We don’t know if picking blackberries at scale is something people enjoy doing. But if you do, we have bad news. The University of Arkansas wants to put you out of a job in favor of your new robot overlord. It turns out that blackberries in Arkansas alone are a $24 million business. The delicate berries are typically hand-picked.
The robot hand that can do the same job has three soft fingers and tendons made from guitar strings. Each finger has a force sensor at the tip so it can squeeze the berries just right. How much force does it take to grab a blackberry? To find out, researchers placed sensors on the fingers of experienced pickers and used the data to guide their design. Researchers claim they were inspired by the motion of a tulip opening and closing each day.
Your berry picking job is safe for now, though. They don’t have the vision system to actually find the berries. Not yet, anyway. Of course in the meantime, the gripper could be used for anything that needs a delicate touch.
Oddly, everyone seems to want to develop robots to pick agricultural items. We are usually more interested in a different kind of picking.
The basal human urge to automate away the basics of survival – food, clothing and housing so that humans can be free and pursue better (or worse) things
… is effectively tying basics of survival to tech giants oligopole and thus endangering humans as a whole, when the interests of industrial countries contradict – or plainly collide. And effectively enslaving the countries that do not have this technological capacity.
Open-sourcing everything can be a remedy to this plague.
…. free to climb into their fully immersive computer game pod installed in the garage. No need for real life anymore.
Basically what everyone has done the past few years anyway. Outside is still a ghost town except for a couple places
We’re on a path to universal basic income. The only way to avoid mass severe poverty which would be disastrous for everyone. Various trials of UBI have proven effective at motivating people to participate more in society either through volonteer work or starting small businesses that serve the community. Robotics and AI must be managed responsibly in step with UBI. This is an opportunity to free millions from slave-like work that barely provides an existance.
Agree completely, but the problem is transition. We need some way to get away from our current “people work in return for money” system to UBI.
For example, any company installing robots to do most of the labor will fire the workers (or not need workers in the first place), and the owner wants to keep the profits, and the extra workers put more stress on the limited amount of work available.
Taken to the logical conclusion, if almost all manual labor is done with robots then nearly all humans will be out of a job and have no money to spend, so robot replacement is self limiting.
(You might consider a similar situation with outsourcing. If all labor is outsourced to other countries, the entire population will have no jobs and therefore no money to spend.)
We need a solution that transitions from our current model to UBI, and we’re going to need it soon. Like, in the next 25 years or so.
UBI will need to be a perk of citizenship, or entire countries worth of people will go wherever they can get the biggest benefit (relative to cost of living).
The money that’s paid out has to represent something real, even in abstract, or it’ll hyperinflate. It won’t be an infinite resource, and will probably have to come from an “automation tax” paid by industries.
Yeah our current mass migration paradigm completely breaks this. People cannot define what a citizen is (except for some countries which for some reason it’s not a massive human rights violation when they refuse to give you a passport if you squat out a baby on their soil).
Partial or uneven or slow roll-out of UBI would be a disaster with current porous borders, it would be an immediate tragedy of the commons. And any attempt to fix it would be met with cries of holocaust. That already happens with much smaller implementations or precursor systems.
Tell me you’re a racist without telling me you’re a racist…
@J. Samson
Sorry, that doesn’t work anymore. Please provide a real rebuttal.
Nah. We are just overdo to tweak the current “do work to get money” system a bit. It’s a good system that has gotten us far. But what we have missed is that it must be constantly tweaked as the need for labor is reduced.
1) Pay people enough that they don’t need to work more than fulltime
Pretty self explanatory. If it’s not worth paying a living wage to do it maybe it’s not worth being done at all? This is not to say that a person who is only working a fraction of full time should expect to be able to support themselves that way.
Arguments like “what about kids’ jobs” are dumb. There is no such thing,. Who runs the restaurants and stores during the school day? And even if there was… if a kid and an adult are doing the same job at the same quality for the same hour how is the kid entitled to any less compensation? If the kid however is not doing a good quality job, what employer puts up with that?
Kids should not be working full time though. That’s for school!
2) Universal Socialized Healthcare
The market system works great for many things but when the demand side of the supply and demand equation is one’s life or health.. it’s like having a gun to your head. Give me all your money!
But more to the point… in some sectors such as factories there is a huge pressure to always work tons of overtime. I’m talking 90 hour weeks! Companies would rather pay time and a half, even double time than hire more workers because more workers means more healthcare benefits to pay. This means fewer people are employed for the same work.
Yes many will be upset to lose that sweet sweet overtime money. But I’ve been there. Some haven’t seen the light of day since the Reagan administration. The money gets blown on stupid stuff in trying to make oneself feel happy when the real problem is not having a life because of always being at work. Let it go! Of course.. I am talking about jobs that pay decent wages to begin with. See number 1.
3) Do more things
Make some new jobs by doing more things. Add another year to school, hire more teachers and teach more subjects. Take better care of our public places. Reinvigorate the space program. Make use of the time and energy that are freed up by automation to actually do something!
4) Shrink the work day
After accomplishing steps 1 through 3 there will probably be plenty of jobs to go around for now. But over time as labor saving devices continue to be invented this may not be the case. Well, 40 hour work weeks were invented in the 1930s. As technology reduces labor maybe we eventually have to shrink it.
But how would people live off of less hours. Well, see #1. If the definition of full time shrinks then pay per hour must rise. But how will companies afford to pay? Well.. we are talking about a time when things are much more automated. They are paying for less labor. There is more profit.
5) Free money?????
Steps 1-4 plus a good social safety net for people who cannot work should cover all our problems for the forseeable future. We don’t need to transition to some sort of free money system any time soon. Such an idea should be left for a time when the labor needed to run our society has come very close to zero. We can dream about that but can we even prove it is possible? That’s a future for some other generation to think about, if it’s even a real future at all.
overdue not overdo
Is that you Mr. Stalin? Your dream of communist economy was a nightmare that could not produce equitable amounts of food, not to mention things like bicycles or film cameras. Just let the people work and decide for themselves instead of letting others do it.
Read it again. The only market I proposed significant change to was health care. Everything else was just a little tweaking of the minimum wage (which use to be a lot higher than it is now when adjusted for inflation anyway) and then, only if there still isn’t enough work to go around slowly lowering the number of hours that count as full time.
Everything else was still the same Capitalism we have today.
Perhaps you wanted to argue with the parent post that was proposing UBI?
I mean, if Americans suddenly had less access to food, is that really a bad thing?
Have you met … people?
People have been saying something similar ever since the first ox was domesticated as labor.
UBI is DOA, have fun with the techno-tankie fantasy
Kokan Berry harvesters already do this job far more efficiently than any fingered bot could. 3 people operation picks the equivelent of 200 pickers harvesting 1000 kg/hr and 4 hectares per day with an estimated ROI of 2 seasons, Less if youre multiharvesting as these machines can be adjusted for blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, and more.
https://youtu.be/jT2T6-NqXQ4?si=72ZB7wLKzbpoahN6&t=21
This is a similar concept to how cranberries are harvested. The bogs are flooded and the bushes are beaten so that the berries will fall into the water. The berries are then filtered out of the water as it flows out of the bog.
If you’ve never had the chance to pick your own berries I highly recommend it. The experience is fun, but the quality is so much better. Living in the US I would say maybe 2 in 100 blueberries are “good” and the shelf life is poor. Picking my own at a farm I would say 95 out of 100 are “great” and last way longer.
Automation is cool and all, and I’m sure it will improve, but mass production cuts quality in ways that I don’t think the average person has an understanding of. It’s really sad to me. I’m pretty sure I had never had a great blueberry or strawberry in my life until my mid to late thirties.
THE worst experience of my childhood. You should see the smiles on faces of my sister and me, when we were finally getting rid of that blackcurrant patch. It was hard job for two teenagers to cut all those bushes, but we motivated each other with “yeah, but no more black currants!”. I still hate black currant juice to this day.
Oh yeah, the only nice thing, getting praise from workers at local greengrocer for how good quality you brought. But yes, growing a small amount for yourself will always taste much better. Unless your single tree didn’t produce anything this year because there was frost a week too late.
You should pick blackberries in south Louisiana, USA, some time. I grew up there. Delicious berries barely outweighed by the hazards of picking them:
Thorns on the canes. Like trying to pick berries off of a rose bush.
Mosquitos and chiggers. Blood sucking little bastards chasing you all the time.
Wasps and bees. They love sweet stuff, too. Nothing like grabbing a berry with a red wasp hidden on the back side. Get (painfully) stung by the wasp, then get all scratched up when you jerk your hand back in pain.
Rattlesnakes and cottonmouth snakes. Both venomous,. both hiding from the heat of the day in the shade of the brambles.
Fingers colored red and purple from the overripe berries that burst in your hand.
Blackberries grow wild in Germany as well (where I now live.) Most of the worst dangers are gone, replaced by a single hazard – fox tapeworms. You have to pick the berries above the height at which a fox can piss on or otherwise contaminate the berries. The worst part about the worms is that you can’t really see the eggs. You have to do it blind and never eat raw berries – you have to cook them into something to kill the worms.
For all that, I get a hankering for a blackberry cobbler now and then – which reminds me that I’ve got a bunch of them frozen, waiting for a cool fall day to be made into a cobbler and topped with a scoop of vanilla icecream,.
Ya but no, robo picker has nothing on me, ha!, bwaaaaa, haaaaaaa, heh!, heeeeeeeeee
been a berry pickin fool since I was little, and I will.go into a patch
bare foot, no shirt, just cut offs, and snake my way into where the berrys are biggest and best……after a good hike in…..for no other reason than I can
* keep pounding those keys and working on a florecent tan, I’ll be munchin my way through the brier patch*……lots for everybody
Riiiggggtttt. Come out to the Willamette Valley of Oregon that is overrun with invasive/wild Himalayan and Evergreen blackberries that grow literally everywhere (and are wonderfully ripe right now) but not in neat, easily harvested rows. If the automated harvester could fare even as well as the people working the roadsides and forest paths, it might be quite a proposition, but otherwise mechanical harvesters are already working on geometrically convenient varieties.