At Wilkin & Sons in Tiptree, a city boy gets impressed by agriculture, and meets some robots that work better than others. | AD: 💼 Find a fulfilling career that also helps the world: | 🗺️ England series map:
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Written and presented by
Tom Scott
Producers
for Penny4
Cambria Bailey-Jones
Guy Larsen
Studio Associate Producer
Heloise Lowenthal
Studio Director of Photography
Jamie MacLeod
Studio Gaffer
Frank Hammond
Head of Post
for Breadbox Studios
Mandy Celine
Associate Post Producer
Isla McTear
Senior Editor
Bethan Leadley
Online Editor
Jamie MacLeod
Sound Supervisor
Dan Pugsley
Sound Assistant
Maggy Apodaca
Subtitles by So Speedy
With thanks to the Historic County Borders Project
Executive Producer
Tom Scott
© Pad 26 Limited MMXXVI
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The only time in the past decade ive heard AI actually do some good.
When the strawberries are not exposed to fungus and bacteria in the same amounts as when they grow on the ground. Isn’t there a danger that they will lose their immunity to these and become more fragile?
1:27 the way you look up at the ad was clever
this is such an interesting video, thanks for the work!
The real question on the robot is speed and computing power. How much computing power is needed for that one arm? The arm can only move so fast to avoid damaging the plant or fruit. You either need the machine small and cheap enough that you have multiples, or you need it beefy enough that it's got a bunch of arms all picking simultaneously. I prefer the small and cheap because then you just have a stack of baskets and it drops them off and picks up a new one when it's done with each row. But anyways, the robot can work roughly 24hr a day so can an arm move fast enough to make it cost effective to replace human pickers.
It is worth noting that the companies engineering berry picking robots don’t need to engineer robots that pick berries better than humans (I.e. faster/more accurate).
They need to engineer robots that are just good enough and just cheap enough to buy/own that they can replace human labor. The machines may be worse, but for an industrial operation, they can work non stop be better than humans at working non-stop. And the grower may be able to sacrifice some yield or berry tastiness if the price of the robot (and babysitting the robot fleet) gets low enough.
Tbf, watching the robot team, they also still have a long way to go because it is a hard engineering problem to balance cost/reliability/performance in a way that beats the human economics! But if a strawberry picking machine company hits the right performance / cost point, the labor transition may start happening very fast for large industrial growers.
UVC lamps won't blind you; the light can't penetrate that deeply into the eye, but damage to the top outer layers of cells of the cornea results in them dying off after a short amount of time (a few hours later) which is most unpleasant and there's not much you can do but keep eyes shut and wait it out. Once damaged cells have finished dying, you're good to go. UVC is far more damaging than UVA/B that you get from sunburn, but far less penetrating, so damage is more often going to be to cells that you would be shedding soon anyway. You do need to be careful, like with any cleaning product, but doesn't need to be feared. Might even be less of a cancer risk, as damage to cells is so lethal, but this is just a wild guess… it's still a risk better avoided.
…yet.
Can we not just leave some jobs for humans to do for goodness sake!
3:46 There are a couple of Medlar trees in the yard of Shakespeare’s house in Stratford-upon-Avon!
The fruit was all ripe and soft when we visited one November a couple of years ago. We ate to our heart’s content as clearly no one else had any plans of picking them!
What a delightful man. He's so pleased by your appreciation of his clever little systems.
What did you put on top of the jam
Because they don't have hands
I notice Ella was using a Logitech F710 gamepad for the UV robots, you could control a submersible with one of those.
The berry picking robot had a PS5 Dualshock controller, I think.
Check out Dyson's pet project – full automated indoor strawberry farm.
Naaaaahhhhh bro 😂😂😂😂
That pick a robot was on the level of "look at the robot my son built. Isn't he such a smart boy?"
It's like a first-year grad student level of product. Frontier robotics is solving ludicrously difficult problems. I refuse to believe this is a depiction of anywhere close to the robotic capabilities we have.
you can tell that he is really passionate about his craft
Ai cant pick strawberries because we haven’t fed it enough human joy yet. It’s still blind to high joy-level objects such as strawberries. If it can just replace a few more jobs it will have drained enough human happiness to perceive them.
I want that scone
There is no such thing as unskilled labor. There's a huge mis understanding that fruit picking is something anyone can do, but farm laborers have developed skills to quickly and efficiently pick different kinds of fruits and vegitables.
Ah yes, spend millions developing robots rather than paying people a living wage to pick them
the thing is…. if you make that robot even have a 60 -70% success rate…. you can scale much more and it still be more profitable…. because ya wont have the picking fee's….. but as you said about taking job's… another thing we need to look at is cheap healthy strawberries a greater good for the people over the jobs the robotic picker will take…. because if ya paying $40an hr + to pick them and your still having problems getting picker's…. then strawberries will become a luxury fruit…. people not like to hear that but AI picked cheaper strawberries might be more important for the health of the world if you think about it…
It'll be when they don't care about quality and waste is acceptable.
Posting this so someone can leave me a timestamp and save me 30 minurws
did they really let you stay at sheep hotels?
1:52 did that car have a vanity plate?
My ex loves 4:16 jelly
1:29 that look at the ad-sign appearing is nicely done!
Hi Tom!
This roadtrip must have needed a lot of planning in order to meet up with so many people and get everywhere on time. Could you do an episode about how you and your team planned the trip?
I'm surprised that in the UK people don't use medlar jam as a spread. It's delicious. I guess it has some more presence in the Mediterranean? ("Níspero", in Spanish) 😅
Happy childhood memories of going to local farms and picking strawberries, and you're absolutely right they taste so much better straight from the stem.
Tom, you had me until you started with the crumpets. Jam on first? What is this madness? You wouldn't put ham on dry bread and then slather butter on the ham afterwards. Dairy first, ALWAYS!
I believe, by the time AI and robotics get that level of spacial skills with human level efficiency, there will be no humans to feed those berries to…
Nice video. I really enjoyed it.
Though the right term is Horticulture. I’ve been working in horticulture for quite a few years now and know a thing or two. There is so much more to see and learn.
If you have the time please do visit “Het Westland” in The Netherlands. The best of the best in the world are situated there.
Or, visit Wageningen University. They do amazing research.
26:37 A berry picker needs a subscription??
Honestly love the guy who took you on the strawberry farm. He seems so kind and genuine
This episode showcases one of my favourite elements of humanity, the excitement of that guy grows as he realizes how interested Tom Scott is. Its a cyclical pattern of joy between the two, where one shares a piece of information, the other is super excited and they trade joy back and forth.
I live in Tiptree and actually got to have a tour of the grounds 10 or so years back. I've been driving past this place for years and yet I had no idea that they where using robots and all this tech. Very interesting to see how drastically things have changed since then.