[HN Gopher] Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Hu...
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Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans
Author : Luc
Score : 183 points
Date : 2025-05-09 11:18 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| omneity wrote:
| Warehouses is definitely not where I expected robots with
| retractable blades to first appear.
|
| The demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWXco05eK28
| krapp wrote:
| That's still far slower than a human being, and those bins are
| far too neat.
| wielebny wrote:
| Slower than a human making one operation.
|
| Not slower than human stocking items for a whole day.
| vntok wrote:
| Surely the robot does not stop at the end of the day.
| nosrepa wrote:
| The article says they plan on it operating continuously
| for 20 hours at a time.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Until they unionize.
| ta1243 wrote:
| Do robots rely on being ionized? I'd have thought a robot
| which wasn't ionized would work just fine
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| You're thinking of "Onionized", when their exploits are
| covered by one of the world's best publications.
| cusaitech wrote:
| Are you talking about the "Soviet Onion"?
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| The tortoise and hare allegory? Slow and steady wins the
| race.
| CraigRood wrote:
| 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!
| dlt713705 wrote:
| The challenge is not only stowing objects. It is also
| optimizing space and keeping it clean. In that matter robots
| are faster and better.
| krapp wrote:
| 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.
| dlt713705 wrote:
| That is why, in the end, only robots will remain. They
| are inexhaustible and strictly meticulous in all
| circumstances.
| krapp wrote:
| Robots aren't inexhaustible. They break down a lot and
| are far more expensive to repair and maintain than a
| human being.
| reverius42 wrote:
| They're going to get better a lot faster than humans,
| though. The fact that they exist at all is remarkable.
| bigtunacan wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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)
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> 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.
| maintainarmsx wrote:
| 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
| mapt wrote:
| "Meticulous" in industrial automation does not mean
| "Precise without the use of feedback-driven control
| loops".
| WillAdams wrote:
| 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.
| usrusr wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| What skilled worker? This is a low skill worker they are
| replacing.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| For now.
|
| Wait until LLMs get better and destroy the ability for
| junior developers to get their foot in the door.
| warrenmiller wrote:
| How do you get senior developers if you replace the
| junior developers?
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Sounds like a problem for some future CEO, long after
| current CEO has gotten a fat bonus from improving
| quarterly profits _now_.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| 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
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| By then the senior developers will be obsolete too
| DrillShopper wrote:
| That's the neat part - you don't.
|
| (The suits think that's a good thing)
| LoganDark wrote:
| Have you read the article? "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."
| bluGill wrote:
| 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)
| dullcrisp wrote:
| What data? Just try it yourself and see.
| LoganDark wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| usrusr wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| zaphar wrote:
| Slow is fast is a saying for a reason. It is just as true
| for a human as it is for a robot.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| 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.
| seadan83 wrote:
| 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.
| esperent wrote:
| I guess a spatula is a kind of blade. I was expecting something
| a little more exciting though, from your comment.
| djtango wrote:
| How does the robot assess whether there is enough space
| available in each bin?
| spwa4 wrote:
| It reads the state from a database?
| abricot wrote:
| 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."
| raisedbyninjas wrote:
| 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.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| 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.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| It's a safe space in the interim. A place where they can hone
| their skills and sharpen their blades.
| analog31 wrote:
| The first robot that learns to make a shiv will rule the
| warehouse.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| ... and then. The world.
| immibis wrote:
| 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?
| withinboredom wrote:
| 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.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| 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.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| 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"?
| bearjaws wrote:
| "a genuine sense of touch" Means the stock is down $30 YTD and
| they gotta pump by pretending they've created something.
| Symmetry wrote:
| I'd assume measuring the force exerted at the contact point
| rather than the motor current.
| markisus wrote:
| I think this has also existed in the form of force sensors
| and more recently image-like pressure sensors.
| Symmetry wrote:
| 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...
| blitzar wrote:
| > What does "a genuine sense of touch" actually mean?
|
| The technology has applications in the robot sex work industry.
| danielovichdk wrote:
| And yet some people think AI will take over jobs. I am amazed
| this robot was not in place 20 years ago. Really ?
| krapp wrote:
| I don't understand why people still express doubt about this -
| AI already is and has been taking over jobs.
| lesuorac wrote:
| 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).
| conception wrote:
| Human labor is shockingly cheap.
| bayindirh wrote:
| 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...
| maintainarmsx wrote:
| >are finicky about their health
|
| Machines are anything but reliable. They need constant
| servicing and maintenance and still break entirely
| bayindirh wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| 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.
| righthand wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Amazon warehouse base pay is ~$21-22/hr due to labor supply
| shortages.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+raise+wages+warehouse
| Gracana wrote:
| That's about 60k a year for the employer, I think? That
| probably doesn't even cover the BOM cost of this robot
| installation.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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.
| Gracana wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| AIoverlord wrote:
| 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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| 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.
| alsodumb wrote:
| It takes hundreds of millions to build a warehouse. Amazon has
| tons of them. Retrofitting things is capital intensive.
| sschueller wrote:
| Humans are cheaper than robots too...
| thfuran wrote:
| How much cheaper? You can hardly get humans to work two
| shifts a day, let alone three.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| abricot wrote:
| Only if you don't need to pay them a living wage.
| econ wrote:
| 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
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| In China, yes, but not here.
| jajuuka wrote:
| 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.
| vidarh wrote:
| The Ocado warehouse automation is pretty crazy:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE
| throw310822 wrote:
| 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."
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| 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.
| dimator wrote:
| Those peaky humans and their stupid quality of life
| needs!
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > 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).
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Yes, if you're going to pay humans to suffer the
| indignity of doing a robot's job, it makes sense to pay
| well.
| nemomarx wrote:
| if you incurred nrlb fines aren't you breaking the law?
| RaSoJo wrote:
| 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
| havblue wrote:
| I'd suggest robots with fire extinguishers.
| ido wrote:
| Or non-combustible robots
| jajuuka wrote:
| Need to quit running all the robots on gasoline and
| building them out a wood.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| 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?
| foobarian wrote:
| If there are really no humans there they could just fill
| the warehouse with nitrogen or something. No fire!
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Lithium battery fires don't feed on atmospheric oxygen.
| That's the most likely ignition source.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| yurishimo wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| burningChrome wrote:
| 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.
| Closi wrote:
| 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.
| gjm11 wrote:
| 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?)
| omneity wrote:
| > 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?
| Closi wrote:
| Ocado's first automated warehouse installation was also
| purchased from Autostore (before they built their own
| solution, and now market/sell it)
| Closi wrote:
| 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.
| voakbasda wrote:
| 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.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| 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...)
| michaelt wrote:
| 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.
| AIoverlord wrote:
| 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?
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| 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.
| mmmlinux wrote:
| 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.
| beambot wrote:
| Symbotic also has a fascinating solution.
| matthewfelgate wrote:
| Are companies designing product packaging to be more compatible
| with robotic handling?
| AftHurrahWinch wrote:
| 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.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Average humans. Not stowing masters apparently.
| klooney wrote:
| I mean, who is going to volunteer to be the Amazon Stowing John
| Henry?
| myself248 wrote:
| It's an interesting approach. Treat the workers so poorly
| that even reasonable people look forward to eliminating the
| jobs with robots.
| LeonB wrote:
| 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/
| masom wrote:
| 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.
| Melonai wrote:
| But what if the dog gets sad? :(
|
| I think the solution might be multiple dogs.
| elzbardico wrote:
| 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?
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| markisus wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| We could start by dismantling the oppressive systems that
| force labor.
| tombert wrote:
| 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,
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > 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.
| seadan83 wrote:
| 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| seadan83 wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| ryan93 wrote:
| Almost no one running these companies is even childless. Much
| more likely the people complaining are
| nancyminusone wrote:
| 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > 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.
| krapp wrote:
| 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.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > 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.
| oxqbldpxo wrote:
| Is there a future where we stop buying so much garbage?
| snek_case wrote:
| There are many futures where humanity stops.
| eddieroger wrote:
| All of them, really, if you're willing to wait long enough.
| sph wrote:
| We're moving towards a future where the entire earth and
| asteroid belt are mined by machines to build more machines.
| krapp wrote:
| No we aren't, not even a little.
| havblue wrote:
| If we can promote right to repair a bit more, we could actually
| talk about this.
| barbazoo wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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.
| havblue wrote:
| 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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).
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| 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).
| jajuuka wrote:
| 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.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| 145% tariff on China means we get to test that future very
| soon.
| j_timberlake wrote:
| Be the change you wish to see in the world.
| mapt wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 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.
| dialup_sounds wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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.
| mapt wrote:
| 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).
| m3kw9 wrote:
| 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.
| cogidub wrote:
| hopefully
| gruntbuggly wrote:
| 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?
| marcellus23 wrote:
| Well, the industrial revolution has been a story of
| continuous efficiency gains and increasing automation, but
| somehow there's still enough jobs.
| gruntbuggly wrote:
| 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'
| thisisnotauser wrote:
| 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?
| bdangubic wrote:
| UBI FTW :)
| noisy_boy wrote:
| There is a crucial Basic in the middle.
| disambiguation wrote:
| Once Bezos replaces everyone with robots, why would he need
| anyone to buy his junk anymore?
| dh2022 wrote:
| That is one of his ways of extracting value from society - by
| selling his junk.
| mhb wrote:
| Crazy right? It's almost like the people buying stuff are
| idiots who don't understand their own needs and values.
| exe34 wrote:
| Given how much time they spend on social media and how
| much money they spend on keeping up with the Jones.....
| yes?
| kajumix wrote:
| Once he replaces everyone with robots, and all the factories do
| the same, people will get stuff at home for watching ads.
| iamtheworstdev wrote:
| but ads exist to convince people to buy things. if people
| can't afford to buy things, why would you need ads?
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| So they can buy things with their ad-watching money.
| kajumix wrote:
| 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
| pixl97 wrote:
| And what labor are you going to be doing to afford those
| upleveled products?
| kajumix wrote:
| it's a good question. what would true abundance look
| like? I can't wait to find out
| hattmall wrote:
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Casinos provide free drinks
|
| Because people will spend money. The premise here is no-
| one has money, but somehow adverts exist.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Maybe we pay people a small fee to watch ads?
| vlovich123 wrote:
| 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.
| hashiyakshmi wrote:
| 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.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| Not enough to offset losing their fingers left and right.
| claudiulodro wrote:
| 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.
| burnerthrow008 wrote:
| 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".
| vishalontheline wrote:
| 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)?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| 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
| vlovich123 wrote:
| 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.
| burnerthrow008 wrote:
| > 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).
| burnerthrow008 wrote:
| 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.
| godelski wrote:
| I don't think they think that far ahead. I'm not sure why
| they'd risk their head.
| ck2 wrote:
| 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.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| 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.
| HighGoldstein wrote:
| > 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.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| 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
| econ wrote:
| Same as it always was except from the last few decades.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| 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.
| guhidalg wrote:
| 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.
| 8note wrote:
| 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
| myself248 wrote:
| Pray tell, what jobs can't be automated soon?
| guhidalg wrote:
| The ones where human interaction is the point. Education,
| bar tenders, nursing, tourism, for example.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Japan is moving fast on a few of these, particularly as
| their population is rapidly aging.
| bmitc wrote:
| 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.
| tw04 wrote:
| 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.
| jajuuka wrote:
| 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.
| tw04 wrote:
| 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?
| sydbarrett74 wrote:
| 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.
| apercu wrote:
| 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?
| SR2Z wrote:
| > 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.
| rendang wrote:
| 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...
| antisthenes wrote:
| Are you somehow connecting low unemployment with high
| purchasing power by your median worker through a bunch of
| logical hoops?
| rendang wrote:
| 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/yea
| r...
| mattigames wrote:
| 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.
| rendang wrote:
| 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/yea
| r...
| mattigames wrote:
| 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.
| rendang wrote:
| All of those are part of the basket of goods and services
| tracked in the Consumer Price Index
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| > 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.
| mannyv wrote:
| Bezos doesn't make the stuff on amazon, so your question is
| moot.
| arghwhat wrote:
| 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.)
| allturtles wrote:
| 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.
| exe34 wrote:
| Poor people will go the way of the horse.
| arghwhat wrote:
| 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...
| opo wrote:
| >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...
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Post-human Capitalism: androids are the new consumer.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| 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
| pixelready wrote:
| 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.
| uniq7 wrote:
| 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.
| cryptonector wrote:
| 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.
| ge96 wrote:
| 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
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| > I started drinking to get through it on my breaks
|
| That bad, huh?
| ge96 wrote:
| 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
| lr1970 wrote:
| > pound a couple 100 proof 100ml bottles, back to it. That
| job was more fun than stow.
|
| WoW, you can hold your liquor :-)
| damion6 wrote:
| 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
| greekanalyst wrote:
| It's clear we are near an event horizon moment.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Does this have any potential to get costs down for customers
| though?
| rsyring wrote:
| 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.
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