It occurs to me that I have spent 50 years building robots. Specifically robots to process resources. Food is a renewable resource. Dairies, breweries, cheeseplants, surimi plants, slaughterhouses and oat mills are all robots.
They are static robots with their operators operating within the body of the robot.
The plants employ electric motors to convert agricultural resources harvested from field and sea and convert them into consumer products. For 50 years I built plants where my goal was to reduce the number of operators within the walls to two (2) per shift. My goal was two operators and a coffee pot.
Machine intelligence (clockwork, electro-mechanical, integrated circuitry based on transistors and computers) allowed me to make the next plant more efficient than the last one.
I also discovered that a plant with a small output costs about as much as a plant with a big output. This is because the cost of the plant is not dependent on the size of the motors. It is dependent on the number of motors and they, in turn, are dependent on the number of unit processes conducted by the robot within the plant.
This means that the cost of building a plant to service the 5,000,000 of the Alberta market is not substantially less than the cost of building a plant to service the US or China. The same logic applies to mines, farms and fisheries, or I daresay, forestry.
People are thrilled with dancing robo-dogs and somersaullting robo-warriors.
But the real magic is in getting 2 operators with a pot of coffee to supervise a bunch of motors harvesting resources and converting them into marketable goods that can be dumped into the hold of a ship or packaged in an ISO container and shipped around the world.
Canada shoots itself in the heart with its supply management programmes. In protecting their 40,000,000 market with trade barriers they prompt the rest of the world to isolate Canada by erecting their own trade barriers. Canada could be raising millions more cows and shipping cheese to Asia (they are lactose intolerant but are consumers of cheese which is lactose reduced because the lactose is strained off with the whey and the residual lactose is converted to the lactic acid that preserves the cheese).
New Zealand came to that conclusion decades ago and cancelled its supply management program.
We have yet to learn the lesson.
Our future is not in importing more cheap labour to staff the plants my grandfather sold in the 1930s. It is in building new plants that 2 of our kids, with a coffee put, can use to supply the rest of the world and make a buck that will supply them a living wage and free time.
sprott.carleton.ca
