Watch a robot do rapid-fire gardening

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Terribly unclear until the better angle at 1min30:

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  1. Love the actual machine design, with the expansion/compression dynamic, very clever.

  2. The people at the end sticking the labels in = quality control. Or is that just a pity shot to show that, yes, we still have humans in our factory?

  3. Insert plant plant joke here.

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Love the wet t-shirt shot at the end.

Eventually (probably soon) this is how crops will be weeded. Weeding is the perfect task for a robot - repetitive, low skilled labor.

I often wonder about how various things are made, but that’s something I hadn’t gotten around to wondering about yet. Neat!

Introducing the GA-Roomba!

And yeah @kthejoker, I caught the humans inserting the ID tags, too, and found it somewhat laughable.

Oh good. Capital replacing labor. That should work out very nicely for Bob. And his former workers are now enjoying lives of leisure, without a doubt.

I get your point, but these seedling flats can be expensive. Depending on the plant and the chance of it dying, it sometimes is as expensive to buy these as it would be to just buy the tomato/pepper/beans several month later. I’ve had $10-$20 of strawberry plants yield a single fruit. If automation drives the cost of these down, it probably makes small-scale gardening economical or even a feasible part-time job for thousands of hobbyist gardeners, either saving grocery money or generating income. It also may mean that this company was able to expand to twice its capacity while only hiring 20% more staff. If their lower costs actually grew their market, it wouldn’t necessarily cut the number of people working in that sector either. Cheaper seedlings means fewer people planting the seeds themselves in their basements, and more people buying these instead of just letting the weeds take over their gardens. The net benefit of automation to jobs/income/food independence could be huge.

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Mexican does it… THEY ARE STEALING OUR JOBS!
Robot does it… USA USA USA!!!

Although technologies often have negative externalities, it’s still unrealistic to fault them for being imprecise tools of social engineering that fail to deliver personalized utopias.

Is it okay to fault the sociopathic owners of those technologies ?

Imported laborers = spreading the wealth = socialism.
Robots = concentration of wealth in the hands of the owners = capitalism.

“Made in the USA… by robots!”

Is planting flowers an antisocial personality trait?

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