If anything, you could find a way to get these giant mfs to drive on their own with some remote instructions maybe, but I guess that doesn’t scratch some people’s itch of owning humans and having them harvest wheat one by one
Advanced farm machinery is semi-autonomous right now. It’s really really cool and also a critical point of tension in capitalism as the needs of farmers, ag megacorps, heavy industry firms, and people who eat food are all pulling in different directions.
While I’m a pretty heavy autonomous cars skeptic, autonomous farm machinery is much more reasonable and much closer.
There’s a few companies already producing test combine harvesters for example and there’s been at least one farm here in the UK which is staffed by researchers working to make it 100% autonomous, with quite a bit of success. There’s also been pretty big jumps in harvesting robots and complete indoor argriculture systems. But all of it is either automated versions of contemporary farm vehicles or production-line like arm robots for growing indoors.
If anything, you could find a way to get these giant mfs to drive on their own with some remote instructions maybe, but I guess that doesn’t scratch some people’s itch of owning humans and having them harvest wheat one by one
Advanced farm machinery is semi-autonomous right now. It’s really really cool and also a critical point of tension in capitalism as the needs of farmers, ag megacorps, heavy industry firms, and people who eat food are all pulling in different directions.
While I’m a pretty heavy autonomous cars skeptic, autonomous farm machinery is much more reasonable and much closer.
There’s a few companies already producing test combine harvesters for example and there’s been at least one farm here in the UK which is staffed by researchers working to make it 100% autonomous, with quite a bit of success. There’s also been pretty big jumps in harvesting robots and complete indoor argriculture systems. But all of it is either automated versions of contemporary farm vehicles or production-line like arm robots for growing indoors.
Oh… the really REALLY expensive ones are.
Word. How much does a cutting edge combine cost now? Like a million us dollars or somethjing?