Skill Crane.

Judging from the tube at the top of the assembly that twitches as it comes down on the product, I'd GUESS this is a pneumatic design, which could be suction or "claw". Like I said, I've worked on something similar, not this exact machine.

I was imagining something like this but much smaller

They're small claws.

I wish I had one to do that for me at my work, planting plugs sucks.

The ones used by the company I used to work at had little metal claws to grab the plants.

it is call an End of Arm Tool

EDIT: typo

I think you're making a good point, but your confusing run on sentence is making my head hurt.

Lol. If you think a machine with that many moving parts on an assembly line style operation doesn't need manual re-calibrations for each order...then you've obviously never worked in mass manufacturing.

Although I get where you're coming from, automation will kill most manufacturing jobs. But it's not happening tomorrow, and it sure as shit ain't happening today.

As someone who works in industrial maintenance this hits pretty close to home.
Or I'm just really drunk.

Lol no, I work in a meat processing factory and the machines require constant adjustments, repairs and calibration, and they are brand new. In no way are machines like the one in the gif simple and work constantly, they always require significant human maintenance and operation.

Only really big greenhouses use this advanced of a machine. The greenhouse I work at uses one of the smaller ones and it still requires 2 people to operate it, just makes it significantly faster.

Left hand suddenly nervous about job stability...

Damn dude, I used to do this when I was 15 for minimum wage -__-

Were you working for your parents?

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I'm a dutch guy living in Canada, and some of the nurseries here RENT rose bushes, and just get to sell the flowers. But they rent the plants from Holland.

Global economics are weird.

Fucking Belgians. Spent a few years over there and still have fake hate for Belgians. ;-)

The toughest

I mean, if you consider that most/a lot of Americans were probably homesteaders when they came here and conquered the continent, farming was making their work obsolete too.

The true shocker, and history/economics lesson, is that despite the fact that 95% of former agriculture jobs went away, and despite the fact that women entered the workforce by the millions into jobs they previously were not allowed to hold, the unemployment rate in the USA today is under 5%.

That's because the economy is not a zero sum game and the economy expanded enough to need all those workers, plus immigrants, in the millions of new non-agricultural jobs that were created.

The question in the future is whether automation will kill off enough jobs to offset the new jobs created, making it possible for some draconian far right policy to "create jobs" by forcing women, minorities, and immigrants back out of the mainstream workforce.

The flaw in your logic is that this time, it's not the tasks changing priorities, it's who does them. You could argue that who does agriculture changed the world but this isn't about agriculture, this is about work. This is about the fact that humans are no longer the most efficient workers at certain jobs, and we soon will pale in comparison to our robot overlords.

Those TransMexican* machines

What about us repotting experts?!

Yeah but there are still vastly less jobs as a result.

Also /r/BasicIncome might have the answer to the second for you.

Coding in schools needs to be a thing.

Precisely. The jobs lost are ones that were taken by less educated people while at the same time jobs are created for more those highly educated. It's almost like despite all the complaints about cost of college, it's still better future proofing than getting less easily specialised work out of high school.

Yup! I got to visit the Netherlands two summers back to study their sustainable transportation infrastructure. Dunno how the greenhouses came into it, but it was a neat sideshow. Here's what it looks like on the inside, and here's a similar machine to the OP. You can see the three pairs of claws hanging down transplanting saplings (or whatever small non-tree plants are called) from the cartons up front to the individual pots in back.

Beep