One of my favorite episodes of the television series The Twilight Zone is "To Serve Man," a tale about the Kanamits, a race of nine-foot-tall aliens that land on Earth. In the episode, one of them addresses the United Nations, vowing that his race's motive is solely to help mankind.
Indeed, one of the Kanamits' books is entitled just that—To Serve Man. Soon everyone on Earth wants to visit the alien planet and they are loaded off in spaceships by the thousands. Until, of course, the heroine of the tale discovers that the book To Serve Man is in fact a cookbook and that the aliens simply needed a good meal! This is at once horrifying and, to those with a somewhat black sense of humor, rather comedic.
Some would also argue that a similar somewhat disturbing tale is also now occurring in the opening overs of the 21st century. In automotive inspection, pharmaceutical production and packaging, and semiconductor inspection systems, OEM products such as lighting, cameras, computers, robots, and software are already being deployed in integrated vision systems to increase the quality and lower the costs of manufacturing and production.
Other less established opportunities are emerging that will benefit OEM suppliers even further. These include applications in automated vehicle navigation, sophisticated security and surveillance, and automated harvesting and meat production.
In developing automated processes and equipment, manufacturers often rightly like to tout the aforementioned benefits of the systems. Some manufacturers also like to state that by deploying such systems, the manual labor once associated with the tasks has been in turn "redeployed" within the company to more productive work. Needless to say, this more productive work is never quite fully explained! To any one with half a brain, however, it is obvious that the primary reason for the development of automated systems is to replace human labor.
Nowhere is this more evident that in the farming and food production industries. Already, automated harvesters are available that continuously reap numerous types of crops, automatically delivering foodstuffs to storage facilities for later distribution, without human, manual intervention.
Formerly time-consuming and labor-intensive tasks such as cattle farming are slowly being handled by automated systems that can track, herd, and milk cows. Slaughtering, cutting, preparing, and packaging of meat products are also slowly being automated, as you will see in our article in this issue.
In future, it is highly likely that more fully integrated systems will be deployed that integrate the complete cradle-to-grave food production process. While relieving mankind of such laborious, often dangerous tasks, it is certain that the manpower once required will be initially reduced and perhaps eventually eliminated.
One has to ponder whether such systems—though touted as being developed to serve man—will eventually become a cookbook for social disaster. Or is that just the Luddite in me speaking?
Andy Wilson, Editor in Chief
[email protected]
