I worked as stow, that job is brutal man, you gotta last 2-3 hrs at a time 3x a day for a 10hr shift. They don't like you listening to music so you gotta just sit there in silence. Luckily I got to unload trucks and I started drinking to get through it on my breaks.
Still it's tough to beat a place where you can walk in with no skills and start making $20/hr
It just made it more fun. There was a liquor store nearby so drive to it on the 30 minute break, pound a couple 100 proof 100ml bottles (99 Apples), back to it. That job was more fun than stow.
If you're curious can read the subreddit /r/amazonfc
They did recently start allowing you to buy their own approved headphones but before you'd get written up for being on your phone/having headphones in
Plenty of people who don’t work for Amazon already buy stuff from there. I guess I mostly see the jobs as exchanging labour for something that society values and so by automating, there is more labour available to do things society values and so society gets more of what it values. And if you think working for Amazon is bad for people then you should be happy if automation is decreasing the number of people suffering that bad thing (though automation won’t always decrease this, eg see rise in number of bank tellers/branches in the US). But that isn’t really the way that lots of people talk about jobs and so if what you want is for people to have somewhere local where they can exchange their time for money to spend on goods and services then I guess automation and efficiency don’t really matter because the point of the job is to ensure the worker has money coming in rather than to ensure that something useful comes out of it. That latter point of view is pretty popular and I think I’m describing it pretty terribly – I’m sure there is a much more reasonable argument for it.
The ultimate endgame is either a significant reduction in global population, or UBI. You can’t just keep automating every non-knowledge job away and just hope people find something else to do.
All those jobs in Detroit that went away were replaced by…? As best I can tell they were replaced by poverty and crime.
Detroit is an odd example. You have the cornerstone industry up and leaving the area, followed by race riots which led to white flight and the middle class leaving the city. This led to a vacuum in support and jobs leaving the new majority black population and poor to fend for themselves. Two historically oppressed groups now yolked to a dying city.
It's more an example of how racism and reliance on singular industry can quickly create pits that are largely insurmountable. Similar cases can be found in coal country in Appalachia. The lesson isn't to prop up local industry to maintain job and economic stability. The lesson is to stage out disruption. ILA recently took this on with automation in shipping. The goal isn't to prevent automation but to not give companies a blank check to mass fire workers and replace them with automation.
So ignore Detroit, pick a city that based their economy on literally any manufacturing industry that up and left. What was the replacement work that maintained middle class families at the same numbers?
Judging from efforts in the US to make health care harder and harder to obtain, I'm betting on the former, especially if other countries follow suit. Slowly letting people die from untreated chronic diseases may be seen as more humane than outright mass slaughter.
I don’t understand the endgame. If everyone is poor and dying who is buying all the useless/social credit shit until there are 100m “wealthy” people left? And if “they” (whoever they are, I think we all give “wealthy” people far too much credit, many that I’ve known are pretty empty, insecure people lacking any real self awareness) want everyone else dead, why are all “developed” countries pushing for higher birthrates and encouraging immigration from less developed countries?
I think the latter view is usually held by people who know they won't experience productivity gains from automation.
Say someone who is has driven a taxi all their life or driven a forklift. They can appreciate how adding air-conditioning to their vehicle allows them to drive in hotter days, therefore they can do more work. But automating their whole job away with autonomous vehicles doesn't benefit them, so they don't want it.
Personally, I think those people can't be picky about their jobs. If you do something that is automatable, you will be out of a job sooner or later. When that happens, don't get mad and go find another soon-to-be automated job.
The unfortunate reality is that humans seem to have this innate desire to get rid of ourselves. I see us trying to automated everything. To what end, I do not know.
meanwhile, i wont mind if they trash your robot taxi so that its inoperable. shoulda put that money and automation into something that doesnt break so easily
The point wasn't really that workers should be the primary clientele, just that the average worker should be able to afford it, and if that wasn't the case the price of the goods should be lowered, or a trend started for higher worker compensation.
Robotic workers lower operational costs and can make goods more accessible, and it's common for various manual labour jobs to be lost when industries change - the labour shifts elsewhere, and generally higher.
(If this wasn't true, unemployment would have constantly grown worldwide since the first automaton replaced a human job or government outlawed certain manual industries, which isn't the case. Workforces do and must adapt to needs and trends.)
I think the point is that once robots can do everything human bodies do and AIs can do everything human minds do, there is nowhere left for humans to go. Just like horses didn't find new employment when internal combustion engines reached the point where they could do everything a horse does but better and cheaper.
I think the horses were pretty okay with not being bred into slavery.
But there's a very, very big difference between "automate dumb task with unimpressive efficiency that beats humans because humans have to pee, eat and sleep", and AI supplanting humans in society.
Robots isn't an important step in that path tbh. Intelligence is, and we still aren't close, even when throwing entire hyperscale datacenters at the problem...
>Henry Ford famously wanted his workers to be able to afford his cars.
Amazing how that bit of PR is still being quoted over 100 years later. In reality, Ford had huge turnover problems with his workers - one estimate is over 370% annual turnover. One way to help prevent turnover is to pay more, and it solved the problem. (Even so, the base pay was still actually $2.30 and to get the extra $2.70 you had to abstain from alcohol, keep your home clean, etc.)
Didn't he pay more than his competitors and get sued by his competitors for not acting in the the best interest of his shareholders (by wanting to pay his workers even more)?
No, Henry Ford's goal was to screw the Dodge brothers (whose other company, Dodge Brothers Company, needed a cash injection), not to help his workers.
The Dodge brothers were major investors in Ford Motor Company, and thus entitled to a large share of dividends. Henry Ford tried to bankrupt the Dodge Motor Company by avoiding to pay FoMoCo dividends and thus starve his competitor of cash. The fact that the mechanism Ford used to make his own company unprofitable (and thus avoid paying dividends) also benefited the workers is just coincidence.
In fact the reason we have the modern precedent "companies must operate for the benefit of shareholders" is precisely because Henry Ford's defense in Dodge v. Ford was "I can do this because I want to and I am king". If he had argued "paying workers more makes them happier and thus makes Ford more profitable in the long term", Ford probably would have won that lawsuit. He didn't make that argument because it just wasn't on his radar: His goal was screwing Dodge.
Fascinating read especially when viewed from the strategic angling to make Ford less profitable and cut off the minority shareholders the Dodge brothers from the dividend revenue stream they were using to build a rival company. So ironically, while the court held that the board had to prioritize shareholder profits, he would have realized greater shareholder profits by stifling the competition in its crib.
> while the court held that the board had to prioritize shareholder profits
It's a bit more nuanced than that. The court held that company directors have to be acting for the benefit of shareholders. They still have wide latitude about how to do that.
The reason Ford lost is because his legal position was essentially "I am king, therefore I can do whatever I want". But you can't do whatever you want. You can't lock the workers in the factory and burn it down with them inside, for example. You need to have some kind of colorable argument that what you are doing is somehow in the interest of shareholders (either long or short term).
The problem for Ford was that he couldn't articulate any reason for how his actions were beneficial to shareholders (probably because the real reason, killing the Dodge Brothers Company, would have been illegal under the antitrust laws of the time).
It might be apocryphal, but my understanding is that he did this less out of a sense of civic duty and more because the skilled tradespeople liked their existing lifestyle and did not want to work in factories much, so they needed a big raise to be convinced.
I think it's even simpler than that: To run an assembly line, you need all stations staffed at the same time. You can't run the line if you're missing staff for just one station, but you still have to pay all the people who did show up.
So the easy solution is just to pay a lot and threaten to fire (and possibly blacklist) anyone who no-shows. Since the pay is much higher than they can get elsewhere, the people are much more likely to show up.
The high pay probably also helped find people who would tolerate the extremely intrusive practices of Ford's "morality police" (my term), who would inspect worker's homes to ensure they were living "the right way".
Products will become advertisements themselves. It could be cheaper and more effective to send everyone a box of Tesla Tasty-Electrons cereal than TV or Social media and slots.
Casinos provide free drinks, cartels offer free prostitutes, it's not unprecedented.
As long as the pace of automation does not exceed some max rate that people can't figure out what to do with the excess labor, we should be ok.
Though I suppose it's always possible that we'll reach something of a "singularity" where we enter the realm of The Phools, by Stanislaw Lem. I can't find a copy of it online, so you might just have to buy the book in which that short story appears.
Briefly and to spoil it: In the story there is a planet with human-like people called Phools and a very stratified, hyper-capitalistic society with three classes, workers, priests, and owners, and someone invents computer that fully automates all factories which then causes 100% unemployment among the workers who then start starving to death. In the story the owners and priests ask the inventor to ask the computer to come up with a solution. You can imagine what the computer came up with... At the end the traveler screams at them something like "Phools! All you had to do was redistribute your income!".
Today -and on this planet- there are certainly a few people today who speak of "useless eaters" and who would like the outcome from that short story. And I can imagine that happening almost naturally. Already fertility rates are crashing worldwide, and we're on a path towards a crashing human population worldwide, and if that happens naturally then I think it means that humans respond to price and other signals and adjust their family planning accordingly, and that would not be a bad thing. Pray though that it's not like in The Phools where the population crashed in a much more dramatic and speedy way, and not at all naturally.
New types of jobs are created every year. When I was young, there was no such thing as streaming video games and getting paid for it. Now, young kids and adults are making bank by playing video games and letting the whole world watch
I’m all for creative disruption, but what worries me is when I see a pattern of stable employment being displaced by algorithmically mediated gig work and viral entertainer lotto tickets. This is a dangerous trend in general, but the US is especially poorly positioned because of its lack of strong safety nets. When the foundation of your economy is hollowed out to make it ever more top-heavy, you’re destined for collapse.
We're more automated than we've ever been & unemployment is close to all-time lows. Why don't you get back to us with this when it's at least 6 or 7 percent...
Job quality is deteriorating, more people are holding more than one job, part time jobs are increasingly common, almost half of US workers are in low-wage jobs, wages have stagnated... It's a nice statistic, but unemployment rates don't tell much of the story on the ground, in people's lived experiences. That side of the story is overwhelmingly getting worse.
Unemployment being at all time lows means nothing if those employed with the minimum wage cannot afford the same quality of life than people did in the past earning the minimum wage of their time, because it means you aren't really comparing the same thing.
The minimum wage is not relevant as very few people make it. Wage earners at the top, bottom, and middle can afford a better (materially speaking) quality of life in the USA than at any time in the past:
This doesn't seem to take into account the price of land or the price of education or the price of healthcare, therefore claiming that they can afford a better quality of life it's highly misleading, if this is taking such things into account I would like to know exactly how.
There will be plenty of money to be made serving the needs and interests of the wealthy, while the rest of us are serviced by an informal economy that doesn't see institutional investment.
Look at street markets in countries with high wealth disparity. The well-off wouldn't shop or eat there, and they certainly wouldn't invest in a street vendor, the vendors are meant to serve the needs of people in poverty.
See Citigroup's plutonomy paper[1] that explores what that would look like and what investment strategies investors should take. The tl;dr is that the formal economy will abandon lower classes in favor of making a ton of money serving plutocrats and their friends and families instead.
If someone else replaces all workers with robots first instead, what will Bezos do then?
What you are describing is a political problem, not one for entrepreneurs. IMO the solution would be a form of UBI that we can smoothly increase as automation in fact removes jobs or lowers wages. I'd like to see that start ASAP, but OTOH we are still close to record-low unemployment and the last years saw the largest wage increases at the lower end in decades.
> What you are describing is a political problem, not one for entrepreneurs. IMO the solution would be a form of UBI that we can smoothly increase as automation in fact removes jobs or lowers wages.
The most successful entrepreneurs like Bezos are also the biggest political influencers, and instead of UBI they are advocating for less tax for themselves.
>I'd like to see that start ASAP, but OTOH we are still close to record-low unemployment and the last years saw the largest wage increases at the lower end in decades.
The last years also saw the highest rates of inflation in decades. Even basic necessities are the least affordable they've been in a long time, let alone something like housing.
"My favorite thing about this is how 2 weeks after this video went up, they had an accident where two robots collided and caused a gigantic fire that cost them like 50 million dollars."
Meanwhile, the warehouse down the road underwent a strike that put them out of commission for weeks, forced expensive wage concessions, and incurred NRLB fines, costing them like... 60 million dollars.
One of these things can be fixed, the other will always be a risk as long as humans are involved.
I'm curious how Amazon handles fire in the midst of their Kiva pods. Do they have procedures for retasking an army of robots to clear a path for humans to get access?
True, though the problem isn't just robot batteries burning up, but setting all the stock ablaze and this part is indeed feeding in atmospheric oxygen.
Walmart isn't considered a super high-tech company, but I took a tour of one of their warehouses in Bentonville and even that was quite cool. There were tons of conveyor belts everywhere, it kind of felt like something you'd see in Satisfactory.
I would argue Walmart is quite high tech! They’ve been approaching their business goals from lots of different angles. Tech, finance, logistics, etc are all a huge part of their business operations.
It’s a shame that the problems being solved are embedded within a business that embodies throwing things away at the first sign of weakness. I’m still upset they bought what seemed on track to be a nice successor to Simple Bank. Now it’s been pivoted again for the third time since acquisition.
Oh it wasn't trying to diss Walmart in this case. I used to work there (Jet.com -> Walmart Labs -> Walmart Global Tech), and I generally liked it. Some of the smartest humans I have ever known came from Jet and Walmart Labs.
Back in the early aughts when I was still in college, My roommate was an IE and worked as an efficiency engineer intern during his Summers. I vividly remember him talking about the company he was working for had a huge project to improve UPS's efficiencies. Their big improvements was to add dozens and dozens of conveyor belts in order to move the packages faster. He concluded his experience by saying, "Yeah man, its crazy, this is what the future is going to look like. This is how they're going to automate everything."
Interesting to know companies are still using them as a means to automate their work.
There was a big patent lawsuit related to this, which as I understand it Ocado won pretty comprehensively. (https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/ocado-wins-... -- case in UK court concluded that AutoStore's patents were all invalid and in any case Ocado didn't infringe them; there were a bunch of related cases in other jurisdictions but https://www.ocadogroup.com/media/news/autostore-and-ocado-se... indicates that shortly after the UK judgement they settled on terms very favourable to Ocado.)
This seems difficult to square with your claim that Ocado "just copied AutoStore". (I suppose it's not quite inconsistent with it; maybe Ocado copied a pile of things that AutoStore never patented, and the patented bits were always a sideshow?)
AutoStore losing a patent dispute doesn't mean that Ocado didn't copy them. Just looking at the patent dispute ignores that the first automated Ocado distribution centre was actually purchased from AutoStore, who had been selling their robot-digging tote system since 1996.
Ocado's initial patents as well were actually modifications of Autostore's robots, running on an Autostore grid, and Autostore manufactured the robots to Ocado's specification before Ocado decided to build the whole thing themselves.
So hard to argue that it wasn't a copy.
IMO I think the UK patent victory was a bit of a joke... Ocado's innovation of the robot above a single cell is both obvious, but also has it's own obvious downsides.
> This seems difficult to square with your claim that Ocado "just copied AutoStore".
I just looked at videos of the two technologies and it seems difficult to ignore the relationship.
Perhaps this is a case of "technically correct", i.e. that they technically did not infringe the patents, but that in practice they leveraged as much as they could around the patent claims?
AutoStore's patents were deemed invalid in the U.K. because they disclosed the invention prior to filing for the patents, which apparently is not allowed under U.K. law.
Their patents were invalidated in the U.S. due to "inequitable conduct or equitable estoppel" meaning either that Autostore violated someone else's patents or that they led Ocado to believe that Ocado was not violating Autostore's patents in some way. Both parties indicate that the latter happened, but the usual remedy is just a mandatory license, so the invalidation of the patents indicates that the former also occurred. (https://www.autostoresystem.com/investors-press-releases/aut...)
Truth has no place in a court of law. The fact that they won the lawsuit does not imply they are innocent. It could simply mean that they had better lawyers.
The warehouse automation industry has long had problems with scaling systems up.
A system that works well with 15 robots will often fall apart if scaled up to 150 or 1500 robots. Reliability, planning algorithm complexity, radio performance, all sorts of issues start to come up.
That’s why Hatteland patented the autostore tech in ~1995 and by the time the patents expired they only supported ~100 robots.
It’s not always easy to appreciate, because everyone publicises when they install a new automation system, but nobody publicises it if they scrap it 18 months later. Being discreet about it is better for the share price.
Of course there’s still a perfectly good market for less scalable automation; grocery just has crazy financials.
Labor is one of the most expensive parts of running a business. So just doing the math of, if we spend X amount of money on robots and can layoff Y amount of people then it's a net gain. Especially if a single machine can replace multiple people.
Only sometimes and costs change over time. The first robot is almost always more expensive than a human, but the second robot comes after the design is done and so it generally cheaper than the human (accountants will figure out how to amortize these costs and thus give us a better picture of costs.)
Robots also get cheaper over time because we learn. You can buy many parts in bulk including computer libraries to control them. You can find many people who know best practices who will not make some of the early mistakes that cost money.
I've picked orders. If I have to touch your purchase for 20 seconds it is a very long time. There are 180 chunks of 20 seconds in an hour. If the pay is $45 per hour it would cost 25 cents.
It appears this bot could be about 100 times simpler if they just had storage racks with smaller cubbies at the modest expense of usable storage volume. 1 item per cubbie.
It also stowed the other items, and know how much space they take up.
From the article:
> “When you’re a person doing this task, you’ve got a buffer of 20 or 30 items, and you’re looking for an opportunity to fit those items into different bins, and having to remember which item might go into which space. But the robot knows all of the properties of all of our items at once, and we can also look at all of the bins at the same time along with the bins in the next couple of pods that are coming up. So we can do this optimization over the whole set of information in 100 milliseconds.”
This feels like a silly way to do things. Why are they storing arbitrary cuboid items in fixed-size boxes? If they designed the warehouse for maximum robot efficiency, doesn't it seem more sensible, on first glance, to have stacks of the same item in a regular grid accessed from the top, instead of optimizing how to pack wildly different items in the same box?
The Kiva warehouses deliver the pods to human pickers at fixed stations. The humans just have to retrieve the product from the indicated bin without roaming the warehouse. The storage area for the pods is kept maximally packed without any aisles since the robots have their grid to operate in underneath.
From working on warehouse picking software way before there were robots ... it's because humans. It would take longer for a human to find space in the right space -- or instead, be lazy and forcibly put an item in a space it barely fits -- than to simply dump it into an arbitrary box with enough space and record the box. Then when deciding the path for the picker to pick items from, there's a high chance one of the purchased items is actually nearby other purchased items.
Neat is very important for consistent performance.
A restaurant can improve performance during the "lunch rush" by letting neat slip, but that carelessness is already costing them performance at the end of the lunch rush - this works because just as this catches up they get several hours in the afternoon to clean things up. Then supper crowd where they do it again - then they have the rest of the night to clean up from that. (the restaurants I worked in didn't have a breakfast rush, YMMV)
A factory by contrast needs to keep things neat and consistent all the time because there is never a rush/downtime. They want things rolling off the line at a consistent pace all day. Any compromise for speed now is a cost latter in the day.
I have never been in an Amazon warehouse so I don't have great insight into what things are like. I would expect they want to be more consistent all day - but I don't know. Maybe all the trucks arrive at once and then they get time when they are gone to clean up. I wouldn't expect that, but maybe.
Smooth is fast, slow is smooth, so slow is fast. You're applying that to the restaurant as a whole though, which makes human or robotic immaterial.
The saying I do believe has a difference between robots and humans. The idea largely being that human inaccuracy increases exponentially relative to speed. Ergo, slowing down can lead to dramatically bette accuracy and throughput. Though, robots don't necessarily lose accuracy because they are moving more quickly. Though, I'd agree it is likely that both humans and robots need "smooth" in order to be fast. The key difference is robots do not always lose smooth when moving at high speed.
Like every other Reddit-ism and internet worshipped rule of thumb. The reason for the popularity has far more to do with what makes a sound byte marketable to humans than it does with anything quantitative.
Look at the above restaurant example, the system has a built in buffer to handle spikes so it can be cheaper or make other tradeoffs everywhere else compared to an equivalently performant system that can do 100% duty cycle.
A robot or human that can deal with messy inventory is facilitating positive tradeoffs elsewhere in the system.
It's not about throughput per unit, it's about throughput per unit of cost.
If five cheap robots outperform a single skilled worker, robots win. But depending on jurisdiction, those five robots might still lose to a dozen or so slaves kept near starvation. For the skilled worker it's bad news one way or the other.
Skilled. Not pedigree-filtered and trained and certified into a scarcity that may or may not actually be natural. Chances are most doctors or lawyers or software engineers would perform rather sub-par picking and putting in a warehouse.
Day one yes. put us in the warehouse for a few months and we would be as good as everyone. I'm guessing the woule only give a few days of training before setting us loose.
Several months of me as a doctor and I'd still be incompetent.
"The fastest humans at this task are like Olympic athletes. They’re far faster than the robots, and they’re able to store items in pods at much higher densities."
They're not paying for the fastest. If they get some by accident that's great, but otherwise they just want someone reasonably mobile that will be good enough after a week or two of practice.
Of course the robots don't trip and fall breaking their back and sue the company, nor do they want vacations or raises. In fact the robot performance is probably rather consistent versus human performance.
Compare to a doctor who needs nearly a decade of special training. Or an engineer who needs a complex university training program.
Yes some are better than others. However there is still a vast gulf in skill between those people than engineers (much less doctors), while the gap between them and someone off the street is much less. (the article doesn't say how long it takes someone to get to that high skilled state or even if it is possible to train to that level - if someone can show me data on this I might change my mind on skill)
Part of my day job is Warehouse Automation - not Amazon!. I would agree with you on being slow, but it probably suffices to what Amazon want to achieve here. If your entire process, so stow, store and retrieve is automated, you wouldn't use these "pods". A lot of these problems seem so simple and easy to automate out, but it's really not!
Optimizing space and trying to keep things neat is a futile effort. Pickers and counters are constantly pulling things out of the bins and putting them back in, and during high demand it's a chaotic mess. If there are going to be robots being this meticulous at every step of the process, then it's too slow.
There's a reason human beings are worked to the point of exhaustion in these warehouses - the goal is to move as much product as fast as possible. Quality and productivity are at cross purposes, and between the two only the latter makes money.
Real life interaction is anything but strictly meticulous. Inside an application (in silicon without bugs, not being hit by stray cosmic rays, not having software logic bug) things may seem ideal, but the moment you try to move a pole on a motor 5 cm forward, and 5cm backward, every day at the same time, you'll notice that ideal will have dismantled itself off the mount within two weeks
I agree robots breakdown a lot, however if you think robots are more expensive to maintain you may want to take a look at the cost of American medical costs.
Mechanical engineering has a lot of practice on looking at failures and changing designs to make those less common or a maintenance item easy/cheap to fix. (they might have other options too, I'm not a ME)
>and are far more expensive to repair and maintain than a human being
Fillpy the robot will not:
- need vacations
- go on maternity leave
- call in sick
- steal from work
- be rude to customers
- go to work hungover from drinking
- come in high/stoned at work
- sue you for X,Y,Z
- sexually harass colleagues
- go on strike
- start a union
All those pale in comparison to repair costs. That's why companies are pushing for automation. Because Flippy does its job quietly and diligently 24/7 without complaining.
This seems insane. We're trying to teach Longshoreman's Tetris to machines, instead of using the system of standard containerization that almost completely replaced longshoremen, despite lower packing densities.
If Amazon had to load and unload entire warehouses as fast as possible, they wouldn't do this. The constraints they're operating under are completely different.
The containerization is at a higher level: the rack of yellow bins is a four-sided tower that is robotically driven in and out of tightly packed uniform rows.
Right. Containers being a standard size is great so you don't have to care about what's inside the containers. At the AMZN warehouse, they absolutely care about what's in the containers, and what's in the container is no longer anywhere close to be standard size/shape/weight.
The container is the standardization. One container per unit of product. Containers ("bins") dimensioned in multiples of some standard unit that evenly divides a grid system on a rack. Stuffing looks like "a pallet of identical goods appears on one side of your workspace and 150 individual 100mm x 200mm x 400mm bins appear on the other side and the job is to put A into B". Storage operations look like they do now using the robot racks. Emptying looks like "Three bins of various sizes shows up on one side and a cardboard box appears on the other side". You divide the tasks up and have a different machine or human for each. The benefit is you always have a reliably identical picking and stuffing task per item, and there is never a bin of remainder items that has to be pushed back into the system. The cost is lowered storage efficiency. You don't even have to break a pallet at a DC, you can design for distribution of bins (at a higher transport cost).
What does "a genuine sense of touch" actually mean? Surely there have been robots in the past that can detect how much force they are apply to an object? Was that a "fake sense of touch"?
Anecdotally, I know of 2 examples of friends who work in traditional manufacturing who have changed packaging graphics and colors because their previous designs were difficult for optics.
Specifically, both of them had to stop using black-colored boxes and move graphics in from box boundaries.
This is good news actually, while you have less jobs, hopefully new ones are created, people in the future don't have the option to work slave like jobs.
I see this thinking thrown around often, but I don't see how net new jobs would be created by efficiencies. Amazon wouldn't adopt robots if it created more employment overhead downstream. Sure, there will be robot maintainers, but not at a replacement level of the roles replaced. Companies adopt technologies because they reduce the net amount of human input (cost) required, right?
Certainly, for 95% of americans that's been true recently, but ai seems more positioned as a qualitative than a quantitative shift. maybe my defining it in terms of efficiency is incorrect. Moreover these types of mundane tasks are a product of that industrialization. so i'm puzzled by the thinking of 'more efficiency to fix the pains brought on by efficiencies'
People who advocate for right to repair (which I'm in favor of by the way) sometimes ignore the economic realities.
For example, my dad was an electrical engineer who could fix any radio or TV. Reality: radios & TVs were relatively expensive AND the circuits within them were relatively large (observable with the naked eye or at least a magnifying glass). Today "repair" means at most replacing a capacitor although it's often cheaper & more efficient to just swap out a board. That of course assumes the board is still being manufactured and there are costs for companies to continue doing that, especially how fast technology moves forward.
Of course there are reasonable rights to repair we should have like being able to replace the software with software of our choosing, being able to modify parts within things we own, etc. But it won't be like it was prior to the 2000s where you could actually meaningfully enact repairs on electronic components by swapping out small easily available generic parts.
There are also secondary considerations like security that we haven't figured out technical answers to for right to repair (i.e. right to repair today also often means right to inject security vulnerabilities).
I actually work in the industrial repair industry. The thing to remember is not every company is insanely rich. Maybe top level companies but they are supported by a wide network of smaller companies. Those smaller companies don't have a ton of money to throw around. The manufacturers of the equipment have become quite greedy. The majority of them offer whole systems and then if anything breaks they want to charge an insane amount to send out a field engineer. And then if something is broke most of the time they either don't carry that part/panel/whatever in stock and will try and upsell you to the new model which is of course a massive investment.
So repair shops fill the gap for all these smaller companies and factories to get support higher than the on staff maintenance. Not everything is fixable though. They may use unique hardware signatures on drives or FPGA's or PAL's with security bit enabled. That has been true for a while though. Even in consolidation there is still plenty of business and repairs to be made.
Conversely the medically industry might be a good example. Anyone making medical equipment has to provide documentation on it. Which makes them far more repairable and easily diagnosable.
TV's especially are peak commodity. They are so cheap that the skilled labor cost to fix them isn't economically. They also are not easily transportable so repair and resell is a rough business for them. Things like laptops and phones though seems much more reasonable. Plenty of people do that professionally or even as a hobby. I like a large portion of repairs on those types of devices can be fairly economical and Chinese part makers provide plenty of affordable parts. It would cost OEM's extra to keep these parts in stock, but it's not a terrible hard task. Providing schematics also isn't a huge ask. Most are reverse engineered anyway.
When it comes to security I think this is fairly simple. Provide a blank security chip and create a secure method to connect and program it. Apple does this with its self repair when it comes to matching hardware UID's in the firmware so all the functionality is unlocked. Companies like Apple and Samsung can keep their Knox and Secure Enclave/exclave. Data can be seen as something that is not repairable in most cases. But they can provide the parts the secure a device again and leave it as a blank slate.
The biggest problem with Right to Repair is pricing. Right now Chinese makers can whip out parts for really cheap. Comparing to official parts from Apple or Google or Samsung when they did sell them and they are way higher and sometimes prohibitively so. Would be better to treat it like auto parts. Where you can get the OEM part or the third party part and both can work. Some things like security would need to be first party, but that would be a great deal. So it's doable, but would require a LOT of political will against tech companies. So it's just a really tough sell to get to that point.
Consumerism can be avoided regardless of right to repair legislation. We just stop buying shit we don’t really need which is most of what people buy on Amazon I imagine.
If your argument begins with "people should just..." then generally you've already lost the argument. The fact is that people aren't doing whatever you're suggesting, for whatever reason, and no amount of righteous indignation is going to suddenly make people change that. I guess you can sit there smug and feel good about yourself, and that's worth something, but you can't expect people to give a shit about that.
In this case, legislation could help ameliorate this problem, and maybe taxing the actual cost of things (e.g. environmental impact) instead of just letting the future generations deal with it.
Sorry, I think I read a bit more indignation in your message than you intended.
I mostly have a visceral reaction to "people should just.." arguments because I heard stuff like that brought up a lot during abortion arguments, particularly in regards to birth control.
"Teenagers should just stop having sex!!" was something I thought was particularly dumb, because a) have they never been a teenager? that's all a lot of them think about cuz hormones and b) whether or not they should, they're going to anyway.
Anyway, sorry for the kind of pissy response, no offense meant.
Well, no, when I say "people should just" arguments, I'm referring to arguments that talk about society at large. I think those are bad arguments. I didn't say "people should stop", I just think it's a bad argument, they're obviously free to make bad arguments. I wouldn't take that right away from them even if I could.
"People should just" pass legislation would be specific to congress, so not quite the same thing, or at least not the kind of argument that I was referring to. You're free to think it's a dumb argument but there's a slight pedantic difference.
>People should just" pass legislation would be specific to congress, so not quite the same thing, or at least not the kind of argument that I was referring to.
Isn't that even worse? In that case it's entirely externalizing the problem.
I think I take the opposite position to you. I think that arguments (or discussions) about society at large are the most important and critical.
I think there is a common trend to ignore and dismiss the importance of decentralized social values and individual choice, instead only focusing on concrete policy proposals.
The latter is almost never productive without consensus on the former. If 90% of people want disposable crap, it will be difficult to shove a law down their throat preventing them from getting it.
Either way, as a result of being triggered by social opinions, you seems to miss the point of the parent post, namely, that right to repair only addresses a tiny fraction of consumerism, nor is it a prerequisite to buy less garbage in general.
The solution to people buying single use toys and inflatable Jacuzzis on Amazon is not to mandate their repairability.
I think religion is stupid. I think it’s harmful. If I said “people should just stop being religious” and acted like that in itself was in any way insightful, you would consider that a dumb argument.
To be clear, this isn’t to say community outreach is bad or a waste of time. I think getting the larger populous onboard with the narrative that you think is going to make the world best is a good thing, please don’t let me stop you.
I have mostly seen these arguments pop up with giving teenagers access to birth control, with conservatives saying stuff like “people should just stop having sex out of wedlock” or something to that effect, and act that argument along is an insightful or useful comment.
The people were going to church and getting harmed and someone proposed a 5 cent wafer tax as a solution, a response that "no, people actually just need to stop going" is useful and insightful.
It points out that the tax doesn't solve the actual problem. It points out that any solution will require people not wanting to go to church. It is not a complete instructions set.
I think you are confusing use in normative statements (value judgments or opinions) with instructional statements (step by step how to).
Just to be clear, I think the act of being religious is harmful even if you were to get rid of every single church. Pedantic, yes, but the point is that this is purely a behavioral thing, not a specific action. I have tax-free ideas on the best ways to go about getting people to stop believing in dumb things but those are far beyond the scope of this conversation.
I am not “confusing” anything. In the case of teenage pregnancy, I have seen the conversation start and stop with “teenagers just shouldn’t have sex”.
If you’re just saying “I wish the world were X”, then sure you can make a declarative statement about what people are doing. That’s not what I have an issue with.
My issue is when people make a statement like “people should just…” without engaging in any meaningful way for that to happen.
Taxes on harmful behavior is one possible way we can curve it. It’s not the only way, and I am not claiming as such, but clearly righteous indignation telling people to stop using single-use plastics has not worked. We can wax philosophical as to why it hasn’t worked, and there might be value in that, but I just don’t think it’s particularly useful to begin an argument with “people should just stop buying single use plastic” as if that by itself is a meaningful thing to say.
At the risk of splitting hairs, I was suggesting that people "promote the right to repair" more and not necessarily "pass legislation". While I agree that it's a good goal to buy less plastic junk, the subject probably needs more of a positive narrative behind it to gain traction. Repairability is a positive way to look at our stuff (eg speed queens and Toyotas last forever!). Plastic junk is a negative.
We probably agree in our interests. Almost nobody is for "plastic junk", described as such. Im not opposed to repair rights in general. I think it is relatively niche, but that isn't a reason to oppose it (people can be for multiple thing).
What I do think is powerful is cultivating anti-consumerism or selective consumption behavior and belief. The desire for reparability falls within within this.
Why do we think this is a good thing without socialism? I am not a fan of socialism, but with the level of automation we are reaching, do we really want to be ruled by our incel tech-bro overlords, living out of UBI, in a permanently bi-strated society without even the illusion of social mobility and democracy we have nowadays?
> Social system aside, I'd say being a human worker mindlessly shoving boxes into other boxes all day is no fit way to live.
I agree with you. And yet, the people who are working those jobs are doing so because they need them to get by, not for funsies. They will not be better off if they lose that job and there's no income stream to replace it. The two must go hand in hand or you're just ruining people's lives.
Luddites were asking that question long before socialism was a thing. However we now have more people than ever working, and standard of living is higher. I'm not worried.
During the transition to industrialization it’s conceivable that many people became worse off because they could not find a place in the new economy. Even if society is eventually better off, the our generation or the next may have to sacrifice our way of life.
We do for sure need to get people to realize their jobs are obsolete and train them on something more useful. Old people (often anyone over 25) are far too resistant to change.
Eh, this isn't a great theory especially for the poor.
As a higher income individual I conversely seem to have a lot of time to study and am not given a constant stream of work I must complete every moment. I also have the benefit of working from home and being able to spend a lot on training and upskilling.
When you are poorer you typically don't get this. The vast majority of your income is spent at the end of the week. Your job gives you zero time to explore and learn more. You likely commute and and may have a second job to make ends meet.
Just saying 'learn to code' here doesn't address the systematic issues.
For better or worse, my parents always instilled in me that no job is guaranteed forever, and that's why you need to keep up with as much new technology as you can. My dad's uncle was a victim of automation in his 40's, and I think he was always annoyed that instead of learning something new he would sit and complain all day that there's no jobs for him.
In hindsight, I think they were completely right and I feel kind of lucky that they drilled that in so much, because even into my mid 30's I don't have a ton of trouble or resistance to picking up new things. Sometimes I don't love the way new tech is going [1], but I still try my best to keep up with what's in demand in the industry (generally looking at job boards and looking at their keywords and making sure I have at least a cursory understanding of the stuff they're talking about). I will admit I don't completely love that AI is being used instead of junior engineers in some cases, largely because a lot of AI code is shit or flatout wrong in non-obvious ways, but I still have tried my best to utilize it and learn from it because it's clearly the way that things are going. [2]
I've been hired and lost/quit more desk jobs than anyone I know, and I attribute my ability to find work quickly to this characteristic.
[1] e.g. treating memory like it's infinite, disregarding CPU performance as a means of "getting more shit done", making configurations (arguably) needlessly complicated like Kubernetes, etc.
[2] For example, my latest project has been building an HLS and Icecast "infinite radio station" which picks a random song from my collection, feeds a prompt to OpenAI for DJ chatter in between songs,
Not a question of luddites. Example, coal in the US became heavily automated - the workers did not all just find new jobs. Industry shifts don't mean the old workers become the new workers. People do get left behind, and potentially en masse.
I mean there is an argument that the robber-barons during the Gilded Age were a net negative, in that they exerted way too much control and a lot of people needlessly suffered in the process.
Generally, though, I'm against the arguments of "automation is bad cuz less jobs". I think that might be true in the very short term, but we're never going to have a case where "all possible work is done", because that's a completely malformed premise. There's pretty much an infinite amount of potential work to do.
> I think that might be true in the very short term...
The short term matters. It's zero comfort to a factory worker who has lost his job if there will be another, better job for him in a year or two. He still needs to eat between now and then, and he can't buy food with pie in the sky promises of future employment.
AFAIK it would be more fitting to say it is of little comfort to a factory worker who lost their job, that there are now 1.5 more jobs, better jobs, now available to other people.
The reason for AFAIK, my understanding is it is more common for people to be left behind than to transition entirely to a new industry. (That is my memory of seeing some data around that, not saying I'm correct, but that I find it just as plausible to speculate that industrial transitions don't always transition with the same workers.) Perhaps we should talk farming? That is the biggest example pethaps. Some 80% plus of all populations used to do agriculture. The Grapes of Wraith were all about this very topic.
That's true as well. Also, the timeframe for those new jobs probably won't be just 1-2 years. But I was trying to use the most favorable scenario for tombert's argument to show that, even in that case, it still isn't enough.
I mean, as someone who has been laid off a bunch of times (more than most people I think), I do sympathize with them. It sucks to have your income source cut off, it sucks to lose health insurance (or have to pay full freight with COBRA), it’s demoralizing to have to grovel at the feet of a bunch of potential employers for months at a time, it’s depressing to wake up to dozens of rejection emails, and it’s scary to not see an end in sight.
I wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to forcing companies to pay some amount per month to people whose jobs were automated away for N years, and/or providing job training for a new career.
The people making the decisions to replace their workforce with AI and automation are doing so to maximize their profits, not to improve society or the quality of any life but their own.
Assuming you aren't a member of the capitalist class, and thus complicit, you don't have a say in the matter. They aren't putting the future they're implementing up to a vote. They don't care if you want it. They don't care if you die in the street like a dog.
We are now switching over to a self optimizing system approach.
We had big data and didn't do anything with it but now whenever we do something with an LLM, we give it feedback, its getting processed benchmarked stored and used.
ChatGPT 3 was not impressive because it was good, it was impressive because it showed everyone that we started this ara now. This lead to massive reallocation of resources around the globe from a human and money perspective.
Whatever we had with ChatGPT-3 was build with humans and money significant less than what we now have. Which leads to progress unseen before and this will continue at least for now.
Robot lasts 6-7 years under typical duty cycles (per FANUC). Think how an EV is cheaper over its lifetime to operate vs a combustion vehicle, capex vs opex. Price of labor will continue to increase in the future due to structural demographics. And lets be real, Amazon warehouse jobs are not good jobs and terribly hard on the human body. No one yearns for the Amazon mines. These are jobs that should absolutely be automated.
Oh yeah I agree with what you're saying, and of course they're working on this because they think it makes sense to do so, I just figure it's still a tricky sell even to replace $20/h humans.
FWIW I design industrial equipment for meat processing plants, where you'd be lucky to get 6-7 months out of a robot arm. I wish it was affordable to use robotics there, because there's a lot that could be done to eliminate some truly awful jobs.
Actually it's pretty expensive in the long run. They want raises, are finicky about their health, have pesky habits like going home, having life partners and something silly called work/life balance. Also, they sometimes organize and become collective bodies under something called a union.
In reality, I'm a strong supporter of everything above. Maybe we can really provide people better jobs by delegating repetitive and boring things to machines and allow everyone to do something they enjoy to earn their lives.
These "what if we give everyone jobs they are interested" remarks are just bullshit. You're not going to give people more interesting jobs, the result will just be flooded job markets everywhere. Then more jobs will become automated and people will then flood to more sectors that aren't automated. What a stupid dream, let people have meaningless jobs if they want that.
Depends on how they're built, and building them takes experience. Plus, if their MTBF is long enough with enough hot spares, you can rotate the problematic ones out fix them while they are being replaced from the hot-spares pool.
When you are not budget constrained, and building things for businesses, a little overengineering goes a long way.
I have a Xerox 7500DN color laser printer next to me, and it's working for more than 20 years at this point. It has gone through a lot of spares, but most (if not all) issues are from parts wearing down naturally. Nothing breaks unexpectedly on that. Same for robots. Give enough design budget, overengineer a little, and that thing will be one hell of an ugly but reliable machinery.
When you work with real "industrial" stuff, the landscape is very different.
All moving parts degrade. A nice thing about machines is you can service and refurbish them to like-new condition.
There are options to deal with your shitty knees, hip, and back, but none of them get you back to 100% of your original capabilities and, carry an element of gambling, and will involve the kinds of painkillers that can ruin you far more comprehensively than a shitty joint will.
Humans are not reliable either. Humans are much more likely to be out sick unexpectedly.
If you keep up the maintenance plan for machines they rarely break before their predicted retirement date when you replace them. And since the maintenance and retirement dates are predicted in advance you can plan for them and thus ensure they happen when you want them to.
If you have the misfortune to be in a developed country (not the USA) then yes. Worker without rights are evidently pretty cheap. They go home, but you can just get twice as many. Catastrophic self-organization happens on scales comparable to robot crashes, and you can just recycle the offending units and replace them with new ones.
I worked as stow, that job is brutal man, you gotta last 2-3 hrs at a time 3x a day for a 10hr shift. They don't like you listening to music so you gotta just sit there in silence. Luckily I got to unload trucks and I started drinking to get through it on my breaks.
Still it's tough to beat a place where you can walk in with no skills and start making $20/hr
> I started drinking to get through it on my breaks
That bad, huh?
It just made it more fun. There was a liquor store nearby so drive to it on the 30 minute break, pound a couple 100 proof 100ml bottles (99 Apples), back to it. That job was more fun than stow.
If you're curious can read the subreddit /r/amazonfc
They did recently start allowing you to buy their own approved headphones but before you'd get written up for being on your phone/having headphones in
> pound a couple 100 proof 100ml bottles, back to it. That job was more fun than stow.
WoW, you can hold your liquor :-)
Henry Ford famously wanted his workers to be able to afford his cars. When Bezos replaces everyone with robots, who will be left to buy his junk?
Plenty of people who don’t work for Amazon already buy stuff from there. I guess I mostly see the jobs as exchanging labour for something that society values and so by automating, there is more labour available to do things society values and so society gets more of what it values. And if you think working for Amazon is bad for people then you should be happy if automation is decreasing the number of people suffering that bad thing (though automation won’t always decrease this, eg see rise in number of bank tellers/branches in the US). But that isn’t really the way that lots of people talk about jobs and so if what you want is for people to have somewhere local where they can exchange their time for money to spend on goods and services then I guess automation and efficiency don’t really matter because the point of the job is to ensure the worker has money coming in rather than to ensure that something useful comes out of it. That latter point of view is pretty popular and I think I’m describing it pretty terribly – I’m sure there is a much more reasonable argument for it.
The ultimate endgame is either a significant reduction in global population, or UBI. You can’t just keep automating every non-knowledge job away and just hope people find something else to do.
All those jobs in Detroit that went away were replaced by…? As best I can tell they were replaced by poverty and crime.
Detroit is an odd example. You have the cornerstone industry up and leaving the area, followed by race riots which led to white flight and the middle class leaving the city. This led to a vacuum in support and jobs leaving the new majority black population and poor to fend for themselves. Two historically oppressed groups now yolked to a dying city.
It's more an example of how racism and reliance on singular industry can quickly create pits that are largely insurmountable. Similar cases can be found in coal country in Appalachia. The lesson isn't to prop up local industry to maintain job and economic stability. The lesson is to stage out disruption. ILA recently took this on with automation in shipping. The goal isn't to prevent automation but to not give companies a blank check to mass fire workers and replace them with automation.
So ignore Detroit, pick a city that based their economy on literally any manufacturing industry that up and left. What was the replacement work that maintained middle class families at the same numbers?
> You can’t just keep automating every non-knowledge job away and just hope people find something else to do.
[citation needed]
We've been at it for more than a century now and it seems to be working pretty well for nearly everyone!
Our goal is not to preserve jobs. Our goal is to be more productive for fewer resources.
Jobs in Detroit went away - but so did the people, who found new jobs in other cities. There has been no lasting unemployment from automation, ever.
Human beings are good for more than pulling levers and carrying heavy objects and we do each other a disservice by pretending otherwise.
Judging from efforts in the US to make health care harder and harder to obtain, I'm betting on the former, especially if other countries follow suit. Slowly letting people die from untreated chronic diseases may be seen as more humane than outright mass slaughter.
I don’t understand the endgame. If everyone is poor and dying who is buying all the useless/social credit shit until there are 100m “wealthy” people left? And if “they” (whoever they are, I think we all give “wealthy” people far too much credit, many that I’ve known are pretty empty, insecure people lacking any real self awareness) want everyone else dead, why are all “developed” countries pushing for higher birthrates and encouraging immigration from less developed countries?
I think the latter view is usually held by people who know they won't experience productivity gains from automation.
Say someone who is has driven a taxi all their life or driven a forklift. They can appreciate how adding air-conditioning to their vehicle allows them to drive in hotter days, therefore they can do more work. But automating their whole job away with autonomous vehicles doesn't benefit them, so they don't want it.
Personally, I think those people can't be picky about their jobs. If you do something that is automatable, you will be out of a job sooner or later. When that happens, don't get mad and go find another soon-to-be automated job.
Pray tell, what jobs can't be automated soon?
The ones where human interaction is the point. Education, bar tenders, nursing, tourism, for example.
The unfortunate reality is that humans seem to have this innate desire to get rid of ourselves. I see us trying to automated everything. To what end, I do not know.
Japan is moving fast on a few of these, particularly as their population is rapidly aging.
meanwhile, i wont mind if they trash your robot taxi so that its inoperable. shoulda put that money and automation into something that doesnt break so easily
The point wasn't really that workers should be the primary clientele, just that the average worker should be able to afford it, and if that wasn't the case the price of the goods should be lowered, or a trend started for higher worker compensation.
Robotic workers lower operational costs and can make goods more accessible, and it's common for various manual labour jobs to be lost when industries change - the labour shifts elsewhere, and generally higher.
(If this wasn't true, unemployment would have constantly grown worldwide since the first automaton replaced a human job or government outlawed certain manual industries, which isn't the case. Workforces do and must adapt to needs and trends.)
I think the point is that once robots can do everything human bodies do and AIs can do everything human minds do, there is nowhere left for humans to go. Just like horses didn't find new employment when internal combustion engines reached the point where they could do everything a horse does but better and cheaper.
I think the horses were pretty okay with not being bred into slavery.
But there's a very, very big difference between "automate dumb task with unimpressive efficiency that beats humans because humans have to pee, eat and sleep", and AI supplanting humans in society.
Robots isn't an important step in that path tbh. Intelligence is, and we still aren't close, even when throwing entire hyperscale datacenters at the problem...
Poor people will go the way of the horse.
>Henry Ford famously wanted his workers to be able to afford his cars.
Amazing how that bit of PR is still being quoted over 100 years later. In reality, Ford had huge turnover problems with his workers - one estimate is over 370% annual turnover. One way to help prevent turnover is to pay more, and it solved the problem. (Even so, the base pay was still actually $2.30 and to get the extra $2.70 you had to abstain from alcohol, keep your home clean, etc.)
https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/henry-ford-implements-5...
Once Bezos replaces everyone with robots, why would he need anyone to buy his junk anymore?
That is one of his ways of extracting value from society - by selling his junk.
Crazy right? It's almost like the people buying stuff are idiots who don't understand their own needs and values.
Given how much time they spend on social media and how much money they spend on keeping up with the Jones..... yes?
Henry Ford just wanted to be rich and said something that sounded good and inspired people to work for him. Bezos does similar things for his workers.
Didn't he pay more than his competitors and get sued by his competitors for not acting in the the best interest of his shareholders (by wanting to pay his workers even more)?
No, Henry Ford's goal was to screw the Dodge brothers (whose other company, Dodge Brothers Company, needed a cash injection), not to help his workers.
The Dodge brothers were major investors in Ford Motor Company, and thus entitled to a large share of dividends. Henry Ford tried to bankrupt the Dodge Motor Company by avoiding to pay FoMoCo dividends and thus starve his competitor of cash. The fact that the mechanism Ford used to make his own company unprofitable (and thus avoid paying dividends) also benefited the workers is just coincidence.
In fact the reason we have the modern precedent "companies must operate for the benefit of shareholders" is precisely because Henry Ford's defense in Dodge v. Ford was "I can do this because I want to and I am king". If he had argued "paying workers more makes them happier and thus makes Ford more profitable in the long term", Ford probably would have won that lawsuit. He didn't make that argument because it just wasn't on his radar: His goal was screwing Dodge.
Kind of but it was moreso that he wanted to invest in expansion and R&D while driving prices down for consumers
See: Dodge vs Ford
Fascinating read especially when viewed from the strategic angling to make Ford less profitable and cut off the minority shareholders the Dodge brothers from the dividend revenue stream they were using to build a rival company. So ironically, while the court held that the board had to prioritize shareholder profits, he would have realized greater shareholder profits by stifling the competition in its crib.
> while the court held that the board had to prioritize shareholder profits
It's a bit more nuanced than that. The court held that company directors have to be acting for the benefit of shareholders. They still have wide latitude about how to do that.
The reason Ford lost is because his legal position was essentially "I am king, therefore I can do whatever I want". But you can't do whatever you want. You can't lock the workers in the factory and burn it down with them inside, for example. You need to have some kind of colorable argument that what you are doing is somehow in the interest of shareholders (either long or short term).
The problem for Ford was that he couldn't articulate any reason for how his actions were beneficial to shareholders (probably because the real reason, killing the Dodge Brothers Company, would have been illegal under the antitrust laws of the time).
That may be true, but it certainly helped that he DID pay his workers enough for them to be able to afford the cars they were making.
It might be apocryphal, but my understanding is that he did this less out of a sense of civic duty and more because the skilled tradespeople liked their existing lifestyle and did not want to work in factories much, so they needed a big raise to be convinced.
I think it's even simpler than that: To run an assembly line, you need all stations staffed at the same time. You can't run the line if you're missing staff for just one station, but you still have to pay all the people who did show up.
So the easy solution is just to pay a lot and threaten to fire (and possibly blacklist) anyone who no-shows. Since the pay is much higher than they can get elsewhere, the people are much more likely to show up.
The high pay probably also helped find people who would tolerate the extremely intrusive practices of Ford's "morality police" (my term), who would inspect worker's homes to ensure they were living "the right way".
Not enough to offset losing their fingers left and right.
Once he replaces everyone with robots, and all the factories do the same, people will get stuff at home for watching ads.
but ads exist to convince people to buy things. if people can't afford to buy things, why would you need ads?
Products will become advertisements themselves. It could be cheaper and more effective to send everyone a box of Tesla Tasty-Electrons cereal than TV or Social media and slots.
Casinos provide free drinks, cartels offer free prostitutes, it's not unprecedented.
> Casinos provide free drinks
Because people will spend money. The premise here is no-one has money, but somehow adverts exist.
you may not need to buy a box of cereal or a vacuum cleaner, but maybe a flight to moon, or a humanoid companion? products move up a level
And what labor are you going to be doing to afford those upleveled products?
it's a good question. what would true abundance look like? I can't wait to find out
Maybe we pay people a small fee to watch ads?
So they can buy things with their ad-watching money.
As long as the pace of automation does not exceed some max rate that people can't figure out what to do with the excess labor, we should be ok.
Though I suppose it's always possible that we'll reach something of a "singularity" where we enter the realm of The Phools, by Stanislaw Lem. I can't find a copy of it online, so you might just have to buy the book in which that short story appears.
Briefly and to spoil it: In the story there is a planet with human-like people called Phools and a very stratified, hyper-capitalistic society with three classes, workers, priests, and owners, and someone invents computer that fully automates all factories which then causes 100% unemployment among the workers who then start starving to death. In the story the owners and priests ask the inventor to ask the computer to come up with a solution. You can imagine what the computer came up with... At the end the traveler screams at them something like "Phools! All you had to do was redistribute your income!".
Today -and on this planet- there are certainly a few people today who speak of "useless eaters" and who would like the outcome from that short story. And I can imagine that happening almost naturally. Already fertility rates are crashing worldwide, and we're on a path towards a crashing human population worldwide, and if that happens naturally then I think it means that humans respond to price and other signals and adjust their family planning accordingly, and that would not be a bad thing. Pray though that it's not like in The Phools where the population crashed in a much more dramatic and speedy way, and not at all naturally.
New types of jobs are created every year. When I was young, there was no such thing as streaming video games and getting paid for it. Now, young kids and adults are making bank by playing video games and letting the whole world watch
I’m all for creative disruption, but what worries me is when I see a pattern of stable employment being displaced by algorithmically mediated gig work and viral entertainer lotto tickets. This is a dangerous trend in general, but the US is especially poorly positioned because of its lack of strong safety nets. When the foundation of your economy is hollowed out to make it ever more top-heavy, you’re destined for collapse.
Bezos doesn't make the stuff on amazon, so your question is moot.
For example, people who work at Ford.
In exchange, in the long term they won't be able to afford the cars they produce anymore.
I don't think they think that far ahead. I'm not sure why they'd risk their head.
We're more automated than we've ever been & unemployment is close to all-time lows. Why don't you get back to us with this when it's at least 6 or 7 percent...
> unemployment is close to all-time lows.
Job quality is deteriorating, more people are holding more than one job, part time jobs are increasingly common, almost half of US workers are in low-wage jobs, wages have stagnated... It's a nice statistic, but unemployment rates don't tell much of the story on the ground, in people's lived experiences. That side of the story is overwhelmingly getting worse.
Are you somehow connecting low unemployment with high purchasing power by your median worker through a bunch of logical hoops?
Inflation-adjusted wages are at all time highs at the top.
Inflation-adjusted wages are at all time highs in the middle.
Inflation-adjusted wages are at all time highs at the bottom.
https://data.epi.org/wages/hourly_wage_percentiles/line/year...
Unemployment being at all time lows means nothing if those employed with the minimum wage cannot afford the same quality of life than people did in the past earning the minimum wage of their time, because it means you aren't really comparing the same thing.
The minimum wage is not relevant as very few people make it. Wage earners at the top, bottom, and middle can afford a better (materially speaking) quality of life in the USA than at any time in the past:
https://data.epi.org/wages/hourly_wage_percentiles/line/year...
This doesn't seem to take into account the price of land or the price of education or the price of healthcare, therefore claiming that they can afford a better quality of life it's highly misleading, if this is taking such things into account I would like to know exactly how.
All of those are part of the basket of goods and services tracked in the Consumer Price Index
There will be plenty of money to be made serving the needs and interests of the wealthy, while the rest of us are serviced by an informal economy that doesn't see institutional investment.
Look at street markets in countries with high wealth disparity. The well-off wouldn't shop or eat there, and they certainly wouldn't invest in a street vendor, the vendors are meant to serve the needs of people in poverty.
See Citigroup's plutonomy paper[1] that explores what that would look like and what investment strategies investors should take. The tl;dr is that the formal economy will abandon lower classes in favor of making a ton of money serving plutocrats and their friends and families instead.
[1] https://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-1.pdf
Same as it always was except from the last few decades.
Henry Ford had a knob made that controlled the speed of the assembly line.
He routinely would keep dialing it up and up and up until too many people rage quit and then dial it down just a notch.
One of the first things unions negotiated for when they stated was control of that knob.
UBI FTW :)
There is a crucial Basic in the middle.
Post-human Capitalism: androids are the new consumer.
If someone else replaces all workers with robots first instead, what will Bezos do then?
What you are describing is a political problem, not one for entrepreneurs. IMO the solution would be a form of UBI that we can smoothly increase as automation in fact removes jobs or lowers wages. I'd like to see that start ASAP, but OTOH we are still close to record-low unemployment and the last years saw the largest wage increases at the lower end in decades.
> What you are describing is a political problem, not one for entrepreneurs. IMO the solution would be a form of UBI that we can smoothly increase as automation in fact removes jobs or lowers wages.
The most successful entrepreneurs like Bezos are also the biggest political influencers, and instead of UBI they are advocating for less tax for themselves.
>I'd like to see that start ASAP, but OTOH we are still close to record-low unemployment and the last years saw the largest wage increases at the lower end in decades.
The last years also saw the highest rates of inflation in decades. Even basic necessities are the least affordable they've been in a long time, let alone something like housing.
It's interesting how Amazon is embedding robots in human-designed warehouses whereas Ocado has humans overseeing a robotic warehouse.
The later is a much easier problem.
The Ocado warehouse automation is pretty crazy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE
Incredibile!
Also, from the comments:
"My favorite thing about this is how 2 weeks after this video went up, they had an accident where two robots collided and caused a gigantic fire that cost them like 50 million dollars."
Meanwhile, the warehouse down the road underwent a strike that put them out of commission for weeks, forced expensive wage concessions, and incurred NRLB fines, costing them like... 60 million dollars.
One of these things can be fixed, the other will always be a risk as long as humans are involved.
Those peaky humans and their stupid quality of life needs!
> One of these things can be fixe
That's correct, the second one can get fixed with higher wages and benefits, like when Ford introduced the “$5 a day” (doubling market average).
Yes, if you're going to pay humans to suffer the indignity of doing a robot's job, it makes sense to pay well.
if you incurred nrlb fines aren't you breaking the law?
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Ocado did run into multiple fire issues due to these robots colliding with each other. In 2019 and 2021 [1]
Wonder if the matter has been resolved.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57883332
I'd suggest robots with fire extinguishers.
Or non-combustible robots
Need to quit running all the robots on gasoline and building them out a wood.
I'm curious how Amazon handles fire in the midst of their Kiva pods. Do they have procedures for retasking an army of robots to clear a path for humans to get access?
If there are really no humans there they could just fill the warehouse with nitrogen or something. No fire!
Lithium battery fires don't feed on atmospheric oxygen. That's the most likely ignition source.
True, though the problem isn't just robot batteries burning up, but setting all the stock ablaze and this part is indeed feeding in atmospheric oxygen.
Walmart isn't considered a super high-tech company, but I took a tour of one of their warehouses in Bentonville and even that was quite cool. There were tons of conveyor belts everywhere, it kind of felt like something you'd see in Satisfactory.
I would argue Walmart is quite high tech! They’ve been approaching their business goals from lots of different angles. Tech, finance, logistics, etc are all a huge part of their business operations.
It’s a shame that the problems being solved are embedded within a business that embodies throwing things away at the first sign of weakness. I’m still upset they bought what seemed on track to be a nice successor to Simple Bank. Now it’s been pivoted again for the third time since acquisition.
Oh it wasn't trying to diss Walmart in this case. I used to work there (Jet.com -> Walmart Labs -> Walmart Global Tech), and I generally liked it. Some of the smartest humans I have ever known came from Jet and Walmart Labs.
Back in the early aughts when I was still in college, My roommate was an IE and worked as an efficiency engineer intern during his Summers. I vividly remember him talking about the company he was working for had a huge project to improve UPS's efficiencies. Their big improvements was to add dozens and dozens of conveyor belts in order to move the packages faster. He concluded his experience by saying, "Yeah man, its crazy, this is what the future is going to look like. This is how they're going to automate everything."
Interesting to know companies are still using them as a means to automate their work.
Not sure why Ocado gets so much credit for the latter though, they just copied AutoStore which has a fascinating history!
They purchased an AutoStore, then reverse engineered it, made a few changes, and claimed it as their own invention.
There was a big patent lawsuit related to this, which as I understand it Ocado won pretty comprehensively. (https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/ocado-wins-... -- case in UK court concluded that AutoStore's patents were all invalid and in any case Ocado didn't infringe them; there were a bunch of related cases in other jurisdictions but https://www.ocadogroup.com/media/news/autostore-and-ocado-se... indicates that shortly after the UK judgement they settled on terms very favourable to Ocado.)
This seems difficult to square with your claim that Ocado "just copied AutoStore". (I suppose it's not quite inconsistent with it; maybe Ocado copied a pile of things that AutoStore never patented, and the patented bits were always a sideshow?)
AutoStore losing a patent dispute doesn't mean that Ocado didn't copy them. Just looking at the patent dispute ignores that the first automated Ocado distribution centre was actually purchased from AutoStore, who had been selling their robot-digging tote system since 1996.
Ocado's initial patents as well were actually modifications of Autostore's robots, running on an Autostore grid, and Autostore manufactured the robots to Ocado's specification before Ocado decided to build the whole thing themselves.
So hard to argue that it wasn't a copy.
IMO I think the UK patent victory was a bit of a joke... Ocado's innovation of the robot above a single cell is both obvious, but also has it's own obvious downsides.
> This seems difficult to square with your claim that Ocado "just copied AutoStore".
I just looked at videos of the two technologies and it seems difficult to ignore the relationship.
Perhaps this is a case of "technically correct", i.e. that they technically did not infringe the patents, but that in practice they leveraged as much as they could around the patent claims?
Ocado's first automated warehouse installation was also purchased from Autostore (before they built their own solution, and now market/sell it)
AutoStore's patents were deemed invalid in the U.K. because they disclosed the invention prior to filing for the patents, which apparently is not allowed under U.K. law.
Their patents were invalidated in the U.S. due to "inequitable conduct or equitable estoppel" meaning either that Autostore violated someone else's patents or that they led Ocado to believe that Ocado was not violating Autostore's patents in some way. Both parties indicate that the latter happened, but the usual remedy is just a mandatory license, so the invalidation of the patents indicates that the former also occurred. (https://www.autostoresystem.com/investors-press-releases/aut...)
Truth has no place in a court of law. The fact that they won the lawsuit does not imply they are innocent. It could simply mean that they had better lawyers.
The warehouse automation industry has long had problems with scaling systems up.
A system that works well with 15 robots will often fall apart if scaled up to 150 or 1500 robots. Reliability, planning algorithm complexity, radio performance, all sorts of issues start to come up.
That’s why Hatteland patented the autostore tech in ~1995 and by the time the patents expired they only supported ~100 robots.
It’s not always easy to appreciate, because everyone publicises when they install a new automation system, but nobody publicises it if they scrap it 18 months later. Being discreet about it is better for the share price.
Of course there’s still a perfectly good market for less scalable automation; grocery just has crazy financials.
Yeah but then you cant pretend like your going to hire a bunch of humans in the local poor area that you built the warehouse.
It takes hundreds of millions to build a warehouse. Amazon has tons of them. Retrofitting things is capital intensive.
Labor is one of the most expensive parts of running a business. So just doing the math of, if we spend X amount of money on robots and can layoff Y amount of people then it's a net gain. Especially if a single machine can replace multiple people.
Humans are cheaper than robots too...
Only sometimes and costs change over time. The first robot is almost always more expensive than a human, but the second robot comes after the design is done and so it generally cheaper than the human (accountants will figure out how to amortize these costs and thus give us a better picture of costs.)
Robots also get cheaper over time because we learn. You can buy many parts in bulk including computer libraries to control them. You can find many people who know best practices who will not make some of the early mistakes that cost money.
How much cheaper? You can hardly get humans to work two shifts a day, let alone three.
In China, yes, but not here.
Only if you don't need to pay them a living wage.
I've picked orders. If I have to touch your purchase for 20 seconds it is a very long time. There are 180 chunks of 20 seconds in an hour. If the pay is $45 per hour it would cost 25 cents.
It is strange how this isn't obvious
I just watched a video of theirs and i have no clue at all if this is more efficient or not.
Amazon uses a lot higher stacked spaces than Ocado does.
Are there any real numbers you can reference than just stating that Ocados way is better?
I didn't say it was better, I said it was easier to design robots that don't have to work in an environment originally designed for humans.
Symbotic also has a fascinating solution.
Does this have any potential to get costs down for customers though?
Costs are fine IMO.
I'd rather see quality improve, even at a reasonable cost increase, and the disappearance of the alphabet soup brands and similar.
Warehouses is definitely not where I expected robots with retractable blades to first appear.
The demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWXco05eK28
I guess a spatula is a kind of blade. I was expecting something a little more exciting though, from your comment.
It appears this bot could be about 100 times simpler if they just had storage racks with smaller cubbies at the modest expense of usable storage volume. 1 item per cubbie.
That would be a huge expense. You would either waste a lot of space in each one, or have the robot waste time finding one that's the optimal size.
It's a safe space in the interim. A place where they can hone their skills and sharpen their blades.
The first robot that learns to make a shiv will rule the warehouse.
... and then. The world.
How does the robot assess whether there is enough space available in each bin?
It also stowed the other items, and know how much space they take up.
From the article:
> “When you’re a person doing this task, you’ve got a buffer of 20 or 30 items, and you’re looking for an opportunity to fit those items into different bins, and having to remember which item might go into which space. But the robot knows all of the properties of all of our items at once, and we can also look at all of the bins at the same time along with the bins in the next couple of pods that are coming up. So we can do this optimization over the whole set of information in 100 milliseconds.”
It reads the state from a database?
This feels like a silly way to do things. Why are they storing arbitrary cuboid items in fixed-size boxes? If they designed the warehouse for maximum robot efficiency, doesn't it seem more sensible, on first glance, to have stacks of the same item in a regular grid accessed from the top, instead of optimizing how to pack wildly different items in the same box?
The Kiva warehouses deliver the pods to human pickers at fixed stations. The humans just have to retrieve the product from the indicated bin without roaming the warehouse. The storage area for the pods is kept maximally packed without any aisles since the robots have their grid to operate in underneath.
From working on warehouse picking software way before there were robots ... it's because humans. It would take longer for a human to find space in the right space -- or instead, be lazy and forcibly put an item in a space it barely fits -- than to simply dump it into an arbitrary box with enough space and record the box. Then when deciding the path for the picker to pick items from, there's a high chance one of the purchased items is actually nearby other purchased items.
That's still far slower than a human being, and those bins are far too neat.
Neat is very important for consistent performance.
A restaurant can improve performance during the "lunch rush" by letting neat slip, but that carelessness is already costing them performance at the end of the lunch rush - this works because just as this catches up they get several hours in the afternoon to clean things up. Then supper crowd where they do it again - then they have the rest of the night to clean up from that. (the restaurants I worked in didn't have a breakfast rush, YMMV)
A factory by contrast needs to keep things neat and consistent all the time because there is never a rush/downtime. They want things rolling off the line at a consistent pace all day. Any compromise for speed now is a cost latter in the day.
I have never been in an Amazon warehouse so I don't have great insight into what things are like. I would expect they want to be more consistent all day - but I don't know. Maybe all the trucks arrive at once and then they get time when they are gone to clean up. I wouldn't expect that, but maybe.
Slow is fast is a saying for a reason. It is just as true for a human as it is for a robot.
Smooth is fast, slow is smooth, so slow is fast. You're applying that to the restaurant as a whole though, which makes human or robotic immaterial.
The saying I do believe has a difference between robots and humans. The idea largely being that human inaccuracy increases exponentially relative to speed. Ergo, slowing down can lead to dramatically bette accuracy and throughput. Though, robots don't necessarily lose accuracy because they are moving more quickly. Though, I'd agree it is likely that both humans and robots need "smooth" in order to be fast. The key difference is robots do not always lose smooth when moving at high speed.
Like every other Reddit-ism and internet worshipped rule of thumb. The reason for the popularity has far more to do with what makes a sound byte marketable to humans than it does with anything quantitative.
Look at the above restaurant example, the system has a built in buffer to handle spikes so it can be cheaper or make other tradeoffs everywhere else compared to an equivalently performant system that can do 100% duty cycle.
A robot or human that can deal with messy inventory is facilitating positive tradeoffs elsewhere in the system.
It's not about throughput per unit, it's about throughput per unit of cost.
If five cheap robots outperform a single skilled worker, robots win. But depending on jurisdiction, those five robots might still lose to a dozen or so slaves kept near starvation. For the skilled worker it's bad news one way or the other.
What skilled worker? This is a low skill worker they are replacing.
Skilled. Not pedigree-filtered and trained and certified into a scarcity that may or may not actually be natural. Chances are most doctors or lawyers or software engineers would perform rather sub-par picking and putting in a warehouse.
Day one yes. put us in the warehouse for a few months and we would be as good as everyone. I'm guessing the woule only give a few days of training before setting us loose.
Several months of me as a doctor and I'd still be incompetent.
Have you read the article?
They're not paying for the fastest. If they get some by accident that's great, but otherwise they just want someone reasonably mobile that will be good enough after a week or two of practice.
Of course the robots don't trip and fall breaking their back and sue the company, nor do they want vacations or raises. In fact the robot performance is probably rather consistent versus human performance.
Compare to a doctor who needs nearly a decade of special training. Or an engineer who needs a complex university training program.
Yes some are better than others. However there is still a vast gulf in skill between those people than engineers (much less doctors), while the gap between them and someone off the street is much less. (the article doesn't say how long it takes someone to get to that high skilled state or even if it is possible to train to that level - if someone can show me data on this I might change my mind on skill)
If your point is that experience is not necessarily skill, I suppose that's fair, but in that case skill does not always tell the full story.
What data? Just try it yourself and see.
For now.
Wait until LLMs get better and destroy the ability for junior developers to get their foot in the door.
How do you get senior developers if you replace the junior developers?
Sounds like a problem for some future CEO, long after current CEO has gotten a fat bonus from improving quarterly profits now.
That's the neat part - you don't.
(The suits think that's a good thing)
By then the senior developers will be obsolete too
You don't, you slowly cannibalize your business and industry. By the time consequences show up, you've already jumped ship with your golden parachute
Part of my day job is Warehouse Automation - not Amazon!. I would agree with you on being slow, but it probably suffices to what Amazon want to achieve here. If your entire process, so stow, store and retrieve is automated, you wouldn't use these "pods". A lot of these problems seem so simple and easy to automate out, but it's really not!
Yeah, I worked in an Amazon Warehouse on two separate occasions:
https://old.reddit.com/r/EDC/comments/dmnuts/53mamazon_fulfi...
and Inbound (or the previous person picking) was usually a bit less careful.
Slower than a human making one operation.
Not slower than human stocking items for a whole day.
The tortoise and hare allegory? Slow and steady wins the race.
Surely the robot does not stop at the end of the day.
The article says they plan on it operating continuously for 20 hours at a time.
Until they unionize.
Do robots rely on being ionized? I'd have thought a robot which wasn't ionized would work just fine
You're thinking of "Onionized", when their exploits are covered by one of the world's best publications.
Are you talking about the "Soviet Onion"?
The challenge is not only stowing objects. It is also optimizing space and keeping it clean. In that matter robots are faster and better.
Optimizing space and trying to keep things neat is a futile effort. Pickers and counters are constantly pulling things out of the bins and putting them back in, and during high demand it's a chaotic mess. If there are going to be robots being this meticulous at every step of the process, then it's too slow.
There's a reason human beings are worked to the point of exhaustion in these warehouses - the goal is to move as much product as fast as possible. Quality and productivity are at cross purposes, and between the two only the latter makes money.
That is why, in the end, only robots will remain. They are inexhaustible and strictly meticulous in all circumstances.
Real life interaction is anything but strictly meticulous. Inside an application (in silicon without bugs, not being hit by stray cosmic rays, not having software logic bug) things may seem ideal, but the moment you try to move a pole on a motor 5 cm forward, and 5cm backward, every day at the same time, you'll notice that ideal will have dismantled itself off the mount within two weeks
"Meticulous" in industrial automation does not mean "Precise without the use of feedback-driven control loops".
Robots aren't inexhaustible. They break down a lot and are far more expensive to repair and maintain than a human being.
I agree robots breakdown a lot, however if you think robots are more expensive to maintain you may want to take a look at the cost of American medical costs.
They're going to get better a lot faster than humans, though. The fact that they exist at all is remarkable.
Mechanical engineering has a lot of practice on looking at failures and changing designs to make those less common or a maintenance item easy/cheap to fix. (they might have other options too, I'm not a ME)
>and are far more expensive to repair and maintain than a human being
Fillpy the robot will not:
All those pale in comparison to repair costs. That's why companies are pushing for automation. Because Flippy does its job quietly and diligently 24/7 without complaining.Great they can stop killing people. Only place I ever worked where the ambulances came 1-5 times a day to save the old people they abuse
This seems insane. We're trying to teach Longshoreman's Tetris to machines, instead of using the system of standard containerization that almost completely replaced longshoremen, despite lower packing densities.
If Amazon had to load and unload entire warehouses as fast as possible, they wouldn't do this. The constraints they're operating under are completely different.
The containerization is at a higher level: the rack of yellow bins is a four-sided tower that is robotically driven in and out of tightly packed uniform rows.
Right. Containers being a standard size is great so you don't have to care about what's inside the containers. At the AMZN warehouse, they absolutely care about what's in the containers, and what's in the container is no longer anywhere close to be standard size/shape/weight.
The container is the standardization. One container per unit of product. Containers ("bins") dimensioned in multiples of some standard unit that evenly divides a grid system on a rack. Stuffing looks like "a pallet of identical goods appears on one side of your workspace and 150 individual 100mm x 200mm x 400mm bins appear on the other side and the job is to put A into B". Storage operations look like they do now using the robot racks. Emptying looks like "Three bins of various sizes shows up on one side and a cardboard box appears on the other side". You divide the tasks up and have a different machine or human for each. The benefit is you always have a reliably identical picking and stuffing task per item, and there is never a bin of remainder items that has to be pushed back into the system. The cost is lowered storage efficiency. You don't even have to break a pallet at a DC, you can design for distribution of bins (at a higher transport cost).
> 500,000 stows in operational warehouses
Isn't that a pretty tiny number?
I assume a human probably does 1 every 5 seconds (it's much easier to put an item on a shelf than to take it off).
So that's about 5 months human output.
It's clear we are near an event horizon moment.
What does "a genuine sense of touch" actually mean? Surely there have been robots in the past that can detect how much force they are apply to an object? Was that a "fake sense of touch"?
I'd assume measuring the force exerted at the contact point rather than the motor current.
I think this has also existed in the form of force sensors and more recently image-like pressure sensors.
Right. A company I used to work for was selling force sensors over a decade ago and I'm sure they're older than that.
https://blog.robotiq.com/bid/65024/TakkTile-Sensors-for-Indu...
"a genuine sense of touch" Means the stock is down $30 YTD and they gotta pump by pretending they've created something.
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> What does "a genuine sense of touch" actually mean?
The technology has applications in the robot sex work industry.
Are companies designing product packaging to be more compatible with robotic handling?
Anecdotally, I know of 2 examples of friends who work in traditional manufacturing who have changed packaging graphics and colors because their previous designs were difficult for optics.
Specifically, both of them had to stop using black-colored boxes and move graphics in from box boundaries.
This is good news actually, while you have less jobs, hopefully new ones are created, people in the future don't have the option to work slave like jobs.
I see this thinking thrown around often, but I don't see how net new jobs would be created by efficiencies. Amazon wouldn't adopt robots if it created more employment overhead downstream. Sure, there will be robot maintainers, but not at a replacement level of the roles replaced. Companies adopt technologies because they reduce the net amount of human input (cost) required, right?
Well, the industrial revolution has been a story of continuous efficiency gains and increasing automation, but somehow there's still enough jobs.
Certainly, for 95% of americans that's been true recently, but ai seems more positioned as a qualitative than a quantitative shift. maybe my defining it in terms of efficiency is incorrect. Moreover these types of mundane tasks are a product of that industrialization. so i'm puzzled by the thinking of 'more efficiency to fix the pains brought on by efficiencies'
hopefully
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This isn’t the factory of the future.
The factory of the future will have only two employees, one human and one dog.
- The human feeds the dog.
- The dog makes sure no one touches the equipment.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/01/30/future-factory/
https://www.amazon.com/Dokoo-Automatic-Vacuum-Sealed-Dispens...
No need for a human to feed the dog, a robot will refill the dog feeder.
But what if the dog gets sad? :(
I think the solution might be multiple dogs.
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Average humans. Not stowing masters apparently.
I mean, who is going to volunteer to be the Amazon Stowing John Henry?
It's an interesting approach. Treat the workers so poorly that even reasonable people look forward to eliminating the jobs with robots.
Is there a future where we stop buying so much garbage?
145% tariff on China means we get to test that future very soon.
We're moving towards a future where the entire earth and asteroid belt are mined by machines to build more machines.
No we aren't, not even a little.
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
If we can promote right to repair a bit more, we could actually talk about this.
People who advocate for right to repair (which I'm in favor of by the way) sometimes ignore the economic realities.
For example, my dad was an electrical engineer who could fix any radio or TV. Reality: radios & TVs were relatively expensive AND the circuits within them were relatively large (observable with the naked eye or at least a magnifying glass). Today "repair" means at most replacing a capacitor although it's often cheaper & more efficient to just swap out a board. That of course assumes the board is still being manufactured and there are costs for companies to continue doing that, especially how fast technology moves forward.
Of course there are reasonable rights to repair we should have like being able to replace the software with software of our choosing, being able to modify parts within things we own, etc. But it won't be like it was prior to the 2000s where you could actually meaningfully enact repairs on electronic components by swapping out small easily available generic parts.
There are also secondary considerations like security that we haven't figured out technical answers to for right to repair (i.e. right to repair today also often means right to inject security vulnerabilities).
I actually work in the industrial repair industry. The thing to remember is not every company is insanely rich. Maybe top level companies but they are supported by a wide network of smaller companies. Those smaller companies don't have a ton of money to throw around. The manufacturers of the equipment have become quite greedy. The majority of them offer whole systems and then if anything breaks they want to charge an insane amount to send out a field engineer. And then if something is broke most of the time they either don't carry that part/panel/whatever in stock and will try and upsell you to the new model which is of course a massive investment.
So repair shops fill the gap for all these smaller companies and factories to get support higher than the on staff maintenance. Not everything is fixable though. They may use unique hardware signatures on drives or FPGA's or PAL's with security bit enabled. That has been true for a while though. Even in consolidation there is still plenty of business and repairs to be made.
Conversely the medically industry might be a good example. Anyone making medical equipment has to provide documentation on it. Which makes them far more repairable and easily diagnosable.
TV's especially are peak commodity. They are so cheap that the skilled labor cost to fix them isn't economically. They also are not easily transportable so repair and resell is a rough business for them. Things like laptops and phones though seems much more reasonable. Plenty of people do that professionally or even as a hobby. I like a large portion of repairs on those types of devices can be fairly economical and Chinese part makers provide plenty of affordable parts. It would cost OEM's extra to keep these parts in stock, but it's not a terrible hard task. Providing schematics also isn't a huge ask. Most are reverse engineered anyway.
When it comes to security I think this is fairly simple. Provide a blank security chip and create a secure method to connect and program it. Apple does this with its self repair when it comes to matching hardware UID's in the firmware so all the functionality is unlocked. Companies like Apple and Samsung can keep their Knox and Secure Enclave/exclave. Data can be seen as something that is not repairable in most cases. But they can provide the parts the secure a device again and leave it as a blank slate.
The biggest problem with Right to Repair is pricing. Right now Chinese makers can whip out parts for really cheap. Comparing to official parts from Apple or Google or Samsung when they did sell them and they are way higher and sometimes prohibitively so. Would be better to treat it like auto parts. Where you can get the OEM part or the third party part and both can work. Some things like security would need to be first party, but that would be a great deal. So it's doable, but would require a LOT of political will against tech companies. So it's just a really tough sell to get to that point.
Consumerism can be avoided regardless of right to repair legislation. We just stop buying shit we don’t really need which is most of what people buy on Amazon I imagine.
If your argument begins with "people should just..." then generally you've already lost the argument. The fact is that people aren't doing whatever you're suggesting, for whatever reason, and no amount of righteous indignation is going to suddenly make people change that. I guess you can sit there smug and feel good about yourself, and that's worth something, but you can't expect people to give a shit about that.
In this case, legislation could help ameliorate this problem, and maybe taxing the actual cost of things (e.g. environmental impact) instead of just letting the future generations deal with it.
> I guess you can sit there smug and feel good about yourself, and that's worth something, but you can't expect people to give a shit about that.
You can assume that that’s the kind of person you’re conversing with but you’d be wrong.
I agree with you on taxing things to account and pay for externalities.
Sorry, I think I read a bit more indignation in your message than you intended.
I mostly have a visceral reaction to "people should just.." arguments because I heard stuff like that brought up a lot during abortion arguments, particularly in regards to birth control.
"Teenagers should just stop having sex!!" was something I thought was particularly dumb, because a) have they never been a teenager? that's all a lot of them think about cuz hormones and b) whether or not they should, they're going to anyway.
Anyway, sorry for the kind of pissy response, no offense meant.
sounds like you are saying that "people should just" stop making that argument and that "people should just" pass legislation.
Most of what you said can be applied reflexively.
Humans will and agency is the foundation of society. It is required to pass legislation or taxes as well.
Well, no, when I say "people should just" arguments, I'm referring to arguments that talk about society at large. I think those are bad arguments. I didn't say "people should stop", I just think it's a bad argument, they're obviously free to make bad arguments. I wouldn't take that right away from them even if I could.
"People should just" pass legislation would be specific to congress, so not quite the same thing, or at least not the kind of argument that I was referring to. You're free to think it's a dumb argument but there's a slight pedantic difference.
>People should just" pass legislation would be specific to congress, so not quite the same thing, or at least not the kind of argument that I was referring to.
Isn't that even worse? In that case it's entirely externalizing the problem.
I think I take the opposite position to you. I think that arguments (or discussions) about society at large are the most important and critical.
I think there is a common trend to ignore and dismiss the importance of decentralized social values and individual choice, instead only focusing on concrete policy proposals.
The latter is almost never productive without consensus on the former. If 90% of people want disposable crap, it will be difficult to shove a law down their throat preventing them from getting it.
Either way, as a result of being triggered by social opinions, you seems to miss the point of the parent post, namely, that right to repair only addresses a tiny fraction of consumerism, nor is it a prerequisite to buy less garbage in general.
The solution to people buying single use toys and inflatable Jacuzzis on Amazon is not to mandate their repairability.
I think religion is stupid. I think it’s harmful. If I said “people should just stop being religious” and acted like that in itself was in any way insightful, you would consider that a dumb argument.
To be clear, this isn’t to say community outreach is bad or a waste of time. I think getting the larger populous onboard with the narrative that you think is going to make the world best is a good thing, please don’t let me stop you.
I have mostly seen these arguments pop up with giving teenagers access to birth control, with conservatives saying stuff like “people should just stop having sex out of wedlock” or something to that effect, and act that argument along is an insightful or useful comment.
The people were going to church and getting harmed and someone proposed a 5 cent wafer tax as a solution, a response that "no, people actually just need to stop going" is useful and insightful.
It points out that the tax doesn't solve the actual problem. It points out that any solution will require people not wanting to go to church. It is not a complete instructions set.
I think you are confusing use in normative statements (value judgments or opinions) with instructional statements (step by step how to).
Just to be clear, I think the act of being religious is harmful even if you were to get rid of every single church. Pedantic, yes, but the point is that this is purely a behavioral thing, not a specific action. I have tax-free ideas on the best ways to go about getting people to stop believing in dumb things but those are far beyond the scope of this conversation.
I am not “confusing” anything. In the case of teenage pregnancy, I have seen the conversation start and stop with “teenagers just shouldn’t have sex”.
If you’re just saying “I wish the world were X”, then sure you can make a declarative statement about what people are doing. That’s not what I have an issue with.
My issue is when people make a statement like “people should just…” without engaging in any meaningful way for that to happen.
Taxes on harmful behavior is one possible way we can curve it. It’s not the only way, and I am not claiming as such, but clearly righteous indignation telling people to stop using single-use plastics has not worked. We can wax philosophical as to why it hasn’t worked, and there might be value in that, but I just don’t think it’s particularly useful to begin an argument with “people should just stop buying single use plastic” as if that by itself is a meaningful thing to say.
At the risk of splitting hairs, I was suggesting that people "promote the right to repair" more and not necessarily "pass legislation". While I agree that it's a good goal to buy less plastic junk, the subject probably needs more of a positive narrative behind it to gain traction. Repairability is a positive way to look at our stuff (eg speed queens and Toyotas last forever!). Plastic junk is a negative.
We probably agree in our interests. Almost nobody is for "plastic junk", described as such. Im not opposed to repair rights in general. I think it is relatively niche, but that isn't a reason to oppose it (people can be for multiple thing).
What I do think is powerful is cultivating anti-consumerism or selective consumption behavior and belief. The desire for reparability falls within within this.
There are many futures where humanity stops.
All of them, really, if you're willing to wait long enough.
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Why do we think this is a good thing without socialism? I am not a fan of socialism, but with the level of automation we are reaching, do we really want to be ruled by our incel tech-bro overlords, living out of UBI, in a permanently bi-strated society without even the illusion of social mobility and democracy we have nowadays?
Social system aside, I'd say being a human worker mindlessly shoving boxes into other boxes all day is no fit way to live.
Just like how it was bad to have kids crawling around in the textile factories back in the day.
> Social system aside, I'd say being a human worker mindlessly shoving boxes into other boxes all day is no fit way to live.
I agree with you. And yet, the people who are working those jobs are doing so because they need them to get by, not for funsies. They will not be better off if they lose that job and there's no income stream to replace it. The two must go hand in hand or you're just ruining people's lives.
Luddites were asking that question long before socialism was a thing. However we now have more people than ever working, and standard of living is higher. I'm not worried.
During the transition to industrialization it’s conceivable that many people became worse off because they could not find a place in the new economy. Even if society is eventually better off, the our generation or the next may have to sacrifice our way of life.
We do for sure need to get people to realize their jobs are obsolete and train them on something more useful. Old people (often anyone over 25) are far too resistant to change.
Eh, this isn't a great theory especially for the poor.
As a higher income individual I conversely seem to have a lot of time to study and am not given a constant stream of work I must complete every moment. I also have the benefit of working from home and being able to spend a lot on training and upskilling.
When you are poorer you typically don't get this. The vast majority of your income is spent at the end of the week. Your job gives you zero time to explore and learn more. You likely commute and and may have a second job to make ends meet.
Just saying 'learn to code' here doesn't address the systematic issues.
For better or worse, my parents always instilled in me that no job is guaranteed forever, and that's why you need to keep up with as much new technology as you can. My dad's uncle was a victim of automation in his 40's, and I think he was always annoyed that instead of learning something new he would sit and complain all day that there's no jobs for him.
In hindsight, I think they were completely right and I feel kind of lucky that they drilled that in so much, because even into my mid 30's I don't have a ton of trouble or resistance to picking up new things. Sometimes I don't love the way new tech is going [1], but I still try my best to keep up with what's in demand in the industry (generally looking at job boards and looking at their keywords and making sure I have at least a cursory understanding of the stuff they're talking about). I will admit I don't completely love that AI is being used instead of junior engineers in some cases, largely because a lot of AI code is shit or flatout wrong in non-obvious ways, but I still have tried my best to utilize it and learn from it because it's clearly the way that things are going. [2]
I've been hired and lost/quit more desk jobs than anyone I know, and I attribute my ability to find work quickly to this characteristic.
[1] e.g. treating memory like it's infinite, disregarding CPU performance as a means of "getting more shit done", making configurations (arguably) needlessly complicated like Kubernetes, etc.
[2] For example, my latest project has been building an HLS and Icecast "infinite radio station" which picks a random song from my collection, feeds a prompt to OpenAI for DJ chatter in between songs,
We could start by dismantling the oppressive systems that force labor.
Not a question of luddites. Example, coal in the US became heavily automated - the workers did not all just find new jobs. Industry shifts don't mean the old workers become the new workers. People do get left behind, and potentially en masse.
I mean the great depression is a good example too. Stuff can fall apart much faster than you can retrain and that economies can find new work.
I mean there is an argument that the robber-barons during the Gilded Age were a net negative, in that they exerted way too much control and a lot of people needlessly suffered in the process.
Generally, though, I'm against the arguments of "automation is bad cuz less jobs". I think that might be true in the very short term, but we're never going to have a case where "all possible work is done", because that's a completely malformed premise. There's pretty much an infinite amount of potential work to do.
> I think that might be true in the very short term...
The short term matters. It's zero comfort to a factory worker who has lost his job if there will be another, better job for him in a year or two. He still needs to eat between now and then, and he can't buy food with pie in the sky promises of future employment.
AFAIK it would be more fitting to say it is of little comfort to a factory worker who lost their job, that there are now 1.5 more jobs, better jobs, now available to other people.
The reason for AFAIK, my understanding is it is more common for people to be left behind than to transition entirely to a new industry. (That is my memory of seeing some data around that, not saying I'm correct, but that I find it just as plausible to speculate that industrial transitions don't always transition with the same workers.) Perhaps we should talk farming? That is the biggest example pethaps. Some 80% plus of all populations used to do agriculture. The Grapes of Wraith were all about this very topic.
That's true as well. Also, the timeframe for those new jobs probably won't be just 1-2 years. But I was trying to use the most favorable scenario for tombert's argument to show that, even in that case, it still isn't enough.
I mean, as someone who has been laid off a bunch of times (more than most people I think), I do sympathize with them. It sucks to have your income source cut off, it sucks to lose health insurance (or have to pay full freight with COBRA), it’s demoralizing to have to grovel at the feet of a bunch of potential employers for months at a time, it’s depressing to wake up to dozens of rejection emails, and it’s scary to not see an end in sight.
I wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to forcing companies to pay some amount per month to people whose jobs were automated away for N years, and/or providing job training for a new career.
Almost no one running these companies is even childless. Much more likely the people complaining are
Who is "we?"
The people making the decisions to replace their workforce with AI and automation are doing so to maximize their profits, not to improve society or the quality of any life but their own.
Assuming you aren't a member of the capitalist class, and thus complicit, you don't have a say in the matter. They aren't putting the future they're implementing up to a vote. They don't care if you want it. They don't care if you die in the street like a dog.
And yet some people think AI will take over jobs. I am amazed this robot was not in place 20 years ago. Really ?
AI does and its not just 'AI'.
We are now switching over to a self optimizing system approach.
We had big data and didn't do anything with it but now whenever we do something with an LLM, we give it feedback, its getting processed benchmarked stored and used.
ChatGPT 3 was not impressive because it was good, it was impressive because it showed everyone that we started this ara now. This lead to massive reallocation of resources around the globe from a human and money perspective.
Whatever we had with ChatGPT-3 was build with humans and money significant less than what we now have. Which leads to progress unseen before and this will continue at least for now.
Human labor is shockingly cheap.
Amazon warehouse base pay is ~$21-22/hr due to labor supply shortages.
https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+raise+wages+warehouse
Where I live your basic fast food job is starting at $16/hour. When I was a kid $20/hr was a nice wage for an adult, these days it is very low.
That's about 60k a year for the employer, I think? That probably doesn't even cover the BOM cost of this robot installation.
Robot lasts 6-7 years under typical duty cycles (per FANUC). Think how an EV is cheaper over its lifetime to operate vs a combustion vehicle, capex vs opex. Price of labor will continue to increase in the future due to structural demographics. And lets be real, Amazon warehouse jobs are not good jobs and terribly hard on the human body. No one yearns for the Amazon mines. These are jobs that should absolutely be automated.
Oh yeah I agree with what you're saying, and of course they're working on this because they think it makes sense to do so, I just figure it's still a tricky sell even to replace $20/h humans.
FWIW I design industrial equipment for meat processing plants, where you'd be lucky to get 6-7 months out of a robot arm. I wish it was affordable to use robotics there, because there's a lot that could be done to eliminate some truly awful jobs.
Actually it's pretty expensive in the long run. They want raises, are finicky about their health, have pesky habits like going home, having life partners and something silly called work/life balance. Also, they sometimes organize and become collective bodies under something called a union.
In reality, I'm a strong supporter of everything above. Maybe we can really provide people better jobs by delegating repetitive and boring things to machines and allow everyone to do something they enjoy to earn their lives.
One can dream, I guess...
These "what if we give everyone jobs they are interested" remarks are just bullshit. You're not going to give people more interesting jobs, the result will just be flooded job markets everywhere. Then more jobs will become automated and people will then flood to more sectors that aren't automated. What a stupid dream, let people have meaningless jobs if they want that.
>are finicky about their health
Machines are anything but reliable. They need constant servicing and maintenance and still break entirely
Depends on how they're built, and building them takes experience. Plus, if their MTBF is long enough with enough hot spares, you can rotate the problematic ones out fix them while they are being replaced from the hot-spares pool.
When you are not budget constrained, and building things for businesses, a little overengineering goes a long way.
I have a Xerox 7500DN color laser printer next to me, and it's working for more than 20 years at this point. It has gone through a lot of spares, but most (if not all) issues are from parts wearing down naturally. Nothing breaks unexpectedly on that. Same for robots. Give enough design budget, overengineer a little, and that thing will be one hell of an ugly but reliable machinery.
When you work with real "industrial" stuff, the landscape is very different.
All moving parts degrade. A nice thing about machines is you can service and refurbish them to like-new condition.
There are options to deal with your shitty knees, hip, and back, but none of them get you back to 100% of your original capabilities and, carry an element of gambling, and will involve the kinds of painkillers that can ruin you far more comprehensively than a shitty joint will.
Humans are not reliable either. Humans are much more likely to be out sick unexpectedly.
If you keep up the maintenance plan for machines they rarely break before their predicted retirement date when you replace them. And since the maintenance and retirement dates are predicted in advance you can plan for them and thus ensure they happen when you want them to.
If you have the misfortune to be in a developed country (not the USA) then yes. Worker without rights are evidently pretty cheap. They go home, but you can just get twice as many. Catastrophic self-organization happens on scales comparable to robot crashes, and you can just recycle the offending units and replace them with new ones.
I can tell you that since last month a company now does all their training translations via AI, no more need for the whole translations team.
Additionally, this is now a common feature in CMS space, automated translation of content and assets.
I don't understand why people still express doubt about this - AI already is and has been taking over jobs.
It's really about the hype that is the problem and that people often mean LLMs when they say AI.
LLM isn't going to drive a forklift; it needs more agency than a textbox in order to do that.
But it's really going to be products (ex. Microsoft Word) rather than a technology (ex. Electricity) that'll replace jobs (ex. Typists).
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