Ask HN: Why technology is not hot about solving real life problems?
Do you remember that Major Major&#x27;s father made a good living by not growing more alfalfa than anyone else in the county?<p>But let&#x27;s put things in order:<p>I think your assumptions are wrong. First I would deal with the automated driving, then with the farming business.<p>Automated cars are not only for people who don&#x27;t enjoy driving their car towards the setting sun and enjoying freedom. Literally everything you can buy, eat and enjoy in life relies on transport. I would guess that none of the consumer goods you purchase are produced where you live - maybe with the exception of a bakery, restaurant and your local Starbucks. Automated trucks are simply a huge thing. You will be able to drive them non stop, distribute the traffic more reasonably etc. Passanger transport is another thing, no less important. A lot of white collar workers have to visit their clients in person and spend many hours driving. Their talents and competences are not used properly. If they don&#x27;t have to focus on the road, there could be a huge boost in their productivity. Even if they would just be able to relax more during the business travells by watching films.<p>Self driving cars are not just a matter of leisure, but of significant reduction of cost of transport that everything relies on.<p>And why do we automate in the first place? - to free human energy. Sitting in a car and driving thousands of kilometers is just dumb. Necessary, but dumb and tremendously repetitive. Once the machines can do it, the man can focus on specialised tasks that only humans can do. I believe that is the major task of CS in general - to free human potential.<p>I have nothing to do with farming, but I believe your diagnosis is mistaken. Food production has been automated so heavily, that a single farmer is able to produce an incredible amount of food (it means farmers invested a lot in their current technology). Moreover, as indicated in the beginning, US gov. and other governments in Europe PAY farmers for NOT growing food. And food production is often not very profitable and has to be heavily subsidized. Farmers operate on very very narrow profit margins and therefore investment has to be able to cut (already low) production costs. Robots are sophisticated machines and the maintenance cost is high. On the other hand manual labour on farms is very cheap. I believe that the benefits of automatisations in the farming industry are still not good enough to balance the cost.<p>Moreover, there is virtually no shortage of food, especially in the west. The last big starvation (not caused by politics) in Europe was a matter of the end of 19th century. While transport is an ever growing business - we want more stuff, faster, delivered from further away, food producers are rather more concerned about governments keeping the subsidies and import tariffs to supress supply.<p>Considering all of the above - food production is not such a big problem, and its share in the economy is very very small.<p>Having said that, of course there is a potential market for even more machines and automation, but I am not surprised that the farmers are not interested in it at the moment.