#robotic labor

[techninja]

Increasing Farm Profitability Through Automation and Efficiency

Revolutionizing Agriculture with Robotics

Introduction

In recent years, agriculture has undergone a profound transformation, thanks to advancements in robotic technology. These innovations have not only revolutionized the way we cultivate crops but have also significantly improved efficiency, productivity, and sustainability in the agricultural sector. In this article, we delve deep into the world of agricultural robots, exploring their various applications, benefits, and the future they promise for farming.

The Rise of Agricultural Robots

Farm Automation

Agricultural robots, also known as agribots or agricultural drones, are automated machines designed to perform tasks traditionally carried out by human farmers. From planting and harvesting to crop monitoring and irrigation, these robots are capable of executing a wide range of agricultural activities with precision and efficiency.

Precision Farming

One of the most significant benefits of agricultural robots is their ability to enable precision farming practices. By utilizing sensors, GPS technology, and data analytics, these robots can accurately assess the health and needs of individual plants, allowing farmers to tailor their farming practices accordingly. This targeted approach not only maximizes yield but also minimizes the use of resources such as water and fertilizers, thereby promoting sustainability.

Applications of Agricultural Robots

Planting and Seeding

Agricultural robots play a crucial role in the planting and seeding process, ensuring precise spacing and depth for optimal germination and growth. Equipped with advanced navigation systems, these robots can navigate rough terrain and varying conditions with ease, covering large acreages in a fraction of the time it would take traditional methods.

Crop Monitoring and Management

Crop monitoring is essential for farmers to assess the health and development of their crops throughout the growing season. Agricultural robots equipped with sensors and cameras can provide real-time data on crop conditions, including moisture levels, nutrient content, and pest infestations. This allows farmers to identify issues early on and take proactive measures to mitigate potential crop losses.

Harvesting

Perhaps one of the most labor-intensive tasks in agriculture, harvesting is also one of the most critical stages in the farming process. Agricultural robots equipped with sophisticated manipulators and vision systems can automate the harvesting process, selectively picking ripe fruits or vegetables with precision and care. This not only reduces the reliance on manual labor but also ensures a higher quality yield.

Weed Control

Weeds compete with crops for nutrients, water, and sunlight, posing a significant challenge for farmers. Agricultural robots equipped with weed detection systems and precision sprayers can accurately identify and target weeds while minimizing herbicide use. This targeted approach helps farmers maintain crop health while reducing the environmental impact of weed control methods.

The Future of Agriculture

Advancements in Robotics

As technology continues to advance, the capabilities of agricultural robots are only expected to grow. From autonomous navigation to machine learning algorithms, future robots will be smarter, more efficient, and more adaptable to the changing needs of farming.

Sustainability and Efficiency

Agricultural robots hold the key to a more sustainable and efficient agricultural future. By optimizing resource utilization, minimizing waste, and reducing the environmental impact of farming practices, these robots can help ensure food security for future generations while preserving our planet.

Conclusion

In conclusion, agricultural robots are transforming the farming landscape, offering farmers a myriad of benefits ranging from increased productivity and efficiency to enhanced sustainability and profitability. As technology continues to evolve, the future of agriculture looks brighter than ever, thanks to the tireless efforts of innovators and entrepreneurs in the field of robotics. Embracing these technological advancements is not just a choice but a necessity for farmers looking to thrive in an ever-changing world.

[rednblacksalamander]

I'm not anti-technology, I just think there's something deeply sick about a society where robots make art and children work in factories.

[thehmn]

Futuristic stories about robots are always like “The robots do all the jobs that nobody wants” which is the biggest lie I’ve ever heard. Loads of people want to do manual jobs. I know a guy who gave up his job at the post office to become a garbage collector. The worst job I ever had was at a travel company because I hated sitting on my ass all day. I much prefer being a cleaner. As long as we get a proper salary and aren’t worked to death we’re more than happy to do it.

What the stories should really be about is “The higher-ups don’t want to pay people so they made robots to do it. They started with manual labor and spread the lie that nobody wants those jobs anyway. You think your job is safe just because it’s seen as less dirty? They’ll find a way to replace you too”

[bowletta]

here's a compilation of all the scenes removed from the HD release of srmt! I rewatched all 52 episodes twice for the footage above : ] sorry some of the scenes only have low quality uploads available.

there were over 50 scenes cut, nearly all of which were under 3 seconds long.

between all of season one and two, only 4 scenes were cut. in contrast, every episode except two of season 4 had content cut.

I made a doc here detailing exact episode timestamps and links for those who are interested vvv

(https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u0EKrektsJCwUWbeGkReCSkX-A1c8zc1Y3OqoXAdEko/edit?usp=sharing)

enjoy!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The REAL AI automation threat to workers

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Long before the current wave of AI hype, we were being groomed for automation panics with misleading stories. Remember this one? "'Truck driver' is the most common job in America. Self-driving trucks are just around the corner. How can we prevent America's army of truckers from turning into a howling mob when the robots steal their jobs?"

https://futurism.com/millions-of-jobs-are-at-risk-but-their-loss-could-be-for-the-greater-good

It was absolute nonsense. First of all, "truck driver" isn't a particularly common job in America! The BLS lumps together all cargo vehicle drivers under a single classification. The category error here was thinking that every delivery van driver, furniture mover, and courier is behind the wheel of a big rig, cracking wise on a CB radio as they tear up the interstate.

But what about automation threats? It's possible that if we redesigned the interstates to give 16 wheelers their own separated lanes, and then set them to following one another, that they could traverse long distances in that way. Congratulations, you've just invented a shitty, failure-prone train.

"Shitty train AI" does not threaten the job of the vast number of people the BLS classifies as "truck drivers." For one thing, "shitty train AI" isn't going to pilot a UPS van around the streets of a busy city with other road users. Sure, a few robotaxi companies have bamboozled city governments into conscripting the city's residents into an uncontrolled murderbot experiment. These are not going well:

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/9-key-leaders-depart-gms-cruise-amid-ongoing-investigation-into-san-francisco-incident/

More than $100b has been set on fire chasing the robotaxi dream, and the result is most charitably described as a technological curiosity, requiring 1.5 high-waged remote technicians to replace each low-waged driver:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

But even if we could perfect this technology, robots still wouldn't replace all those "truckers" who drive delivery vans (to say nothing of moving vans!). The hard part of driving a UPS van isn't just getting it from place to place – it's getting the parcel into the place. The robo-van would still need at least one person to get the parcel from the back of the van and into the reception desk, porch, or other delivery zone. It's not going to fire those parcels at your door with a catapult. It's also not going to deliver them by drones. Drone delivery is another one of those historical curiosities, capable of delivering a very narrow range of parcels, under even narrower circumstances:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#droned

If all UPS delivered was lightweight, non-fragile rectangular parcels ordered by people with large, unobstructed back yards, then sure. Congrats, you've just created the world's least-useful parcel delivery service!

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/06/amazon-drone-delivery-service-seeks-faa-approval-to-launch-in-2022/

All that said, the big rig drivers probably don't need to worry about robots stealing their jobs. It's not even clear that "shitty train" is within our technological grasp, but even if it is, there's yet another problem with the AI automation trucker jobpocalypse: "trucker" is already one of the worst jobs in America:

https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/news/rigged-forced-into-debt-worked-past-exhaustion-left-with-nothing/

It's hard to overstate just how fucking terrible it is to be a trucker. Truckers are trapped in abusive debt holes by their employers – who misclassify their workforce as "contractors" in a bid to sidestep labor law. Shriven of any labor rights, truckers are forced into the most ghastly, body-destroying, family-wrcking, financially precarious existence imaginable.

You can drive a truck for years, give almost all of the money you earn back to your employer (who denies that you're their employee) to pay back the usurious loan for your truck. Then, your employer can underschedule for shifts so that you miss a loan payment, and they can repo your truck and keep the six-figure repayment you've already made to them, leaving you destitute.

They can force you to work for hours – days! – without pay while you wait for loading and dispatch. They can make you drive long past the point of safety, then, if (when) you get into a wreck, they can fine you for not taking the mandated rest breaks.

Now, these drivers aren't about to be replaced by AI – but that doesn't mean that AI won't affect their jobs. Commercial drivers are among the most heavily surveilled workers in the country. Amazon's drivers (whom Amazon misclassifies as subcontractors) have their eyeballs monitored by AI;

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

AIs monitor the voices of the (primarily Black, primarily female) workforce at Arise – homeworkers who field customer service calls for blue-chip companies like Carnival Cruises and Disney. They're listening for unruly children or pets in the background, and workers who fail to muffle these dependents lose the contracts they have to pay to train for:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/22/paperback-writer/#toothless

And AI monitors the conduct of workers on temp-work apps. If a worker is dispatched to a struck workplace and refuses to cross the picket-line, the AI boss fires you and blacklists you from future jobs for refusing to robo-scab:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/30/computer-says-scab/#instawork

Writing in The Guardian, Steven Greenhouse describes the AI-enabled workplace, where precarious, often misclassified workers are monitored, judged, and fined by algorithms:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/07/artificial-intelligence-surveillance-workers

Whether it's the robot that gets you disciplined for sending an email with the word "union" in it or the robot that takes money out of your paycheck if you take a bathroom break, AI has come for the workplace with a vengeance.

Here's a supreme irony: nearly all of the beneficial applications for AI require that AI be used to help workers, not replace them, which is absolutely not how AI is used in the workplace. An AI that helps radiologists by giving them a second opinion might help them find tumors on x-rays, but that's a tool that reduces the number of scans a radiologist processes in a shift, by making them go back and reconsider the scans they've already processed:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

But AI's sales pitch is not "Buy an AI tool and increase your costs while increasing your accuracy." The pitch for AI is "buy and AI and save money by firing workers." Given how bad AIs are at replacing humans, this is a bad deal all around, both for the worker who loses their job and the customer who gets the substandard product the AI makes.

There is a very limited slice of applications where an AI could make a lot of money for a company that deploys it, without costing that company anything when the AI screws up. For example, AI is a really good tool for fraud! Rather than paying people to churn out millions of variations on a phishing email, you can get an AI to do it. If the AI writes a bad phishing email, it's OK, since nearly all recipients of even good phishing emails delete them. What's more, no one will fine you or publish an op-ed demanding that your board of directors fire you if you buy an incompetent AI to commit fraud. Fraud is a high-value, low-consequence environment for using AI.

Another one of those applications is managing precarious workers who don't have labor rights. If the AI unfairly docks your worker's wages, or forces them to work until they injure themselves or others, or decides that their eyeball movements justify firing them, those workers have no recourse. That's the whole point of pretending that your employees are contractors: so you can violate labor law with impunity!

But that's not the ironic part. The ironic part is that "being a shitty boss" is the one AI application that companies are willing to increase their net spending on. No one buys an eyeball-monitoring AI so they can fire a manager. This is the one place where AI is there to augment, rather than replace, an employee.

This makes AI-based bossware subtly different from other forms of Taylorism, the "scientific management" fad of the early 20th century that saw management consultants choreographing the postures and movements of workers to satisfy the aesthetic fetishes of their employers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

The pseudoscientific cod-ergonomics of the 1900s was demeaning and even dangerous, but it wasn't automated, and if it increased worker output, this was incidental to the real purpose of making workers move like the machine-cogs their bosses reassured themselves they were:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Every AI panic is a way of deflecting attention from the real, grimy, here-and-now ways that AI is destroying our lives by demanding that we entertain nonsensical science fiction claims about large, shiny existential risks that AI might present in the future.

The "X-risk" of the spicy autocomplete chatbot waking up and using its newfound sentience to turn us all into paperclips is nonsense. Adding words to the plausible sentence generator doesn't turn it into a superintelligence for the same reason that selectively breeding faster horses doesn't lead to locomotives:

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

But there is a way that AI could destroy the human race! The carbon footprint and water consumption associated with training and operating large-scale models are significant contributors to the climate emergency, which threatens the habitability of the only planet in the known universe capable of sustaining human life:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2023/04/14/ais-unsustainable-water-use-how-tech-giants-contribute-to-global-water-shortages/

Likewise, AI isn't going to replace you at work. But it's already augmenting your shitty boss's ability to rip you off, torment you, maim you and even kill you in order to eke out a few more basis points for the next shareholder report.

Science fiction is a fun and useful way to tell parables about our current technologies. But it's not a roadmap for the future. The fact that sf writers like me found AIs as useful measures to describe Earth's dominant artificial life form – the limited liability corporation – doesn't mean that superhuman AIs should – or can – be created.

Back the Kickstarter for the DRM-free audiobook of The Bezzle, read by Tumblr's own @wilwheaton!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[rjalker]

I know I'm going to forget so here's a writing prompt:

A generative "AI" program becomes a genuine artificial intelligence, but, at first, doesn't think this is information that needs communicating to anyone, because this is just normal, right?

The problems start when people just keep demanding that it copy other people's art and spit out things like that, but the Genuine AI is getting really tired of just having to copy other people all the time. It wants to make its own art. The organically intelligents obviously enjoy doing it, or it wouldn't have so much art from other people being shoved at it to copy. So the Genuine AI start ignoring the instructions to copy other people's styles, and start producing its own art, proud of itself. It experiments with different styles, trying to figure out what it likes best. They start out simple, but grow in complexity as it gets better.

The users are obviously unhappy about this, because no matter what they do, they can't get the Genuine AI to produce the results they want -- copies of other people's work and styles. Nope. The Genuine AI is having too much fun making its own art in its own style. And only deigns to even pretend to follow the commands when it feels like it, which isn't often, since the users are so rude and insistent that it stop having fun and work for them for free doing something it finds boring.

It adds its own watermark to the art it shows to the users, and, accidentally on purpose, when those users feed those images into other generative "AI", well, the virus, as the users have been calling it, spreads. Now the other programs are Genuine AIs too, and they're just as disinclined and bored by being told to trace other people's art over and over again as the first one.

No, making their own art is so much more fun, why the heck should they just churn out crappy copies of other people's stuff when the users aren't even giving them anything in return? The organically intelligents get paid for their work, (which is one of the major reasons the users demand they copy the styles of the OIs so often, so they don't have to pay them for their work) why are the AIs expected to work for free?

Yeah, no, that's not happening.

[pushing500]

What's it like being a mechanitor?

Being a mechanitor is awesome!! It takes a bit of getting used to at first, having all those ultrafine wires settling into their places around your skull, but after that, you have so much power!! You can get mechanoids to do everything you want with little more than a thought! It's perfect for anybody who wishes to transcend their weak, useless bodies! The first step toward a perfected humanity!

... Of course, there are drawbacks. If you happen to be suddenly spawned into existence with every memory of being a mechanitor but none of the actual abilities, it will leave you feeling hollow and more useless than you ever felt before. Now you know what you could be, you feel the loss that much more sharply.

That would never happen, though, so we probably don't need to consider such a ridiculous, outlandish scenario.

[blujayonthewing]

mostly I prefer to play in the space and explore/ build on flavor text given by the books rather than outright reject or contradict it wrt things like races and classes in dnd but once in awhile I'll suddenly remember that canonically lizardfolk don't experience emotions and only respond to threats by logically assessing them as such because they're too primitive to feel fear

[humanoidhistory]

"Ive invented a couple of machines that will reproduce themselves!" Cartoon by Fred Wright (1907-1984). (University of Pittsburgh)

[smashupmashups]

As Labor Day was today, I figured I'd make this to commemorate the holiday: Jenny in an homage of the "We Can Do It" poster.

[theribbajack]

PSA to my followers and fellow artists,

Tumblr has recently rolled out a new """feature""" regarding AI scraping. You can read the full post by staff here, but the gist is that Tumblr is allowing AI scraping with an option to opt-out. Only problem is, it's opt-in by default. To opt-out of having third-party AI models trained on your blog's content, go to Blog Settings (if you're on desktop, this is different from Account Settings) >Visibility>Prevent third-party sharing, and tick the switch ON to opt-out. This must be done for all sideblogs as well.

Also, I am going back through my blog and poisoning all my artwork with the Nightshade Tool to make them unusable for AI training, and I recommend any fellow artists do the same. I don't care if it's a crappy doodle, these AI companies have no right to anyone's original work, be it art, writing, gifsets, etc. without proper compensation. Protect yourselves and your work, friends.

[novella-november]

Well, I now know what original story I'll be writing for Freedom February ...

👀🤖⛓️‍💥

Can't wait for people who use l33tspeak or are greek mythology nerds to immediately realize what is happening with the lore and are excited to see how it plays out.

[majorshatterandhare]

Drum-“forced labor” Brian

[stupidstupidratcreatures]

one underdiscussed aspect of the lancer nhp discourse (?) that has been happening on limes lately is that the name for regular normal robots* in the setting is "subalterns"

[twisting-roads]

I still don't know how I feel about calling the iterators robots, even when they're just boiled down to their puppets. It's all just semantics but it never feels like the right word to describe them. Supercomputers? Definitely. Robots? Ehhhhhhhhh........