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Autonomous equipment for crop production is on the verge of technical and economic feasibility, but government regulation may slow its adoption. Key regulatory issues include requirements for on‐site human supervision, liability for autonomous machine error, and intellectual property in robotic learning. As an example of the impact of regulation on the economic benefits of autonomous crop equipment, analysis from the United Kingdom suggests that requiring 100% on‐site human supervision almost wipes out the economic benefits of autonomous crop equipment for small and medium farms and increases the economies‐of‐scale advantage of larger farms.

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Many of the great expectations of technology in the 1960s remain unfulfilled today.Alongside the optimism that drove technological development, sceptical views on the promises of technology have become popular and senses of deception, reflection, even hostility, emerged within Western societies. One such group is the Degrowth community, a heterogenous group of researchers and activists, who question technological advancements that contributed to environmentally and socially harmful economic growth. It critically observes current hypes of digital technology, which seem to follow a mantra of "the more

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Governments required on-site human supervision for the crop robots being tested throughout Europe in 2020. For arable farms, initial evidence suggested that requiring on-site human supervision could lead to robots being used on larger farms with large fields where one human can supervise multiple robots. In spite of the technical progress in crop robotics, the legal, regulatory and policy issues around this technology have hardly been explored. Some observers suggest that, at this point, those issues may be a bigger challenge to implementation of crop robotics than the technical aspects.

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