Last Updated on March 8, 2025 by Brian Beck
I have encountered a few people that expressed objections over robotic lawn mowers. They usually stem from a fear of innovation, change or technological advancement as if that has never happened. More specifically though the people that are the most passionate about rejecting it do so out of a fear of losing their job. While I don’t believe that the machines are simply going to become autonomous one day, walk into a place of work and tell people to leave because they are getting replaced. No, it is a little more nuanced that that. All work is centered around the premise of need and ultimately affordability. In assessing this, cost effectiveness and efficiency is constantly being evaluated. People never simply get replaced by the tools that they are using, they get replaced because their capacity to provide a solution gets matched and surpassed by a technology tat makes their job horribly inefficient. We no longer rely on horse drawn transportation, typewriters, blacksmiths, cashiers, etc. To keep these types of jobs around would be self-destructive. We do still have jobs that are related to the ones that no longer exist, the electric self-driven car, word processors, CNC machines, ATMs, etc. There are still people working in these fields they just are not doing the hard primitive work that was done before. In some instances, the new technology as created even more jobs due to the complexity of the technology that needs support to maintain it.
In regard to lawn mowing and robotic mowers, before we throw up our ands in hopeless desperation we need to realize some things that I think are getting missed. WE are dealing with a horribly inefficient system that is outdated and subject to several tings that are serious obstacles to efficiency. Let me explain: With gas/diesel powered equipment over 90% of the energy being used is being spent in complete waste. When you move man and material from place to place you compound this inefficiency and waste. Once you study the numbers you will draw a conclusion of this fact. In the current system the harder you push, the more expense and inefficiency you experience. The use of powerful machines being used is largely to overcome several things such as time and finite human energy.
The next area of inefficiency that is being overlooked is all of the time that is lost due to weather, holidays, weekends, mechanical delays, logistical delays (traffic), and employee absences. Automation can fill this void and stand in the gap of this inefficiency that will always be present in the current system. We lose a lot of time just to weather. If we could operate just before, during, or right afterwards we could defeat this impediment to our operations. I really feel that automation and the fear of it is too quickly dismissed as being a threat rather than a massive force multiplier. We can be much more productive and we can be wildly more efficient if we study before dismissing.
