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Notes -
It does not appear that foreign workers are big source of Japan’s agricultural workforce: https://fas.usda.gov/data/japan-foreign-farm-labors-role-growing-japan
Just half a percent of the agricultural population in 2010.
https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/a06003/
Only 25k “guest workers” out of 1.5 million total agricultural workers, so 1.5%. This number is increasing though, coincidentally as the Japanese feel poorer and poorer…
We can convince them to spend 12 years in brutal school/residency to stab utensils in human flesh for 16 hour periods at a time, for nothing but money and respect. I promise you we can convince them to pick fruit — forestry workers have some of the highest life satisfaction and doctors perhaps the lowest.
I also looked and it seems that American born employees account for a little over 60% of slaughterhouse workers
https://www.epi.org/blog/meat-and-poultry-worker-demographics/
In Iceland a lot of the butchers come from Sweden: https://www.icelandreview.com/news/hundreds-foreigners-work-slaughterhouses/#:~:text=Foreign%2Dborn%20workers%20are%20now,further%20away%2C%20even%20New%20Zealand.
Also think people are missing the elephant in the room for agricultural work. Isn’t this something AI solves? We already have fruit picking robots and I think it’s fair to say they will continue to improve.
If we didn’t have illegals we would in time just automate fruit picking. Prices would spike for a few years and then my guess would be lower fruit prices. Same thing as in 2008 when oil hit $150 we invented shale oil a few years later. Getting rid of illegals would just speed up the automation process and by 2030 my guess is a fully automated fruit picking system.
I work in a related area. Picking objects (even human-made artefacts whose properties you know in advance) off a table is still an unsolved problem given real world constraints. These constraints include: equipment buying and maintenance costs must be tolerable (good cameras are very expensive, flexible grippers wear out very quickly), high picking speed, high reliability.
It's quite feasible to make Youtube videos and even tech demos, but actually rolling out the tech to make a profitable business at scale is very hard.
That said, the main barrier to AI use in robotics is that the tech is competing against very optimised pre-existing solutions. Near-slave labour is much cheaper, faster, and more flexible than AI-based robotics for most tasks. So trying to sell this stuff is very difficult because even if the AI is quite good, it's still worse than what your customers are currently using. If labour prices rose considerably, AI would be competing on a much more even playing field.
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The barrier for automating fruit picking is not software. The software has already been written to distinguish which fruit needs to be picked/should be left on the plant. It's inventing a robot that won't destroy the fruit as it's picking it.
You can(and some people have) train a monkey to pick fruit, but robots are a long way off.
The AI companies are working very hard on robotics as well. It's not just LLMs.
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I can’t say I am an expert at all on what can be done but I can watch YouTube videos and see plenty of harvesting machines. Some do look like they could damage the plant.
It just seems like we get a lot of what about this industry responses for illegals. When it does appear we figure out more automation when the price of labor goes up.
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