Robots (not) coming over here and taking our jobs! How one UK producer reckons that humanoid robots will be tele-operated by remote migrant workers

Farms worldwide face severe challenges: casual workers are hard to find in the harvest season. Meanwhile, the human population is increasing, but productivity and yield are failing to match that demand. This is why robotic automation and AI are important to agriculture, but developing robots to pick individual crops is an enormous problem. For example, the processes needed to pick strawberries, asparagus, and apples are all completely different, which means developing bespoke solutions.

This is why, in the medium-to-long term, some technologists believe that general-purpose humanoids could offer a potential solution to farming’s automation challenges. If a robot were intelligent, dextrous, and adaptable enough to take on a variety of different tasks, then it might obviate the need to develop solutions for every crop and function, as is currently the case.

But there is another problem. While it is relatively easy to train robots in simple, controlled, and predictable ...