I'm a bit puzzled that the reaction on the Guardian to this development is primarily one of fear that robots are taking our jobs. Isn't anyone excited about how all this production and efficiency is going to make food extremely cheap?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-01/milk-spill...
Imagine removing humans from the food equation. Production (vertical farms), harvesting (automation), distribution (electric vehicles), clean energy inputs (geothermal, solar, fusion), and maintenance (growing crops that can be used to manufacture replacement parts [e.g., organic polymers and carbon-based electronics] combined with modular robotics) needs to be addressed. Difficult, but not insurmountable.
Once food is actually free (not merely inexpensive), how will it affect the economy? A large part of our economy is based on trading work (indentured servitude!) for food. Such trades probably predate agriculture.
Hunger, humanity’s everlasting, unrelenting stressor is timeless and impelling. Hunger calls us all to consume, to feed corporate machines. Machines that were forged in the flames of the Industrial Revolution, when rich men hammered out schemes for our future. Their plans, perhaps unwittingly, followed the template of slave-driven civilisations wrought throughout the ages. Caste societies wherewithin the wealthy commanded the masses through control of food and knowledge.
The printing press and, on a larger scale, the Internet liberated our minds. Wholly automated, indoor farming has the potential to liberate how we spend our time.
In 1974, Henry Kissinger (a national security operative of the U.S. government) once proposed rationing food in developing nations to restrict population growth. Starve people today to prevent people from starving tomorrow. How brilliant. Decades later, researchers learned that empowering women to make educated decisions about their own wombs reduces birth rates. Imagine that. Kissinger was shown to be wrong, but it took time to discover the flaws in his logic, the errors in his proposal.
With the pressures of work, family life, and other societal impacts, time is the most precious of commodities. What if the majority of the world didn't have to work for food, but, instead, could invest their time dedicated to something they love? (Yes, there are people who have the opportunity to love their work, but I assure you, when compared with the global population, they are an insignificant minority.)
I'm amazed that the drive to Japan's robotic future is human population centric driven:
The average age of their farmers is 65.9, young people don't want to be farmers, their population is in decline for many reasons...
Robot farming is critical to their bio and economic survival.
That fact alone is mind blowing to me. And awesome.
Some of the things they have brought about is the acceptance of "ugly" fruit and vegetables. It's not a big market but it's one that exists because young farmers ate pushing the market in this direction despite a fetish for perfect looking fruit and vegetables.
There is even a small movement to get young women into farming: http://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/yamagata-girls-farm/
I wonder where this claim came from? (not sure how serious the concern you're talking about is, but let's run with it) Who benefits from persuading concerned authorities to push more young people towards farming? How about farm owners, who would have to offer higher wages to a less-competitive job pool? I wonder if they found it cheaper to just tell interviewers that the sky was falling?
Whenever you hear someone claiming an urgent economic "crisis", be suspicious. Very suspicious. With a moderately healthy market, often this just means someone will have to pay higher prices--which, as far as they're concerned, is an outrage, a scandal, and an emergency.
Edit: Googled around to figure out what stories you might have read. And, let's see:
"... Japan Agriculture (JA). With its tight links to the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the agriculture ministry, and employing an astonishing 240,000 staff in Tokyo and around the country, the JA is probably Japan’s most powerful lobby. It campaigns to keep high import tariffs on farm goods: the tariff on rice is 777.7%, that on butter is 360%, while sugar attracts a 328% levy." http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21576154-fewer-bigger-plo...
"Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, has promised to protect “sacred cows” — including rice, beef and dairy — from the deal. Rice carries an almost spiritual significance here, not to mention a 778 percent tariff." https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/japans-farmers-face-an-...
Hahahaha, welp. Right, then, maybe you don't have a functioning market economy. That sounds to me like the real problem. I know my recommended solution. Hmm, I find it cool that I "called" that one. It's also kind of interesting to see what these Western publications are doing, and how far it leans towards uncritically swallowing the crisis story.
The Economist one is focusing on the TPP, and it is mostly critical of the JA. The Washington Post one--I give them credit for mentioning the important facts, but they exhibit no sense of their proper weight or their meaning. The article is titled "Japan’s farmers face an existential crisis", the first time they mention the agricultural lobby is in the 7th paragraph, and generally it seems like "Oh, gee, things just are that way" amid a sea of distracting details: portraits of individual farmers, their history and aging concerns, oh and by the way it takes a combined effort from the local and federal governments to "experiment" with "reform" of a few farms because they're so heavily intertwined that the government insulates them from market competition with a 4x-8x trade barrier and who knows what else, and also here's what this proud farmer has to say about his profession. Eeh. Just strikes me as bizarre.
Transport, I think, would hurt more, but I don't know enough about it to say for sure.
Rather, I'm trying to take a look at these percentages of farming workforces by country: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS and trying to see what is this new monster of globalization + automation going to do to countries like Egypt, Pakistan, and basically any country that registers anything over 20% on that website.
It's my opinion that the next 20 to 40 years are going to be formative when it comes to introducing technology that could radically change a country's class system - Automated transportation in the US being that technology case study. Others will look to the US to see how and if a technology that is developed in large parts in the US is allowed to take over US jobs. At what rate does the it take place? Will there be limitations? Will it be mandated by your Congress? What will happen to your economy?
There was a really good AMA on reddit recently about the economics and ethics of automation and when it came to transportation, the writing was one the wall: it's going to get worse before it gets better. https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/45k2pv/science_ama...
Not sure what you mean by that. The US is a net food exporter by more than 70 million metric tons.
Yes, other countries have more people in farming by percentage. But those people will be pushed out of farming by automation whether or not there are robotic farms.
you're right, http://www.fdaimports.com/blog/how-much-of-u-s-food-is-impor... but it doesn't change the matter of concern: what happens to those other countries' economic development when a large percentage of their workforce is rapidly made non-existent.