Current Industry
Currently in the forestry industry, human controlled machinery like the Walking Forest Machine (Forest Industry, n.d.) and the John Deere 909MH Tracked Harvester (John Deere, n.d.) are widely being used to increase productivity. Mixing the progress outlook for the future, and the machinery available today, indeed shows us that the challenge which the forestry industry will inevitably face is the complete automation of all forestry operations. However, that is not the only challenge, many ethical questions about human job loss will arise during the robot replacement era. Is complete automation the right path to take?
Figure 2. Walking Forest Machine (Forest Industry, n.d.)
Figure 3 . Tracked Harvester (John Deere, 2015)
Robotics
Author: Ruan Malan
Humble Beingings
Robots are integrating into our lives, now and certainly in the future. According to Pearson and Neild (2006), robots would be providing personal health care, cleaning and washing and also outnumbering human soldiers on the battlefield, all of which is predicted to happen before the 2030s. This prediction is not only accepted, but is coming into form before our eyes. A great example is ASIMO (Honda, n.d.). ASIMO has gained an enormous advancement for humanoids through its planned foot placement programming (Chestnutt, Lau, Cheung, Kuffner, Hodgins and Kanade, 2005). This foot placement can be seen as the initial stages leading to robots walking side by side with human beings.
Translation of text or speech by a machine has also been an area of significant growth. Initially started in the 1950s, they had visions of high-speed, high-quality translation. However, due to insignificant progress, government funding was cut by late 1975. Still, in 1984 approximately half a million pages of text were translated by machines (Slocum, 1985).
Let’s compare that to today’s translation machinery, Microsoft Word is a great example. Most of us use Microsoft Word on a daily basis, the software checks our every word and sentence, both for spelling and grammar. The magnitude of translation, by Microsoft alone, is massive considering Work is used world-wide.
However, a more specific example may help grasp the enormity. Asia Online is a translating company, claiming to be translating 1 billion words per day for some of their customers (Asia Online, n.d.). On average, there are about 600 words in an academic book (Writing Services, n.d.). Therefore, Asia Online claim to be translating approximately 1.6 million pages per day for some customers. So the world wide machine translating of half a million pages in the whole year of 1984 has grown to 1.6 million per day for a customer, just for a single company.
This amazing growth over 30 years and can be projected both across several robotic fields and the distant future, predicting the overall rapid development and integration of robotics into our daily lives. What does this mean for the forestry industry? As robotics improve, fully automated machinery will most likely be available by 2070 to overtake their human ‘rivals’ in certain forestry operations.
Cyborgs
An alternative pathway that could bring answers to providing human jobs is found in the intertwining of the brain and machine. This area brings about the evolution of humans to cyborgs. The first experimental demonstration of the brain controlling a robotic arm occurred in 1999 (Lebedev and Nicolelis, 2006). According to Lebedev and Nicolelis (2006) “since then (1999), a continuous stream of research papers has kindled an enormous interest in BMIs (brain-machine interfaces) among the scientific community” (p. 1). There are two types of BMIs, non-invasive and invasive. Non-invasive is machinery that is attached externally to the body. Invasive is where electrodes are implanted intracranially, which results in the ‘reading’ of the brain and an action made by machinery, either internally or externally. Both types of BMI have the potential to increase the strength, agility, accuracy and endurance of the users exponentially (Casadio, Ranganathan and Mussa-Ivaldi, 2012). What does this mean for the forestry industry? Man-kind becoming one with machine will improve most physical aspects. This may possibly mean that humans could carry trees around like they were twigs. Allowing the human brain to be attached with outstanding technological capabilities may be more appealing than allowing a machine to ‘think’ with the same technological capabilities.
Both pathways, as well as a mix of the two, will provide a drive for future changes in the New Zealand forestry industry as it looks to compete with international markets. The initial steps towards remote control forestry machines has already been taken by Umea University in Sweden. They focus on providing an operator with a 3d view of the machine in its environment, to allow for remote felling of trees (Westerberg and Shiriaev, 2013). This allows the operator to command the machine from a safe distance, or from the comfort of his/hers house. Nearing the prototyping stages, this could become the norm for the forestry industry for a number of years before either human cyborgs or fully automated machinery are capable of forestry operations.
Future Outlook
Figure 1. ASIMO (Ars Electronic, 2010)
Figure 4. Fully Implantable BMI (Lebedev et al., 2006)