Not that I can recall. I do not like monkeys or movies about monkeys or even movies with monkeys in them, with the possible exception of Dead Alive which I haven’t seen in about 20 years. Monkeys are weird and creepy and they steal people’s shoes and I want no part of them or their shenanigans. I also don’t care for Stephen King adaptations, so that’s two strikes against that movie.
Hmm, okay, I might walk back my previous comments a bit.
-Tom
There Are Twelve Monkeys!
schurem
1641
They only seem like twelve monkeys. All monkeys are but the one singular monkey manifesting itself in many instances. It is known. It is flinging all the shit in the world. This is the way.
Any time I see “uses AI to identify” something then “zaps them with precision thermal bursts from lasers”…well, we’ve all been conditioned by the popular media to have some concern. But hey, if they can keep it from becoming sentient, it should help the farmers out!
Gadzooks. A laser-wielding roomba to patrol the lawn and cook dandelions and crab grass? That would sell like gangbusters. E: hotcakes? Whatever, I’d buy one.
Shouldn’t we be close to fully roboticized farms? Sowing fields seems easy enough. This thing zaps weeds, increasing yields. I can see drones launching to zap pests (and humans trying to steal corn or watermelons!). There may be ways of automating harvesting.
Robots will increasingly take our jobs. Many of these will be dull, laborious jobs so we are well rid of them, but humans need something to do and a way of earning money.
Even with the gig economy delivery service, I read recently Dominos is launching a driverless delivery service from one restaurant in Houston. It’s a test market, but if it works expect driverless (i.e., cheaper) delivery options in the future.
That’s the most fascinating aspect of all of this, for sure. Ricardo, back in the 19th century, wrote about automation taking jobs. His solution, such as it was, was continuous growth, the solution all capitalist-leaning economists end up at, for every problem. As long as the economy continued to enlarge and expand, there would be in the aggregate enough new jobs to replace the old ones lost to automation. Whether that’s true or not is another question. When Ricardo wrote, the gap between the jobs lost through automation and the jobs gained through innovation wasn’t that great. You could envision workers moving from one factory setting to another. Now, though, going from unskilled or semi-skilled farm laborer to, what, CNC machine operator or something? And as noted, even the gig/service economy is getting automated.
Unfortunately continuous growth assumes a non-zero-sum resource base. Our planet is pretty finite.
Banzai
1649
I see two options, starfleet or mad max.
jpinard
1650
If they could use that instead of herbicides that’d be awesome.
Indeed. While Ricardo was more reasonable than Malthus, with whom he had a long intellectual debate over the years, he was still captive to the time period’s understanding of production, consumption, and population.
That gif is from the second film, right? Whoever played that general was great.
Saw it as a kid in the theater. Not as good as the first one, but it still shook me up.
I need to see it again I think.
Scuzz
1654
Wow. Yes it would. All they need to do is add a small area to drop fertilizer with each pass and I am ordering one.
Aren’t you describing a sheep? Or a goat?
Goat and sheeps don’t have lasers. Unless, of course, you are a Linux user.
