> In the agricultural sector, labor shortages are increasing the need for automated harvesting using robots.

This is about Japan, but like the US, Japan has a restrictive immigration policy and an aging, not-replaced population that's at the core of this issue. Japan has been toying with expanding immigration in the area of health care workers [1] recently, but like in the US, there really isn't a labor shortage issue if immigration policy is liberalized.

So this is like so many other things a complex and mediocre technological solution to what's actually a political issue.

[1] https://www.bpb.de/themen/migration-integration/regionalprof...

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standardUser 3 days ago | parent [-]

I agree about immigration, but the world has a large amount of very fertile land in places with very high costs of living. Bringing in large numbers of new immigrants at ultra low pay will have big consequences in most high-cost countries. It's worked well in the US, but that's because of our (former) identity as a nation of immigrants and the massive overlap between US and Latin American culture. In other nations, the outcome could very well be a racially/culturally incompatible underclass working the lowest paying and least consistent jobs, with little-to-no chance of fully integrating.

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graemep 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I can understand culturally incompatible, but what on earth is "racially incompatible"?

> working the lowest paying and least consistent jobs, with little-to-no chance of fully integrating.

It depends who the immigrants are. If your immigration laws favour highly skilled immigrants that is not going to happen.

In the UK people who live in ethnically mixed areas tend to integrate. In fact, I think most people integrate but the minority who do not are just more noticeable and used politically (not by just one side either).

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tracker1 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Some of this is showing in a lot of places already. Cultural adoption as part of migration is important and you can only bring in so many migrants while maintaining anything resembling a national identity. Not to mention secondary effects of bringing a literal under-class of migrant workers into a society already facing the aftermath of heavy inflation combined with wage stagnation.

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zzzeek 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

but Japan is actually relaxing immigration rules due to the need for younger workers. I bet they can pay them pretty well for less than the R&D, maintenance, and loss of productivity of the robots costs

	▲	tracker1 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Long term.. not sure that I agree. The cost of creating robots is going to go down. It's already relatively cheap to produce most of the robot, it's more down to the software development itself at this point. Also, even if a robot costs 2x what you would pay a person in a year at half the speed of a person, that robot can work effectively 4x as many hours a week as a person can. My bigger concern to me is a conglomerate like ConAgra for robot farming comes in and only leases access to these machines instead of being able to buy/maintain/adapt them on the farms themselves. Leading to one more point of pressure against smaller farms in favor of larger conglomerates squeezing every bit of value from the middle out.