The Lettuce Bot

Salad eaters have yet another reason to celebrate.  Lettuce, a food so popular it is often decorated with tiny pieces of bacon, will soon be groomed by robots.  According to a recent Associated Press article out of Salinas, California, the Lettuce Bot is “a machine that can thin a field of lettuce in the time it takes about twenty workers to do the job by hand.”  (To thin a field means to remove the small leaves of lettuce that look like trouble so the good leaves can grow up to be eaten.) Using visual sensors, robotic arms and basic GPS technology, the Lettuce Bot is expected to help alleviate an apparent labor shortage.  Over time the machine is also supposed to decrease costs and increasing food quality. 

According to Blue River Technology, the company that created the machine, the Lettuce Bot will reduce the amount of herbicides used for this type of food.  The article goes on to claim that the Lettuce Bot will “target the last frontier of agricultural mechanization,” by safely harvesting fruits and vegetables destined for the fresh market. 

                  

Not everyone is on board, of course.  As with nearly any new technology, a number of voices have sounded off on the contraption.   Some critics warn that despite Blue River’s insistence that their machine will decrease the use of chemicals, it could very well increase the use of fertilizers by accelerating the trend toward larger and larger fields.  Labor advocates, obviously, are not keen on the idea of machines replacing human employment, whereas smaller farm operations argue that because the technology is so advanced and therefore so expensive to purchase and maintain, it will further hinder their ability to compete economically with the larger corporate farming operations.          

The real problem with the Lettuce Bot, however, besides the probability that it will eventually overthrow its handlers and wreak havoc, is that its name is dumb.  Blue River spent millions of dollars over the course of many years creating this machine.  They invested some of their best talent toward a project they hoped would make the world a better place while also making them money.  With all of the effort put into Lettuce Bot, one would think that at the very least they would have spent more than seventeen seconds naming it. 

They could have given it a docile-sounding acronym, such as LEFTy, the Lettuce Emancipating Friendly Thinner.  Regardless, all robot makers need to stop calling their inventions robots.  It’s unsettling.  Calling a robot a robot was thrilling in 1962, the same year President Kennedy told us we would land a man on the moon before the end of the decade.  Back then many people in the United States were infatuated with all things technological and believed wholeheartedly in the promise of a robotically enhanced future. 

That was a half-century ago, though.  We live in a post-Terminator era.  In much of the public imagination, robots are no longer cool.  They are murderers.  They displace human workers at best and engineer the violent destruction of humanity at worst.  The suffix “bot,” which used to conjure up pleasant images of Rosie from The Jetsons cartoon rolling around with a vacuum hose protruding from her torso, has now been replaced with very negative connotations. 

One of the simplest ways to agitate people, in fact, is to attach those three letters to the end of a word.  Take the word cupcake, for example.  Everyone loves cupcakes.  They are cakes that fit into a cup.  Perfect.  Now add the suffix “bot” to that word.  “Cupcakebot.”  Hungry?  No, you are terrified, because the birthday party you were remembering has just been hijacked by an evil metal monster shooting people with very hard sprinkles.

All kidding aside, now that robots are much more science and less fiction, it seems our attitude toward them has evolved.  Robots certainly do make many people’s lives much easier, particularly those who make them.  Robots save lives by performing dangerous tasks and will continue to do so as they become more sophisticated.   It is evident, however, by the contention raised by the Lettuce Bot and other similar “labor saving devices,” that the rise of these machines is still not a concept with which we have yet made peace.