A farmer selling carrots is sure that carrots will become more important in the near future.

Yeah, I’m downplaying these “news”. I want to see it happen, not hear marketers blabber about it.

I expected them in the year 2000, so there’s no chance they come sooner than I expected.

The person making this claim, Peter Chen, is the founder of a successful robotics firm, Covariant, that already sells robots. Here are some of their robots in action packing meal kits. I think this gives his claims some weight and credibility.

Understandably enough, people often focus on the human job loss implications of this. But there are also other economic challenges. A world where robots and AI do more and more of the work formerly done by people will be a world of constant deflation. By eliminating human wages from production, everything they produce will get cheaper.

Many people don’t appreciate it, but deflation is extremely destructive to how our economies are run. Over time it grows the size of debts relative to incomes and creates recessionary conditions that then often spiral into further problems. My guess is that we are going to start hearing a lot more about this in a few years.

I don’t know. After a skim I don’t see a lot of supporting evidence (basically just “people are working on it”). It’s still hard to turn a physical interaction into a dataset you can run through 10,000 times a second in serial.

It’s pretty telling that self-driving cars still suck years and billions of dollars later, and that’s easily the best common physical task for automation.

If the same approach that lead to a “rapid advancement in ‘AI’” is used… it sounds like theyre going to make robots that look highly functional but suck. Then they’ll sell that to Wall street and the easily convinced public, and in 2 years we can realize they failed! Hoooray!!

As with all robotics and automation news: call me back when farming is fully automatic.