The smell of burnt vegetation wafted through a lettuce field here one recent summer morning as nearly 200 farmers, academics and engineers gathered to witness the future of automated agriculture. Thirteen hulking machines with names like "Weed Spider" and "Mantis" crawled through rows of romaine. One used artificial intelligence cameras to scan the crops and spray them with herbicides. Yet another deployed robotic arms to cultivate and pick through the foliage. "It's a hurdle for people to get over, but the reality is, the numbers don't lie," said Tim Mahoney, a field representative for Carbon Robotics, a Seattle-based company that created one of the machines on display -- a 9,500-pound apparatus known as the LaserWeeder.

The robots have arrived in California's fields. This summer, a self-driving tractor was spotted working rows of vines in Napa valley. Described as resembling a "souped-up golf cart", the tractor runs on an electric battery and can be operated remotely with an app. Farther south, strawberry harvesting robots have been picking fruit. Complete with wheels, clipper-tipped arms and a catchment tray, its maker claims the machine can pick almost as many berries as a human with 95% accuracy.

Robots can do a lot. They build cars in factories. Robotic dogs can, allegedly and a little creepily, make us safer by patrolling our streets. But there are some things robots still cannot do – things that sound quite basic in comparison. "It's a simple thing" for humans, says robotics researcher Joe Davidson.

Instead of worrying so much about robots taking away jobs, maybe we should worry more about wages being too low for robots to even get a chance. Seasonal labor for harvesting agricultural products, particularly fruits and vegetables, is dependent on human labor from a diminishing universe of willing workers. Robots that can supplement or replace human workers in the harvesting process are being developed and tested in startups and academia, but almost all are not yet ready for prime time. In a NY Times article written by Neil Irwin entitled Rethinking Low Productivity, productivity growth has been on a downward path since the Financial Crisis. Irwin, who writes about economic trends, asks whether the downward trend is the cause of low growth, or the result, a troubling question in the dynamics of the agriculture industry.

The Association for Advancing Automation (A3) cites that between 2010 and 2016, 136,748 robots were shipped to the US --the most in any seven-year period in the US robotics industry. At the same time, US manufacturing employment increased by 894,000 and the unemployment rate fell from 9.8% to 4.7%. Yet manufacturers, robotics associations, ethicists and media pundits are still fighting the robotics and jobs issue. Brett Brune, Editor in Chief of Smart Manufacturing magazine, argues that "the hand-wringing around robotics and jobs in the US really needs to stop." Manufacturers around the world, including in China, are busy figuring out how quickly to acquire robots.

In a finding from a Korn Ferry global survey of 800 top business executives, 44 percent of respondents said that the growth of robotics, automation and artificial intelligence will make people "largely irrelevant" in the future of work. Unlike the earlier generation of robots that operated separately from workers, the new robots work side by side with people and typically take on backbreaking tasks such as stacking tires. At the same time, the growth of manufacturing created millions of new jobs for the displaced farm workers. Scott Adams is practice leader, supply chain and operations for Korn Ferry Futurestep.

Robots are replacing human workers at a faster pace than any other point in history. Most of these robots are in factories, but a new kind of mechanized worker has hit apple orchards. Abundant Robotics in California has built an automated apple picker, that uses a vacuum system to suck the fruit straight off of the trees. "As a kid in Louisiana I was inspired by agricultural equipment such as combines, cotton pickers, and tractors," Abundant Robotics CEO Dan Steere told the Newshour. "The work we're doing is an extension of several hundreds of years of technology innovation for agriculture."

This flying bot created by the robotics startup Agribotix works like a normal drone, in that it can fly hundreds of feet in the air at speeds up to 33 mph. Called the Hornet, the bot helps farmers get a bird's-eye view of their fields. It takes aerial photos and videos of fields from above and analyzes crop health using infrared sensors. If a particular part of the field appears to have an issue, the bot will alert the farmers using an app.