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megaframe | 5 years ago

One big one is farming, think harvesting machinery. There's a number of startups trying to get that going. I think most are not at the scale to be successful the way the market themselves, but their collective learning will eventually lead to some consolidation.

Why AI for that, it's vision AI to know when fruit is ripe or vegetables are ready for harvest. Then hand eye coordination to not bruise the fruit/vegetables and adjust force/sensitivity as the equipment wears down.

Scaling that will put likely many workers out and transform the business of harvesting. What I think is most plausible is one large manufacturer will consolidate designs and rent the equipment to do the harvesting much like the contract labor used now, but at much lower prices than humans could do.

discuss

gen220|5 years ago

Depending on the crop you’re talking about, we are still very very far away from this.

People have been trying to design machines to pick fruit, even in toy scenarios, for decades, and we have little to show for it. I don’t think that image processing is the bottleneck here, it’s literally the mechanism as far as I understand.

I’m skeptical that any mechanical equipment will ever be able to do these tasks as cheaply, quickly, and efficiently as a human in our lifetimes.

beckingz|5 years ago

Look at olive harvesting machines.

Definitely easier than fruit, but we've made so much progress.

OldHand2018|5 years ago

> What I think is most plausible is one large manufacturer will consolidate designs and rent the equipment to do the harvesting

No way. Everybody wants the machines at the same time. You're going to incur the capital cost of buying/manufacturing the machines, the cost to store and maintain them for 50 weeks out of the year, and then rent them out at a profit for 2 weeks? No, the farmers will just keep hiring human labor.

If you can solve this problem, you can sell a lot of machines for a lot of money for a short few years. After that, they'll be a commodity and be dominated by all the other capital-intensive manufacturers that can run a factory better than you can.

perl4ever|5 years ago

If it's AI to know when fruit is ripe, etc., then bugs and birds and so on must be intelligent.