Disagree. Automate the production, which democratizes the supply.
Minimal supply chains are necessary if you can produce crops autonomously at the point of consumption (think rooftop solar). It would be wildly inefficient to grow in each person's backyard, but not so to grow in the outer rings of urban areas.
Automated production is essential. Supply chains for abundant, distributed resources are superfluous.
I think you might be correct in some domains, but farming isn't one. You simply can't grow all crops in all places, nor is that allocation of land a good use. Barley grows well in flat fields. Not so well in the wooded hills outside Atlanta. Hops won't grow at all where it doesn't freeze in the winter, and basil needs lots of sun and water. We've mostly optimized where we grow crops for land use and yield already, so, it is indeed a supply chain problem to move them to where they need to go.
Also, I'm not sure how automation of labor democratizes supply. supply isn't constrained by labor. It is constrained by yield. Automation won't solve that as much as chemical engineering or more land would.
> I'm not sure how automation of labor democratizes supply.
It puts the control back in the hands of consumers of the product, instead of producers (which is more often than not, multinationals or large corporations who are motivated to extract as much profit as possible from their business transactions).
You do not have time or resources to farm your own plot of land (generally speaking, hand waving away the homesteaders here). Your ag co-op [1] does. This is to farming as AWS was to infrastructure (if I may be permitted to torture an analogy).
Who do you really think will own the robots? It will be the multinational corporations again. Food is decently cheap already considering I have to eat multiple times a day. People will just spend their money on some place else. Like you said another corporation will extract profit from other transactions.
Well, society gets a say. Witness how both Canada and India have invalidated pharma patents, and how the US DoD is permitted to nullify patents when it suits them for strategic purposes [1].
Also, the US government can infringe on a patent with limited resource of the patent holder.
"Can the U.S. Government Infringe a U.S. Patent? (The U.S. Government Says it’s Impossible)"
"Although a patentee can sue the U.S. government for unlicensed use of its invention, Congress requires that those cases be filed in the Court of Federal Claims (CFC) rather than in district court. No jury trial is available, and the only remedy is a reasonable royalty." [2]
I think its a bit defeatist to throw your arms up in the air and say "there is no hope, big companies will always win", but I'm an optimist.
Just because something becomes cheaper doesn't mean someone isn't profiting. Unless the government owns the production and historically that doesn't work out so well. We live in a capitalist society. For thousands of years there has been a chief, king, family, and now corporate entity profiting off another group. Humans are not even close in our lifetimes.
I won't even source anything I can look around. Applaud your optimism.
Automation provides the masses neither the automatons nor the land. It could make coops marginally better at producing, but it would cost money the coop doesn't have to buy the robots and systems, and would still be constrained by land and fertilizer. Labor just doesn't matter that much to yield.
Indeed the initial capital needs to come from somewhere, although I will argue that technology creates a deflationary spiral allowing automatons to be acquired cheaper than traditional tooling. Witness Tesla able to sell a $35k base EV that is superior to quite a few internal combustion vehicles on the market, with that price only going down as battery manufacturing scales up.
"The students involved in the Hands Free Hectare project also suggest that this was probably “the most expensive hectare of barley ever,” with an overall budget of £200,000 from the U.K. government. Moonshots like this are understandably expensive, though, and since a huge chunk of that money went to capital costs (like buying a tractor and a harvester), the next crop will be vastly cheaper."
