There is a lot of work being done on agricultural robots that will displace even more farm workers. Which, given how back-breakingly awful farm work is, shouldn't be viewed as an entirely bad thing.
What happens to the people displaced, I dunno. Malthusians and Luddites have been telling us we're all going to die in a mass of unemployment and poverty for a quarter of a millenium, and they've been consistently wrong, mostly because they lack the imagination (as we all do) to see how humans will cleverly adapt to the new reality.
In the medium term, agricultural robots may displace a lot of pesticide use as well, because if you have a solar-powered 24/7 robot weeding, you don't need chemicals. This also should be viewed as a good thing.
But a world where robots can do everything, including writing this post for me, creates an interesting problem. Most people--especially men--are not well-suited to not having work. How we fulfill people's need to work in a world where there is no work that needs to be done is an interesting problem to have. But remember that there was a Roman emperor who killed off an early attempt at industrialization and rudimentary assembly lines because he feared what the newly-unemployed would do, and worried that surplus slaves would revolt. It's hard to argue, knowing what we know now, that he made the right decision. Our inability to see our own future shouldn't stop us from embracing it.
I don't really buy that a world where all the work is done by robots will be an issue at all, unless it's only going to benefit the rich.
I imagine it will allow people to work on what they want to work on, instead of what they have to work on. I, for one, would stop spending ~40 hours a week building software for others and build myself an airplane instead. Next? Maybe a sailboat. Sure, the robots could do it better and more efficiently, but I enjoy doing that sort of "work".
But what do I know, maybe not everyone is like me. Maybe it'll turn into Wall-E, or everyone just ends up sitting around watching Friends reruns, or most people would form street gangs and battle it out out of boredom.
Yeah, on balance if someone is working on solar powered agricultural robots to do the weeding, I'm happy to say go for it. But the article was talking about spraying the entire landscape with herbicides that kill off practically everything except the crops, for the sake of eliminating jobs. I'm having difficulty seeing that as a win for society. I don't blame individual farmers, who might be forced to do that to compete with other farmers who are doing it, but maybe there should be a pollution tax on herbicide or suchlike.
What happens to the people displaced, I dunno. Malthusians and Luddites have been telling us we're all going to die in a mass of unemployment and poverty for a quarter of a millenium, and they've been consistently wrong, mostly because they lack the imagination (as we all do) to see how humans will cleverly adapt to the new reality.
In the medium term, agricultural robots may displace a lot of pesticide use as well, because if you have a solar-powered 24/7 robot weeding, you don't need chemicals. This also should be viewed as a good thing.
But a world where robots can do everything, including writing this post for me, creates an interesting problem. Most people--especially men--are not well-suited to not having work. How we fulfill people's need to work in a world where there is no work that needs to be done is an interesting problem to have. But remember that there was a Roman emperor who killed off an early attempt at industrialization and rudimentary assembly lines because he feared what the newly-unemployed would do, and worried that surplus slaves would revolt. It's hard to argue, knowing what we know now, that he made the right decision. Our inability to see our own future shouldn't stop us from embracing it.