Picking crops or cleaning hotels rooms cannot be automated… for less than it costs to hire seasonal/migrant workers, today.

Both farms and hotels have an increasing number of jobs being automated where it makes economic sense, or for pure novelty’s sake.

https://www.farmprogress.com/technology/tethered-drones-can-...

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ben_w 3 days ago | parent [-]

Right now, cleaning rooms cannot be fully automated at any price. The AI to control the robots just isn't good enough for how broad a term "unclean" can be.

I don't want to comment about picking crops, that's rapidly changing and I don't expect to be up-to-date with this. I've seen people being confidently wrong about "cows won't milk themselves" decades after there were machines cows could operate by themselves to get milked.

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Den_VR 3 days ago | parent [-]

When you get into the “ at any price ” range, then you should be up for engineering the room to support fully automated cleaning, and so I’d contend this is possible today. For certain situations. For example, automatic cleaning of a capsule hotel. I’ve just checked into one myself, nearly everything is self-service with an rfid band for access. How about automatic cleaning of a clean room?

	▲	ben_w 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, but "For certain situations" is a strong barrier here. So, the example with most saliency for me (which may not be the hardest to deal with) is: Imagine a hotel that is hosting a convention, and is fully occupied for five days. On day one, a norovirus infection event gets everyone, on day four everyone's digestive tracts are voided from both ends with about 40 seconds' warning. How well do the automation systems cope? This example is probably quite close to the top of the list of things I expect cleaning staff to be hoping someone can automate/has already automated, because noro is hella infectious like that and who on earth would actually want to be the one who has to clean up after such incidents, but has this kind of cleanup actually been fully automated yet? I had to clean up after a relative (which is why it's salient for me), and I think I caught it from them because I'd missed the inside of a cupboard door handle before removing my gloves. > How about automatic cleaning of a clean room? Positive air pressure, air filters, and requiring occupants to wear stuff like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanroom#/media/File:Cleanroo... Would be one of the easier cases, given they are work environments and by extension there's an expectation of reduced scope of things for the automation to be doing, though even then I'd expect some unplanned incidents require human intervention.