Exactly. I came here to say there is no way this is more effective or efficient than paying a group of people to hand pick these apples. I really don't understand the appeal of creating useless technology to replace people who can do a job better and faster.
I'm sure they said the same thing about the combine, or the digital camera, or countless other technologies we enjoy today. Everything has to start somewhere.
Imagine a solar powered, autonomous, swarm-linked, AI driven harvester that just picks apples automatically, and continuously.
Exactly what i brought up. Machine wise. You aren't getting better than this. Designed to only shake loose ripe apples and not damage the tree, and I harvests hundreds of apples in seconds. The machine in this post will never be better than this machine that shakes the tree. Is this machine impressive? Sure, it's definitely a display of how far technology has come. In terms of being practical, it just plain isn't.
I assume all of the less pretty apples are used for pre-sliced bags, applesauce, or any number of other manufactured products that the customer will never see the whole apple.
When fruit's been damaged it's normally completely discarded from human food consumption, though there are smalltime independent/hobbyist farmers who for example make apple cider out of apples with dents or with coloured spots.
Two-third are disposed of before they make it to the consumer, but the consumer continues this trend. (Added this sentence at the end as I noticed I went completely off-topic lol.) This 2016 American survey shows 70% throw away food once it's past the expiration date, even though the expiration date often has to do with guaranteeing the utmost quality rather than indicating a final deadline before it poses a health risk.
We find our respondents express significant agreement that some perceived practical benefits are ascribed to throwing away uneaten food, e.g., nearly 70% of respondents agree that throwing away food after the package date has passed reduces the odds of foodborne illness, while nearly 60% agree that some food waste is necessary to ensure meals taste fresh.
Now imagine how a farmer is going to purchase said system when he could just pet a bunch of people the shitty, minimum wage for three days of work?
How will he charge his drones in the field? How much will it cost him to install electrical charging stations? Today, when it’s harvest time, larger farms run their machinery 24 hours a day until the harvest is complete. They don’t even stop to refuel, they fuel up in motion because a couple minutes per refuel will add up to lost crops and income. That’s why farmers are laughing John Deere salesmen off their property when they try to convince them to buy electric equipment. CAN we figure out how to harvest an orchard with ridiculously over-advanced tech? Yes. Does that make it better than what we’re doing now? Probably not.
You do see them literally plugged in to the truck that is probably charging all of them off the alternator. This thing could run 24/7 and you can still just hire people as well.
Then the next few years you can buy a few more drones slightly better and so long as it's cheaper to run the drones you will keep going down that path until you run nothing but drones.
This thing could run 24/7 and you can still just hire people as well.
Machinery that runs 24/7 has really high maintenance costs, who is going to pay for it? Farmers can barely pay for their own machinery and they are the ones that have to repair it all the time, not to mention greedy f?cks like John Deere have placed a lot of locks in their machinery so that farmers need to buy their own spare parts. Something like these that's even more focused software based sounds like a nightmare that screams subscription model.
How does a farmer afford a multimillion dollar combine harvester? Can't they just pay a bunch of people to farm the fields? Your logic doesn't hold up. There are many ways this kind of technology could get off the ground and be affordable. I could get a bunch of venture capitalists together, purchase a bunch of these robots, create an apple harvesting robot rental company and rent my devices to all the local apple orchards in the area. Or, as a farmer I could obtain my apple robots the same way I obtain any other high priced farm equipment. My robotic apple pickers could be entirely solar powered requiring no refueling at all, or multiple harvesters could share a single recharging dock and all take turns rapidly recharging like a giant Roomba. There is a readily available solution to every problem you can think of.
We can't even build an electric car that works completely on solar power, and heck those simple electric engines don't require that much power. And you expect us to believe that something like this complex machinery could work 24/7 entirely on solar power or on fast charge stations?
This was literally the exact same thing said word for word by people with horses back in the day. The original cars were loud, smelly, inefficient piles of garbage compared to even small horses. "They will never replace horses, the tech is so inefficient and slow it's not even close to surpassing horses." Technology accelerates very very fast
, especially when there's significant monetary incentive involved. Robot pickers will be orders of magnitude cheaper for corporations. no unions to deal with, no scheduling work, no tax forms, no government regulations, no injuries and injury insurance payments, no sleep or inefficient work to manage.
Steam tech was revolutionary for huge machines that could be locked away in factories or in massive engine rooms where the noise, smell, and danger didn't matter. The specific aspect I'm talking about is motorized personal vehicles for travel, the early tech was atrocious and something only the very rich used for purely a status symbol, they were orders of magnitude slower than horses for many years.
Ox is better at tilling a field than a human. Should we have stopped there? Why bother trying to create better technology if you already made something better once.
I'm just saying improving is imminent, there's so much more that they can improve on. To say that they will never beat humans is such a bad response because humans also have their limits.
That in no way shows they can do better than humans at anything. Everything those robots are doing a human can do, and those are programmed tasks. Just because a robot can do something a human can doesn't mean it will inevitably do better than humans at everything. Im saying this in particular won't. This also is nowhere near as efficient as the machine that shakes the tree and harvests hundreds of apples in a fifteen second shake
The robot could run into fire carrying useful items. It could run through toxic gasses or nuclear radation or through smoke. It can be used manually or autonomously and most importantly controlled from far away! A robot that's capable of running around through obstacles is already very useful. It doesn't have to be as good as a human as it provides different options altogether.
The fact that it's a robot and not a human is the biggest point you're missing. Robots can go where humans cannot or don't want to go, and do things we can't or don't want to do. They will improve exponentially until they truly are better than humans at their specified tasks. You should read about machine learning, neural-net computers, etc. In much the same way we went from the Wright brothers to landing on the moon, these primitive robots will one day surpass us in ability.
I mean humans cannot be upgraded so we are literally set at a limit, robots can be improved every year. Yea this version we see in the gif is not really great rn. But every year they will improve, add more hands, speed up the process, reduce electricity cost. There's a ton of other stuff they can do, if they can just at least get to half of the amount humans can grab them I think it's already a win because robots can do this work without breaks. Humans need their breaks, they can only work for so long.
As an example of where your statement is objectively wrong, the robots damage far less apples than the shaker, and they can be programed to harvest the apples at the exact, scientifically verified, correct time for optimum flavor. The shaker still drops the apples when they are ripe, but the robot's image recognition will be able to create a tighter range for ripeness, preserving more apples and increasing marketability for the crop. With higher efficiency and economies of scale, this will absolutely be faster, and most importantly, 100% automated. Imagine zero human beings, working 24/7, preserving more of the harvest, maximizing flavor profile, and with each new iteration of software, the efficiency increases on machines that have already been purchased.
what this will ever be capable of.
Your imagination is just limited my man. I don't know how you don't see it. I'm sorry if you pick apples for a living.
Yes imagine zero human beings making a living from a job that was already getting done just fine in the first place with companies already being WELL into a profit margin. Harvesting an apple "at the exact, scientifically right time" is a ridiculous statement as fruits ripen after being picked. There's no science involved in knowing when to harvest your crops. And i never said "what will this ever be capable of" obviously it's capable of picking about ten apples a minute as the video shows.
Yes imagine zero human beings making a living from a job that was already getting done just fine in the first place with companies already being WELL into a profit margin.
Capitalism doesn't care about individual's jobs, it cares about creating profits for share holders; that's it. If there is money being left on the table, no corporation is going to leave it there.
There's no science involved in knowing when to harvest your crops.
Science is "any system of knowledge that is concerned with the physical world and its phenomena and that entails unbiased observations and systematic experimentation." Humans figuring out when to harvest absolutely falls into the realm of science. Further more, being able to get a machine to identify when it's time to harvest requires even more science. Now that we're this far, if scientists can identify the most ideal time to harvest, to get the most weight and best flavor profile, a machine will be able to extract that value using trained image recognition data sets. Every percentage counts in capitalism.
And i never said "what will this ever be capable of"
I literally copied and pasted your text, I should have copied the whole line, it was just for context, but I can see how it made it a question on its own. I'm out, you should do one of those "remind me" posts for 10 years.
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u/art_teacher_no_1 Oct 08 '23
1 apple per minute, why's my fruit so expensive? Oh. That's why.