Replacing humans with machines: a historical look at technology politics in California agriculture
Replacing humans with machines: a historical look at technology politics in California agriculture
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DOI：
10.1007/s10460-022-10341-2
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发表时间：
2022-07-12
影响因子：
4.5
通讯作者：
Iles, Alastair
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Baur, Patrick;Iles, Alastair
如今，媒体、行业研究人员和政策制定者都在忙着赞美机器人的新进步，这些进步有望改变农业，使我们更接近自我耕作的农场。然而，这种技术乐观主义者的言论忽视了过去试图机械化农场的警示教训。适应技术的社会建构框架，我们追溯了1945年至1980年期间，在加州的水果，坚果和蔬菜农场上用机器劳动取代人类劳动的努力的历史-在此期间，二战后对技术科学应用于农业的益处的信仰文化达到了顶峰。机械化获得动力的程度和形式取决于模仿人类能力和取代工人的技术框架是否、如何以及在谁之间结合。我们发现，这些框架在不同的作物中有很大的差异，反映了生物学、农民和农场工人行为、工业供应链、农业研发、资金流动以及对劳动力、种族、性别和移民的信念的复杂相互作用。为了梳理出这些复杂的动力学，我们直接从档案证据中提取，通过四个案例来跟踪种植和收获机器的发展，这些案例涵盖了一系列结果-西红柿，坚果，桃子和生菜。在比较这些案例时，我们发现，尽管农业工程师、科学家和他们的支持者将机械化框定为“人与自然”冲突中进步的胜利叙事，但这种技术乐观主义的言论掩盖了更深层次的“人与人”冲突，特别是在农业综合企业、农民和农场工人之间。最后，我们总结了这一历史研究为今天的农业自动化研究带来的几点启示。
Media outlets, industry researchers, and policy-makers are today busily extolling new robotic advances that promise to transform agriculture, bringing us ever closer to self-farming farms. Yet such techno-optimist discourse ignores the cautionary lessons of past attempts to mechanize farms. Adapting the Social Construction of Technology framework, we trace the history of efforts to replace human labor with machine labor on fruit, nut, and vegetable farms in California between 1945 and 1980-a place and time during which a post-WWII culture of faith in the beneficence of technoscience applications to agriculture reached an apex. The degree to which and forms whereby mechanization gains momentum hinges on whether, how, and among whom a technological frame for mimicking human capabilities and supplanting workers coalesces. These frames, we find, vary considerably across crops, reflecting complex interactions of biology, farmer and farm worker behavior, industry supply chains, agricultural research and development, financial flows, and beliefs about labor, race, gender, and immigration. To tease out these complex dynamics, we draw directly from archival evidence to follow the development of cultivation and harvest machines through four cases spanning a spectrum of outcomes-tomatoes, nuts, peaches, and lettuce. In comparing across these cases, we find that although agricultural engineers, scientists, and their boosters framed mechanization as a triumphal narrative of progress in 'human vs. nature' conflicts, this techno-optimist rhetoric camouflaged deeper 'human vs. human' conflicts, particularly among agribusiness, farmers, and farm workers. We conclude with several insights that this historical study brings to the study of agricultural automation today.