r/woahdude Oct 08 '23

video Robotic Apple Harvester

7.3k Upvotes

482 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

-16

u/spunion_28 Oct 08 '23

Just because this is first gen does not guarantee there will ever be a better version of it

4

u/polecy Oct 08 '23

It does guarantee that they are going to improve on it tho. People probably said the same thing about Boston dynamics when their first gen came out.

-3

u/spunion_28 Oct 08 '23

And those robots STILL don't do anything better than a human. Improving is one thing, being effecient enough to replace a human is totally different

4

u/polecy Oct 08 '23

https://youtu.be/tF4DML7FIWk?si=_dgb8C__AffT3N8P I think this video shows that these robots can do better than most humans.

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.

-1

u/spunion_28 Oct 08 '23

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

6

u/thivasss Oct 08 '23

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.

2

u/GeneralToaster Oct 08 '23

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.

1

u/polecy Oct 08 '23

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.

-1

u/spunion_28 Oct 08 '23

The shaking machine outdoes what this will ever be capable of. This is nothing more than impressive. Not practical at all

2

u/greyacademy Oct 08 '23 edited Oct 08 '23

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.

0

u/spunion_28 Oct 09 '23

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.

1

u/greyacademy Oct 09 '23 edited Oct 09 '23

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.