life by migrating to another country if you'd change your tune. I hope your rigid rules of society always apply to you and your descendants.

But I'm guessing you're ok with the folks who migrated to North America. Just not ok when those same people move around their own continent.

https://www.numbersusa.com/

So why not let the entire population of Africa move to the United States? Borders are an antiquated concept according to you.

Why not let the entire population of California move to Rhode island?

Wait, who is preventing the entire population of California from moving to Rhode island?

I'm not aware of any regulations that forbid anyone from moving to Rhode island from California, except for things like house arrest or other things requiring someone to stay in one place.

What argument are you trying to make? It is not clear.

Just because borders are open does not mean that people will immediately move.

That said, CA and RI have similar quality of life, but Africa and North American probably do not. So CA/RI is not a good example.

You had me agreeing until the part about the NRA base going down with increased immigration. Now I'm all for it.

Purposeful demographic replacement of white people to achieve political ends. Lovely.

> Purposeful demographic replacement of white people to achieve political ends. Lovely.

Why is being white so important? What's the difference? If the difference is no NRA, sounds like a decent trade to me.

>Why is being white so important? What's the difference?

Replace "white" with "jewish" and you'd fit right in with holocaust deniers/apologist.

So just to be clear, you have no problem with ethnically cleansing a nation to change its political disposition?

>Replace "white" with "jewish" and you'd fit right in with holocaust deniers/apologist. So just to be clear, you have no problem with ethnically cleansing a nation to change its political disposition?

What? You're insinuating we're going through a White Holocaust and I'm apologizing for it. You gotta be out of your mind. "Ethnic cleansing"??? Take a breath and realize you're comparing concentration camps to people migrating for a job. What a sick way to trivialize one of the worst crimes of the 20th century.

> Replace "white" with "jewish" and you'd fit right in with holocaust deniers/apologist.

Exactly, or "white" with "American Indian" or "aboriginal" and you can see exactly how people in the past supported such atrocious policies.

It's scary how far some people will go to achieve political goals.

Are you totally unaware of how blatantly racist this is?

You replied to the wrong person. Otherwise explain.

You are equating the encouragement of immigration with the systematic murder of a population. This means that you are either very stupid, or motivated by the virulently racist notion that an undirected, gradual reduction of the demographic status of white people is somehow lamentable. kmicklas did you the favor of presuming you're not stupid.

Undirected? Our elite are encouraging it.

There are countless article published in mainstream media telling us why less white people is a good thing. "White guilt" is pushed heavily.

Can you imagine if the OP had said he was glad blacks were getting replaced in his town because it would help his pet political issue?

I'm a bit confused about why you (seem to) think that is a good analogy?

One wrinkle that might be part of your idea is that instead of comparing the act of promoting immigration to the act of genocide, you are instead comparing the defense of promoting immigration to a denial or approval of genocide. Perhaps this is what the analogy is based on?

However, I expect that you are aware that many people distinguish between killing members of a group or preventing them from reproducing, against just outnumbering the group? Some people tend to distinguish between those.

Another thing, you use the term "ethnically cleanse". The association's people generally have for that term usually include an active eradication. Not just ending up being in the minority of the population. Similarly, due to the word "racial" in the phrase, people often interpret it as referring to an act of effecting in a targeted manner those of some specific "race".

most People would generally not describe the act of dropping fat man and little boy as being acts of "racial cleansing", though they did result in the drastic decrease of a population of a particular ethnicity in a region. People are more interested in the number of deaths that occurred, and other damage done, than they are on the impacts on the population of a particular ethnicity.

For most people to consider something to be intended as "racial cleansing", they generally have to consider the the intent behind the action to be motivated by "racial" things, not just the action to happen to have an effect on "racial" things.

Let's put aside the admittedly inflammatory rhetoric. Are you arguing that if the government decided to peacefully change the population's demographics in order to make a currently unpopular political goal more achievable in the future, that would be okay?

Because that's about the most anti-democratic thing imaginable. In a democratic society it is absolutely, unconditionally wrong for the government to do such a thing. The government serves at the pleasure of the people, not the other way around!

No, I'm not really arguing that.

I'm mainly just arguing against the comparison to racial discrimination/eradication.

I agree with your point that replacing the people so that some different things will be voted for is harmful and undemocratic, at least if done by the government.

But the problem would be in corruption, basically, not genocide, as the one I responded to claimed, and I think that is an important distinction to make.

Bad arguments for things one agrees with should be refuted as well as for ones one disagrees with.

Although, a limitation on my agreement: many potential actions by a state could influence the population in an area in a way that might change how the area votes. I think it would be generally not a good idea to forbid all such actions, because that would only make it such that the impact of how it is set up does not change, it would not make it so that it does not have an effect. That's not to say that there shouldn't be protection against changes that would cause a harmful change in voting population, just that not everything that incidentally would have a change to voting population would be inherently bad.

In the end, I think, it should be the choice of the population as to whether the govt takes some action which could impact the composition of the population, provided that there is no other reason which it is either obligatory or impermissible to take the action in question.

If the population freely chooses an action which will impact the way they make future choices, it seems to me kind of like a person , for example, drinking alcohol, or taking a mind altering substance, whether it is a medicine or a harmful substance.

Unless the action is forbidden (such as, for example, an actual genocide) or obligatory (not sure of what an example would be here.) , the population would choose whether to take an action which would change itself.

Edit:

Something I thought of just after sending that:

Consider woman suffrage. That was a decision which influenced the collection of people who constituted the voting population. I think it was a good decision.

OK, then. I think a lot of people here got weirdly hung up on the nature of the demographic change, as if the skin color of the people affected somehow affects its morality.

With regards to women's suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment became part of the constitution after extensive public debate, overwhelming approval by Congress, and approval of a supermajority of state legislatures, exactly as spelled out in the Constitution; it also had support among the public. That was the epitome of a change effected in the proper democratic fashion.

So if the OP had said that he was glad the black people in his city were being replaced so that he could get better support for his pet political issue, you would have no problem with that?

Somehow I doubt you would say that in polite company.

What do you mean by replaced? Are you referring to an active specificly targeted removal, and replacement, or are you referring to an action which happens to cause a change in the proportion of ethnicities?

I've already said that I believe that the people should decide whether to take an action that would change the voting population, not just a decision by a single person,

And yes, an action that specifically targets people of a specific ethnicity would be a bad thing,

But not every action which has an influence on the demographics of an area wrt ethnicity is taken with the intent of influencing the demographics of an area wrt ethnicity. The influence can be incidental.

The thing I'm contesting is not that it would be appropriate for a government to cause more immigration in order to change voting patterns. Rather, I'm arguing against trying to make the topic be about ethnicity.

No one said "white". They said "immigrant". Incoming people of all colours are less likely to be pro-NRA than the average multi-generation American.

I can't prove this, but I bet it's true.

And the vast majority of immigrants are non-white.

So if the immigrants were required to have proportions roughly the same as current population proportions you wouldn't have a problem with increasing population for the purpose of changing political opinion?

What makes you think I would agree with that? Doesn't follow.

HN is no place for racial flamewars. You've taken this thread disastrously off-topic. Please stop, and please don't do it again.

The government should dissolve the people and elect a new one, then? Even as a joke that's in very poor taste.

So if black people in your state were being replaced, and that helped your pet political issue, you would cheer on their replacement?

Somehow I doubt you'd say that in polite company. Funny how blatantly racist rhetoric is okay... if the recipients are those mean old whites!

> Automation like this is why I call BS on the "we need more immigrants to keep the economy going!" folks.

This is a bit of a shortcut (and most don't realize it) to "more people doesn't necessarily mean less jobs to go around, as available work is not a finite product because of the amount of artificial demand an increased population can create".

We don't need more human drones; when properly funneled, increased immigration can mean a better economy.

> We don't need more human drones; when properly funneled, increased immigration can mean a better economy.

Agreed. Importing millions of unskilled laborers is insane as automation picks up. Those jobs will be made redundant in short order. (They probably already would have been, but a massive pool of cheap labor meant little incentive for automation. Similar to the first steam-engines being unused by the ancient Greek ruling class http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/HeroAndLoon.htm)

Bringing in the select best and brightest from other countries is certainly wise though.

Or bringing in more, and training people better. But this applies to the entire population through a better education system of course...

But as I stated regarding my point about automation, we don't need more people, we need less.

We already spend more than any other country per pupil. Many of the "broken" school systems have received massive influxes of cash (billions) and seen no improvement what so ever. Schools can only go so far it seems.

2 Billion spent in Kansas City to fix the schools. No appreciable result. I'm not convinced in the panacea of education. Something else is at work. The by country PISA scores are quite interesting.

I think those numbers don't add up. Decreasing population does nothing for the per capita need for working-class people. Unless you think laborers are dying off at a greater rate than the rest of us.

I don't understand, can you explain?

Increased automation definitely decreases the per capita need for working-class people.

We would probably have a lot more automation already (especially in low-end agriculture/service-industry) if not for a seemingly inexhaustible supply of cheap labor from south of the border.

Just noting it doesn't matter how our 'native' population grows or shrinks - we'll have about the same available labor supply per capita. In fact as we push education, our labor supply shrinks as the next generation aspires to more than lawn maintenance.

Import? We are not importing them. They migrate here because there is work. If there is no work, they won't come over here. It is basic supply and demand that is controlling this.

From the perspective of the elites who encourage unchecked mass immigration to drive down labor costs and secure reliable voting blocks "import" is quite accurate.

What about the immigrants in high-skilled labor?

The recent calls for increased immigration are mostly about STEM-trained immigrants, are they not?

Vast majority of immigrants are unskilled.

Letting in a few of the best and brightest from other countries makes sense. Importing millions of central/south American peasants is idiocy.

> The last thing we want to do is import even more low-skilled labor who will soon be made redundant.

This is the lump-of-labor fallacy. More immigrants means greater demand for labor (and other goods and services), not just greater supply and results in net job creation and wage increases for native workers. Automation isn't likely to change that, because the demand for labor is not fixed.

Yes I agree...instead of importing low skilled labor, we should import highly skilled immigrants. Increasing the H1B and employment based greencard quotas is absolutely necessary.

I think this would free migrant farm labor from having the burden of income, freeing them to be wondering poets. Reminds me a recycling sorting robot, which in my country is done by the mentally disabled. Just the kind of person you want to take a job away from.

I agree. Innovation and technological advances cause more harm than good. Break the threshing machines! Break them all!!

The industrialization of agriculture has made clear inroads on the problem of world hunger and has markedly increased the quality of food from the time when all farming was manual labor.

Sarcasm isn't your strong suit, is it?

Actually, it might not be yours; neither of those statements are true. Investigate how much the U.S. government spends on farming subsidies per year and then consider the fact that nutritious food which isn't loaded with pesticides, hormones, radiation, etc is currently considered a luxury good.

I like how loaded the term "loaded" is in this statement. /s

Happy to replace it with a different word if you'd like.

Radiation?

Most meat and produce is irradiated, yes.

You know that irradiation doesn't cause foodstuffs to themselves become radioactive, right?

Yeah I didn't mean to imply radioactivity.

Ah that's how I took it. Thanks for clarifying.

Crop insurance is one of the greatest advances in human history. I'm not even being sarcastic. It turns out subsistence farming and dying of starvation was pretty shitty.

Oh ok, so that's what the subsidies are preventing.

Are you sure? A survey in 1977 showed that just 6% of farmers bought or sold crop futures (i.e. insuring a price for their goods). And apparently 3 in 4 of these farmers were buying futures (i.e. speculating on crop prices) rather than selling them.

That doesn't mean that no one loses out in the process.

Don't forget to ban the plough. These unemployment causing disruptive technologies are ruining farming!

Well, banning the plow would also have saved a lot of topsoil.

http://world.time.com/2012/12/14/what-if-the-worlds-soil-run...

Jobs are pretty shitty, they get in the way doing any real work. If we can have a functional society where robots deal with all the manual labor, the owners of the robots get half the profits and the other half get spread uniformly amongst the populace, anybody who wants to work on things that demonstrably unprofitable like writing linux kernel, or teaching their children to read, or advanced math or analyzing adventure time for asinine thematic story telling, well, who knows what we might get done.

Unfortunately, that's not what is going to happen. The owners will just take all of the profits, maybe even get themselves a subsidy passed to promote the use of robots under some "green energy initiative" or something.

What's going to happen is decided by what everyone does. Owners keep all of the tech for themselves? We reverse engineer it and distribute it.

Economics is simply a game/system that shifts every couple of decades/centuries. Keep in mind the rules you're playing by can change at any time.

Would you recommend some reading that might elaborate upon your comment? I am inspired by this, and would like more information on this idea that economics is just a game that shifts throughout the decades between 'owners' and the rest of the population

"Capital in the Twenty-First Century" by Piketty would be an excellent place to start.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/05/ec...

"From this history, Mr Piketty derives a grand theory of capital and inequality. As a general rule wealth grows faster than economic output, he explains, a concept he captures in the expression r > g (where r is the rate of return to wealth and g is the economic growth rate). Other things being equal, faster economic growth will diminish the importance of wealth in a society, whereas slower growth will increase it (and demographic change that slows global growth will make capital more dominant). But there are no natural forces pushing against the steady concentration of wealth. Only a burst of rapid growth (from technological progress or rising population) or government intervention can be counted on to keep economies from returning to the “patrimonial capitalism” that worried Karl Marx. Mr Piketty closes the book by recommending that governments step in now, by adopting a global tax on wealth, to prevent soaring inequality contributing to economic or political instability down the road."

And remind me why I, as a farmer (hypothetically) who spent millions of dollars buying a piece if land and millions more to buy robots to work on it, then spends all his time worrying about maintenance and shipping and prices and pruning and planting and weeds and so forth... remind me why I should consent to having my profits confiscated and given to other organisms for no reason other than that they happen to be of the same species?

Imagine the social unrest when a large portion of the populace is literally of negative value. It's not going to be pretty.

We need to start thinking now about how we're going to achieve a smaller but more elite population, so only useful people get born.

one: taxes are your subscription to the society plan that offers you property rights and other elements that allow an investment in farm equipment to be profitable.

two: the metric you use to determine the value of a person is highly arbitrary, based on GDP, divorces are better for society than marriages, despite the fact that children going through divorces suffer in school and later go on to accomplish less, capitalism is generally too myopic to actually address any existential risks to the human race.

There's a finite population that a single planet can hold, so there will have to be some form of population control eventually.

Now, why the heck would you (the farmer entrepreneur) care about what the government does with the taxes it generates from your revenues? The question is: is your investment profitable enough? Everything else about your scenario is politics and, in a democracy, these things are decided (or supposed to if you drink from the cynic's cup) by the population.

If the farmer (as a person) disagrees, he can just not buy or buy in another country or planet or whatever. A post-scarcity society has value enough for some of us that we'd run such an automated farm for little profit if only to selfishly sustain said society.

Well, if your view on work is that we shouldn't make processes more efficient if it means taking jobs away, how about this: automate work and then pay people to dig a hole and fill it, paying them with the profits from the automation.

Now, maybe you think it'd be quite useless, so you might suggest cutting away the crap and just paying people to do nothing. Congrats, you are now a proponent of basic income!

Do the robots get basic income too? I mean eventually they're gonna agitate for their rights...

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