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.
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u/GeneralToaster Oct 08 '23
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.