This isn't America's problem picking crops right now, not having million dollar machines to pick lettuce in the desert.

Who does anybody think they're kidding about replacing cheap farm labor with a million dollar machine. Have you seen what big farm equipment costs? They make Ferrari's look cheap and they're about the same to fix in price and it's nuts. You think one guy operates this thing? Only if you want to die.

So, this million dollar machine can replace these pineapple plantation workers? No, it cuts lettuce in a desert, it won't work here you'd have to reengineer it. THat's a quarter mil at least and there's no guarantee it'll actually work and you'll end up spending 10X what these guys cost and might be able to pack pineapples 2x as fast. Not worth it.

I'll believe robots will replace humans when you can show me one that can walk into this line of pineapple pickers, tap one on the shoulder and say "I got this and can do the guys job and keep up and can do this for any guy there. If that works bring in the others and they can all be robots, a "machine" to pick and stack pineapples isn't going to look like a lettuce water cutter, that's too much money for such specialized gear.

So if you can get ten robots to do the work of ten people, great, those ten people can supervise them to do all sorts of work, because the robots can't do anything without being told and with constant inputs throughout the day from changing conditions the two of them, the human and the bot could be an effective team doing more than two of either could in a perfect example of the whole being literally greater than the sum of the parts.

That's how robots will affect human labor and not some silly Star Wars/Jetsons comic book reality. I have no idea what commercial influence is pushing this absurd idea, somebody must be, media campaigns like this are not cheap.

Ever since the US began cracking down on migrant farm workers there have been newspaper stories of fields of crops rotting for lack of workers. You have to understand that the people that pick crops in North America have been doing this since the last ice sheet receded tens of thousands of years ago and these not even 400 year old transparent lines on the earth that show up on some guys map in a certain white house thousands of miles away don't mean a whole lot in terms of the actual mechanics of the way food works in this country. So there's that. And if it really was possible to do this by golly we wole have already.

It's not that we don't have robots, look inside your laptop/tablet/phone - there's all sorts of little tiny surface mounted (as opposed to thru-hole) parts in there each one placed there by a robot because no human can do this and we can place those 3 a second and the chips themselves have a silicon die inside with tiny tiny sold gold wires molecularly bonded there with ultrasonic vibrations after melting just the tip of this wire with a blast of energy and we cna do this 3x a second too.

But we can't pick a single crop as well as a man and were some number of years away from even being as good, it's not the same thing as machines we have that can do better than a man now like the ones I'm talking about here form the 1980s, nearly all Apple computers have been built this way since about the fist big Shuttle accident.

And we have one million dollar monster of a machine that can cut lettuce? Pffft.