Thank you! I’ve always said that would have made more sense. It explains why they kept humans around and is especially creepy.
That said, I’m ok with having AI overlords as long as they keep us well supplied with green chile. That’s chile with an E. Chili with an i is made with meat and beans. Our AI overlords presumably know the difference too.
But would this machine even be necessary?
I mean, I hear all the time that those (insert expletive here) Mexicans are taking all the jobs, so if they’re not doing the pepper picking, we should definitely alert the TeaGOP to this fortunate oversight.
I just know all the unemployed pro-wall building folks will be scrambling to get one of those prime chile picking jobs!
FTFY
Add “flower fluffer” to list of jobs I didn’t know existed
You can get a job tickling vanila flowers with a soft paintbrush if thats your thing.
Challenges the traditional meaning of “vanilla” somewhat…
I totally agre. But I figure you can only tackle one heresy at a time.
“rubbing flower parts together” - are people now so poorly educated that they don’t know what “pollinating” means any more?
Sometimes I wonder if Tomatoes on the Vine might be a surrender to the impossibility of a machine pluck-- whether marketing has driven its target market (myself included) to pay more for something that was produced at lower cost.
But they smell nice, and are an attractive hue, so what do I know?
The first line of that article sums up my experience with strawberries, so I guess the plan is to ruin all fruit in the same manner. Future generations probably won’t know how produce used to taste and we’ll wind up in some variant of this scene from Soylent Green:
Polination sounds like it could be a sterile process, to be filed neatly away for later recall.
Q. How do plants have Sex?
A. Pollination.
But if you’re interested in how polination actually works in practice? In an ecological, or an evolutionary sense?
It involves a carrier species rubbing against stamens, and rubbing against pistils.
Please file this information for later recall, in case the bees die, and you need to replace them with robots.
If the issue is back breaking work then have they considered raised beds so people don’t have to bend?
I see where this is going. Peppers engineered to be picked by machines. Software bloat eventually causes machines to become self aware. Machines re-engineer themselves to run on chili power and enslave humanity. Peppers have to be re-engineered to be easily picked by meat machines.
GirlChild loves strawberries, and was amazed to find that you can actually grow them, and if you’re patient and pick them at peak, that they absolutely blow store strawberries out of the water.
I guess the lesson is that if you like flavor, find an heirloom variety that you like, and grow it yourself.
The Chinese “facing heaven pepper” is called that because it grows pointing upwards. I wonder if that makes it easier to harvest…
Declining willingness for chili growing? Great for my retirement plan!
No machines to pick fruit nicely? Great for my innovation plan!
Forward with failure!
So who is going to put all the bee pollination videos on pornhub?
And if you want to grow chillies, there are more heirloom varieties than you will know what to do with.
I started with this one.
A pepper-picking robot is fine, until it stops to scratch its balls. That’s when the trouble starts.
I think this is a unicorn chaser 
Man with chiles you’ve got a whole community that’s dedicated to crossbreeding new weird and progressively hotter varieties as well (not just the heirloom or cultural group exclusive breeds). Just as Hatch chile has started to get wider distribution and brand value for bigger places like Trader Joe’s, it seems like other varieties are starting to gain traction (I love that Nambe chile is getting easy to get/popular).
