The Handwriting on the Wall

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Newton’s Third Law of Motion

This maxim seems to be equally applicable to politics these days, and nothing substantiates that theory like our new highly exclusionary immigration policies. Younger educated emigres, often unmarried, are more willing to travel to the United States for jobs. “‘It’s the old story of immigrants coming to the U.S. and California seeking a better life for themselves and their children,’ says Hans Johnson, an immigration and demographics expert at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

“‘What’s different now is the trend toward immigrants coming into California with high levels of education. The share of those who already have completed college is extremely high. Asian immigrants are the best educated group in California, better than U.S.-born. Immigrants from India are the single best educated group in our state.” Los Angeles Times, May 20th. 

But as they get older, missing their families, many return to their home countries these days… taking the experience and skills with them… to compete against America. And those who already have families… well, increasingly they choose Canada or England over the U.S.

Not only are highly-desirable engineers, mathematicians and scientists – the real job-creators – deterred from emigrating to the United States or leave to return home (because their families often cannot travel with them), not only is growth curtailed by reason of fewer consumers, but the reaction on the job front is not to create more low-end jobs to replace lost farmworkers – employment that almost no U.S. citizens will take at any pay level – it is to amp up our focus on robots to fill the void. And that void may start with the low-end work, but it very rapidly moves up the skill chain to replace the very workers whose jobs the tight immigration policy was intended to secure.

All over the world, tighter immigration policies are rapidly depleting agricultural workers, bottom-end construction laborers, kitchen help and even workers in abattoirs. Case in point, as Ashley Robinson, Lydia Mulvany and David Stringer, writing for the May 20th Los Angeles Times, illustrates: “Robots are taking over farms faster than anyone saw coming.

“The first fully autonomous farm equipment is becoming commercially available, which means machines will be able to completely take over a multitude of tasks. Tractors will drive with no farmer in the cab, and specialized equipment will be able to spray, plant, plow and weed cropland.

“Dot Technology Corp. in Saskatchewan, Canada, has already sold some so-called power platforms for fully mechanized spring planting. In Australia, SwarmFarm Robotics is leasing weed-killing robots that can also do tasks such as mow and spread… The companies say their machines are smaller and smarter than the gigantic machinery they aim to replace. Industry leaders Deere & Co. and CNH Industrial NV haven’t said when they’ll release similar offerings.

“Sam Bradford, a farm manager at Arcturus Downs in Australia’s Queensland state, was an early adopter as part of a pilot program for SwarmFarm last year. He used four robots, each about the size of a truck, to kill weeds.

“In years past, Bradford had used a 16-ton spraying machine that ‘looks like a massive praying mantis.’ It would blanket the field in chemicals, he said. But the robots were more precise. They distinguished the dull brown of the farm’s paddock from green foliage, and targeted chemicals directly at the weeds. It’s a task the farm does two or three times a year over 20,000 acres. With the robots, Bradford said he can save 80% of his chemical costs.

“‘The savings on chemicals is huge, but there’s also savings for the environment from using less chemicals and you’re also getting a better result in the end,’ said Bradford, who’s run the farm for about 10 years.

“Cost savings have become especially crucial as a multi-year rout for grain and other prices depresses farm incomes and tightens margins. Meanwhile, advances in seed technology, fertilizers and other crop inputs have led to soaring yields and oversupply.

“Farmers need to get to the next level of profitability and efficiency in farming, and ‘we’ve lost sight of that with engineering that doesn’t match the agronomy,’ said SwarmFarm Chief Executive Andrew Bate. ‘Robots flip that on its head. What’s driving adoption in agriculture is better farming systems and better ways to grow crops.’

“Deere hasn’t yet released fully autonomous equipment because the technology that’s out there still isn’t good enough to replace people, said Alex Purdy, head of John Deere Labs and director of precision agriculture technology.

“Machinery that uses automation for tasks right now is more beneficial to farmers than autonomous equipment, Purdy said. Artificial intelligence, deep learning and advances in computer vision are going to transform agricultural machinery even further, he said.

“A modern tractor does thousands of tasks, and to provide a fully autonomous solution, a deep understanding of each of those tasks is needed, said Brett McClelland, product manager of autonomous vehicles at CNH Industrial. One of the areas that are still evolving is the ability of machines to see.” And that technology is already far along in development.

Indeed, a migrant labor field crew sweeps a field ready to harvest and moves on. They harvest everything in sight, letting the sorters later decide what is saleable and what is not. Then they move on to another field somewhere else. The machine pictured above, harvesting apples, doesn’t shake the tree to have all the fruit fall off. Instead, the smart arms scan the available apples, picking only those fruits ready for harvest, leaving the rest to mature as needed.

The reality of artificial intelligence backing sophisticated automation is not a rapid revolution… it is a slow, steady evolution that carries with it the power to erode global economic systems woefully unprepared to accept its obvious consequences. But as governments are loath to accept, you cannot turn back the clock (no one has done that yet) and you cannot force the world to accept economic dominance simply by legislation and restrictive trade agreements. The world needs a plan. America needs a plan. Instead, our government policies are pretty much “just make all this change just go away.”

              I’m Peter Dekom, and as I said, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.