Hi Allen, A comment on the peasant farmer. While friends of mine were in Kenya two years ago they visited a Masai village where the herdsmen were consulting their cell phones to check on market prices of supplies and products they wanted to sell. What is greater impediment to that peasant farmer today is a lack of supporting infrastructure to ensure that what he or she produces doesn’t end up spoiling in the fields, or rotting before reaching market because roads and rail service are insufficient in his or her region.

Where robotics and farming will intersect is not in small plot agriculture, but agribusiness at an industrial scale producing food staple crops that get bought and sold in commodity markets globally. This is not the domain where small farmers will find their future.

I’m afraid that peasant farmer will not benefit, but rather will suffer, as the net
informs the world that there will be even less rain on his marginal acre, agricultural prices are plummeting, and “better farming practices” must implement robots farming thousand acre tracts. Unless the peasant farmer wants to work his marginal acre for less than ten-cents per hour, he will only “benefit” from some meager dehumanizing scheme of “social credit” wealth redistribution in a third world megalopolis slum, but then he sure won’t be a self-sufficient peasant farmer anymore.

(Wiki) John Henry of song and legend “is said to have worked as a “steel-driving man”—a man tasked with hammering a steel drill into rock to make holes for explosives to blast the rock in constructing a railroad tunnel. According to legend, John Henry’s prowess as a steel-driver was measured in a race against a steam powered hammer, which he won, only to die in victory with his hammer in his hand as his heart gave out from stress.”

But the “John Henrys” of the future world won’t be competing with 19th century steam hammers; they will be competing with powerful electrical machines dispassionately controlled by electronic intelligence. John Henry has no chance in Hell.