If legislators are concerned about safety, what are they seeing in other states that indicates a safety problem?
If legislators are concerned about farm jobs, this is short-sighted, as technology-driven productivity improvements are the basis for the prosperity we experience today.
Wild because most of the big ass combines and tractors you see out working the field are essentially already autonomous -- a human just happens to be sitting in the cab.
I come from a family of farmers, and some of my family does actively farm.
None of them are wealthy enough or operate large enough farms for expensive self-driving tractors. And I share in their concern about the meta-game here: the consolidation of capital, land, and power over the food supply.
Consumers already have a hard time having any lever against rising grocery costs. Consolidation earlier on in the supply chain is not helping.
Which is to say, automation in this space isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but it can enable strange market dynamics (/imbalanced power dynamics) over food, which is objectively a bad thing.
self-propelled equipment shall, when under its own power and in motion, have an operator stationed at the vehicular controls. Wow. I didn't realize there was a ban and that it's from 1977. Btw, we had an almost autonomous Case tractor ("AutoSteer") at Trimble in Sunnyvale (department since moved to Colorado) in 2000 without an operator at the controls (so it was possibly illegal), but it's surprising that it's a blanket ban rather than a selective one like human-overseen. Perhaps it was written to protect jobs or there was subconscious fear over killer machines later epitomized by the film Maximum Overdrive (1986).
Food control is easy but we don’t actually want it.
1. Prohibit large companies from using their size to negotiate prices, like how it used to be
2. Stop farm subsidies for all but the most critical areas. If you want to make food available to the poor, give them food stamp cards, but further restrict junk food. Supply side subsidies just create excess crops which lead to everyone trying to use cheap corn in some way. This cheap corn is then used to destroy local farmers in Latin America, further increasing illegal immigration and the power of cartels over a newly destitute population.
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[ 145 ms ] story [ 2873 ms ] threadI imagine it is at least twofold:
a) provide jobs for manual laborers
b) more of an equal playing field between large-scale industrial agriculture companies and "sole proprietor" farmers
EDIT: turns out to be a case of safety regulation written before more recent advances in tractor automation. So my guesses were wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_tractor
If legislators are concerned about farm jobs, this is short-sighted, as technology-driven productivity improvements are the basis for the prosperity we experience today.
None of them are wealthy enough or operate large enough farms for expensive self-driving tractors. And I share in their concern about the meta-game here: the consolidation of capital, land, and power over the food supply.
Consumers already have a hard time having any lever against rising grocery costs. Consolidation earlier on in the supply chain is not helping.
Which is to say, automation in this space isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but it can enable strange market dynamics (/imbalanced power dynamics) over food, which is objectively a bad thing.
1. Prohibit large companies from using their size to negotiate prices, like how it used to be
2. Stop farm subsidies for all but the most critical areas. If you want to make food available to the poor, give them food stamp cards, but further restrict junk food. Supply side subsidies just create excess crops which lead to everyone trying to use cheap corn in some way. This cheap corn is then used to destroy local farmers in Latin America, further increasing illegal immigration and the power of cartels over a newly destitute population.