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Amazon Uses Robots To Speed Up Human 'Pickers' In Fulfillment Centers
cagraham writes "The WSJ, combing through Amazon's Q3 earnings report, found that the company is currently using 1,400 robots across three of their fulfillment centers. The machines are made by Kiva Systems (a company acquired by Amazon last year), and help to warehouses more efficient by bringing the product shelves to the workers. The workers then select the right item from the shelf, box it, and place it on the conveyor line, while another shelf is brought. The management software that runs the robots can speed or slow down item pacing, reroute valuable orders to more experienced workers, and redistribute workloads to prevent backlogs."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfGs2Y5WJ14
In American warehouse.... goods go to you!
They really do bring the product shelves to the workers. Watch: http://youtu.be/gvQKGev56qU
Just because it's hard doesn't mean you shouldn't try, it means you should try harder!
And they "help to warehouses more efficient" as well!
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr6Rco5A9SM
This is where everyone wins with technology. Companies get an increase in volume & works are walking less so it's easier on them.
This isn't exactly news, Wired wrote about Kiva's robots in 2009. They specifically mention Kiva's use at Zappos (an Amazon subsidiary.)
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I get this feeling that most of the new Slashdot "editors" where hired through Dice.com
Don't be silly - they were provided by Kiva Systems.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
He had previous shipping-industry experience and liked the job for the first six months, but then he said the productivity rate abruptly doubled one day from 250 units per hour for smaller items to 500 units per hour.
Speed it up a little!
From the summary..., I figured it was a bunch of ASIMO robots programmed to trundle around the warehouses screaming in the voice of Sgt. R. Lee Ermey's voice "MOVE IT! Move it, MAGGOTS! Work FASTER!"...
Here - robots do the jobs of men.
Yes, it's incredible how Amazon is using something exactly as intended after they bought it.
I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave
This is getting ridiculous.
until Asian robots can do it twice as fast at half the price. And then we'll have millions of unemployed robots milling around humping ATM's and washing machines.
Table-ized A.I.
Soon the picker will be automated, and then the self-driving car will deliver (or the autopilot drone)
Pretty soon the customer will be a robot too
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Lots of good ideas come from individuals without a profit motive. Leonard Kleinrock has said he wasn't motivated by economics when he helped create the internet. From http://articles.latimes.com/2009/oct/24/opinion/la-oe-morrison-use24-2009oct24:
Biz is often too short-sighted to invest in long-term disruptive technologies. That's where govt can step in to fund it. I think the best way is to provide a basic income, so that individuals can have a choice to be free of the market and innovate disruptively on their own or in ad hoc collaborations using the unprecedented communication tool that is the internet.
Taxes aren't needed to fund a basic income. Simply create govt bonds, which the Fed expands its balance sheet to buy. Or former taxpayers can buy govt bonds and get interest from funding the government.
Innovation is the key. As long as we keep advancing knowledge, we can create as much money as we feel.
I'm curious as to why it's more efficient to bring the shelf to the picker than take the picker to the shelf.
Those robots could just as easily be ferrying around the pickers.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
As much as I love my dad and his cool job of truck driving, the self driving car might impact that line of work. Self driving semis won't be quick to hit the road until after the civilian vehicles are out. I think the public will have a bit of fear for the big ol' trucks running under the control of T2000. And to more practical ends, the way you drive a semi is different than a regular car, so the software will need to be more advanced. In the short run(5-10 years after release of self driving cars) though delivery vans will be used quite effectively.
I think if the self driving car becomes popular, there will be a certain size van that will become popular. It will be big enough to hold cargo, but small enough to be able to handle with the self driving car software. While it would not be as cost efficient for larger cargo loads, it would be cheaper for loads in its size because not having to pay for a driver is big time. I think grocery stores, Walmart, and even local distributors could use these. The nice thing about this is that any time logistics sees a boon like this, the prices consumers pay goes down even more. Lower prices for food lets people save more money to invest in other things or donate and society's advancement accelerates. So we should look forward to the self driving car.
To a certain degree, it is sad for someone to lose their job to a robot. But it is just as sad to lose your job to out sourcing of cheaper labor. The key today is you need to be on your toes, always educating yourself. The Internet gives you the ability to keep progressing in education past what you received in secondary education. And if you're a kid who hasn't graduated high school, I envy you because I wanted to take college level courses when I was in high school. Back in the early 90s, you just didn't have a way to educate yourself past what your teachers fed you outside of teaching yourself coding or something at home with limited materials. I mean you could sit down and just read through the encyclopedias as I'm sure many Slashdotters have done. But today, with the Internet, you can get a solid education if you're an active learner. If you need to be spoon fed, the Internet isn't quite there, but it is getting there.
I'm just saying there is no excuse to not be learning as your chief pass time now. You might think learning about other disciplines won't help you in your workplace. But you never know what can click in your head as a business idea when you study cross discipline. Also if you deliberately make it one of your hobbies to learn new stuff on the Internet, you might eventually have enough knowledge to be a tradesman in other fields.
Anyway, I think the days of the truck driver might be numbered. There is no net loss for society though. It will be a net gain. If you want to compete in the new economy, you want to always be learning especially if you're not currently employed. And what you can do with your mind will have a bigger impact than what people with a great mind could do back in the day.
God spoke to me
How is a human picker different from a nose picker?
Table-ized A.I.
I get this feeling that most of the new Slashdot "editors" where hired through Dice.com...
You think this is a new problem? You must be new here.
I love my sig.
mod up
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
All the time.
By moving the shelves they are able to create a queue of work for the picker, such that there is little downtime between picks. If the picker was moved, they would basically be idle while moving from shelf to shelf.
I'm curious as to why it's more efficient to bring the shelf to the picker than take the picker to the shelf.
Those robots could just as easily be ferrying around the pickers.
They could but that would make the process into a serial process. Why waste the time bringing the picker back and forth from the shelves to the belt? If you have enough or fast enough robots, it is more efficient to have them timed so that another shelf arrives just in time for the previous shelf to be removed.
I wondered that as well, but the video makes it clear: this way the shelves can be queueing for the worker.
I can think of a few reasons why robots may be more efficient.
- The Biggie(tm): the time the human spends traveling in racks is wasted time that's paid by the hour. Robots aren't paid by the hour, so even if the robots are half the speed of a human, you can simply deploy five times as many robots, and now you aren't paying people for travel time between pick faces AND you're moving more product with fewer man-hours.
- Racks don't need to be human-length, allowing more storage in less space.
- Product is lighter than a person, so moving it consumes less fuel. Fuel costs are a very serious expense in a warehouse.
- Robots can zip around gathering well-organized product faster than a human can think of where to move next. And even if the robot knows exactly where to take the human, it wouldn't be able to accelerate very fast without additional harnesses/restraints for the human.
- Easier to segregate high-value product. If the robots are bringing you just the SKU you need then nobody except the facility manager has a reason to be wandering around the iPad locker, which means fewer iPads growing legs. Missing product will be noticed very quickly if there's any kind of auditing.
- Lower inventory error rate, because a robot will never accidentally pick from the wrong location. Your cycle counts and physical inventories are suddenly looking much cleaner, especially on high-volume products.
With all of that said, "no human jobs are being taken" is complete, utter BS. Where do you think those up-to-40% savings are coming from? Yes, storage space, fuel, rent/property taxes, and shrinkage (depending on your security) are all major expenses, but by far the biggest cost in any warehouse operation is labor. The travel time between locations is time that's no longer going into the pockets of workers.
Danish != nationality
I'm curious as to why it's more efficient to bring the shelf to the picker than take the picker to the shelf.
Those robots could just as easily be ferrying around the pickers.
Because people are more expensive than robots. So you want to use multiple robots in parallel to make the people more efficient. If you move the picker to the product, you maybe able to slightly speed up a serial process, but if you have a parallel flow of many products to a single picker, then the picker can focus only on the tasks that cannot yet be automated.
I'll sing the song again. The Amazon workers displaced by robots may not be able to shop at Amazon any more. The speed of job elimination is accelerating and we are not hearing a thing about changing social policies to maintain our nation. Now take a peek at the various repair manuals that are directly or indirectly important in your life. Suppose that you need a new bevel gear for your Skill Saw. You can now print that gear or have any company that has the equipment easily print that gear, So things that are normal and usual like a parts warehouse for Skill Saws can no longer justify its financial existence. And the idea of supplying parts being part of the gain in selling an item also goes up in smoke. Even places like auto parts stores may start to dry up as 3D printing advances, Any way you look at it millions upon millions of jobs will vanish due to 3d printing. That is not a bad thing as long as we take care and design a society in which displaced workers can be safe and happy.
I could see containers being shipped via rail or water and then being taken from the shipping terminal via self driving truck along a predefined route (with a separate lane on the roadway) to places like Sysco foods, Walmart, etc. in the near (20 years) future.
Times change, and people need to retool every so often. In the early 1900s, how many buggy whip makers, gas light maintainers, ice block deliverymen, and horse tenders were needed. Time marched on and buggy whips changed to mechanics, gas light maintainers changed to utility workers and electricians, ice blocks changed to HVAC systems, and so on.
A good example of how automation has improved things is IT. IT is a narrow field, but it is a completely company/corporation run field. No unions, no pressure whatsoever against hiring legions of H-1Bs to keep the cost down, extreme tax benefits for offshoring, no pushback against replacing level 1 techs with portable hard drives with PXE servers. With all that in mind, has IT as a whole lost a lot of jobs? They have changed and new things have been added, such as VM admins and SAN admins, something which did not exist in the past. Yes, one has to be more skilled to get into IT, but one can eke out some type of living.
If IT can stand automation of anything that is repetitive, then other jobs, jobs that have unions and regulations guaranteeing employment will either not be affected, or made into less physical, more mental work.
As for truck drivers, the sooner we get autopiloting vehicles the better. AIs are just plain better than drunk, stoned, texting, tripping, high, tired, angry, horny, distracted, or just plain incompetent people.
The van size is probably variable. For a lot of areas, a Euro-van like a Sprinter [1], Ducato/ProMaster, or a Transit [2] is good enough. However, in metro areas where a FedEx van barely can go, it might be good to have a fleet of Doblos (er, ProMaster Cities), or Transit Connects, which haul less, but they can go down the back alleys and avoid the overzealous tow truck drivers and meter maids.
Posting anon... Am tired of Luddites. Either we develop technology to better ourselves, or expire as a species.
[1]: Great vans, but when they break, you pay Mercedes prices to have them fixed. Especially with the latest round of emissions stuff.
[2]: The Transit looks interesting, but it has been hit by plenty of delays. Done right, it would make for a nice campervan.
The spoken it, AMDOCS/AKAMAI has to infiltrate the national interest. How not been said yet, is supposed to be there is AMDOCS/AKAMAI was stopped.
AFFILIATES OF AND AMDOCS/AKAMAI, the proverbial thorn inside of national and privacy interests
I'm curious as to why it's more efficient to bring the shelf to the picker than take the picker to the shelf.
Those robots could just as easily be ferrying around the pickers.
During testing they found a serious bug with that.
The robot ferries would repeatedly demoralise workers with statements like "hurry up meatbag", "why are humans so slow" and "Ugh, why must I vocalise, cant you insipid fluid sacks learn binary". However this was deemed acceptible by the testing coordinator, the clincher was when they started pushing the human workers in the backs with rifle buts and threatening to liquefy their children to spread on their toast.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Those robots could also speed up humans by using whips.
Welcome to their robot overlords.
Sounds awesome. May we be less wasteful by the day and get more help from technology. Think more. Exert less, yet create more.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
Yes... bring the shelf forward, worker picks the item off the shelf, turns around and puts it in the box and does whatever needs to be done. In the meantime, the robot has brought the shelf for the next item.
Also, I would think motion sickness or something would come into play with a robotic platform moving a worker back and forth all the time.
A business has to be profitable to be sustainable and to serve large number of customers.
In general, you're correct... what happens when machines make everything? Who will the customers be?
Ever watch The Jetsons? George Jetson went to work every day to Spaceley Sprockets. His job? To press the big red start button for the robots.
That's it.
That day isn't here, it won't show up in 5 years. It may well show up in 50 years. Then what?
We need a new economic model to take into account what happens when obtaining employment for everyone is no longer the goal (or even possible)
Most of the packages I order from Amazon get delivered by... ...wait for it... ...the federal government's socialist package delivery service, the US Postal Service. Quickly and cheaply. Good thing our founding fathers put this socialist system in the US Constitution! ... ..In all seriousness, though, I'm with you on the anti-Ludditeness and the general efficiency of the private market (and its role in innovation... I liked Amazon's drone delivery video), but you must give credit where credit is due. The USPS is actually pretty good (and is solvent, in spite of onerous new pension-related requirements levied on them lately). Turns out our founding fathers weren't dumbasses. Neither were they ideological libertarian sticklers who believed in the absolute power of the free market everywhere and anywhere, in spite of what you hear on the right.
Self driving semis won't be quick to hit the road until after the civilian vehicles are out.... the way you drive a semi is different than a regular car, so the software will need to be more advanced
Citation, please. The gearing is different, the stopping distance is different, the length of the vehicle (think lane changes) is different, the turning radius is different... but these are all *variables*, not fundamental changes to the software. The biggest difference I can think of is that trucks would need additional waypoints programmed in so they'll stop at weigh stations.
On the other hand, truck drivers represent a significant cost in both money *and time*. If a truck driver costs a company $50k/year but a truck-driving computer system (hardware+software) costs $100k, the computer should pay for itself in under a year. There are limits on how many hours per day or week a person can drive a truck, to ensure they get enough sleep so they can drive safely, but the same doesn't need to be true about self-driving trucks. So a computer driving a truck can move a single load of goods cross-country faster, and can move *more* loads in a month or year.
To a certain degree, it is sad for someone to lose their job to a robot. But it is just as sad to lose your job to out sourcing of cheaper labor. The key today is you need to be on your toes, always educating yourself.
No. Well, yes, that's the key in this current economy. But the promise of robotics isn't supposed to be that only the best and smartest survive, but that the robotics eliminates work for *everyone*. Wages are supposed to keep pace as hours fall. If robots can automate half your work, the idea is that we're supposed to be paid twice as much per hour as our workload drops in half. Somewhere along the line that got distorted when profit became the driving factor, and half (or more) of the workers got laid off because robots/automation could do their work. So you're right, but you're not supposed to be. Asimov, Heinlein, et al would be furious today.
I'm just saying there is no excuse to not be learning as your chief pass time now.
Yep, that's supposed to be the goal, enabled by the robots that take away all the drudgery. Instead of spending all your energy working 40 hours/week, you're supposed to be working 20 hours with plenty of mental energy still in the tank so you can learn. But again, that ideal has been distorted, so most people are doing 45-60 hours worth of work and just don't have the energy left to enrich themselves. Even if they do, the middle class, where this *should* be happening, is disappearing, and if you're worried about money you start losing the ability to think effectively about your future.
Anyway, I think the days of the truck driver might be numbered. There is no net loss for society though. It will be a net gain.
No, it won't be a net gain. Driving truck is a (difficult, lots-of-time-away-from-your-family) ticket to the middle class for blue-collar workers. As factory jobs continue to move overseas and the real value of the minimum wage drops and drops and drops, fewer and fewer poor people can advance into the (shrinking) middle class. If you buy into the theory that the middle class is the driver of the economy (they are the people buying new cars and washing machines and houses, while the poor just try to make the rent and the rich buy an occasional painting or luxury automobile), then losing a pathway to the middle class *is* a net loss to society.
More than likely OSHA and operator safety, too. I didn't read the FA, but I imagine most of the shelves -- even when full -- weigh substantially less than a 120 kg warehouse worker.
--Jim (me)
The pickers probably should start updating their resumes.
There's an Aperture science og Cave Johnson joke in there somewhere....
"and help to warehouses more efficient"
"can speed or slow down item pacing"
Nah it's probably true and yet completely misleading. Amazon has increased its headcount 400% over 5 years, so it's probably true that they'll keep all the staff they currently have but cut down on seasonal hiring and not need to hire more people as they continue to grow. Ultimately it's neither a problem or their fault. Human advancement is built upon finding ways to decrease work and the reason Amazon is doing this is because we choose to buy from the cheapest company not the one employing the most people etc.
The nice thing about this is that any time logistics sees a boon like this, the prices consumers pay goes down even more.
Well, maybe.
Lower prices for food lets people save more money to invest in other things or donate and society's advancement accelerates.
Or to pay bills and buy food because those don't turn free when you're replaced by a robot and cease to have income. Maybe we could all become consultants.
To be fair this isn't actually a new concept. One of the American founding fathers (I think, give me a break I'm not American or 250 years old) said something like: I must be a general so that my sons can be doctors and lawyers and their sons can be sculptors and artists.
There are people who are incredibly deprived in the world. Wouldn't helping them if we have the spare time and resources help uplift all our spirits? Wouldn't the pursuit of fundamental truths be the scientific or philosophical be a worthwhile endeavour when the need to build low quality consumable crap decreases?
What the founding fathers, and even we today, haven't really grasped is that we're obsessed with having 'more' such that we work nearly as many hours now even though our productivity has increased monumentally and yet feel less fulfilled.
We need a new economic model to take into account what happens when obtaining employment for everyone is no longer the goal (or even possible)
That's one direction that might yield a solution, assuming one exists.
But a solution we already know works, at least short-term, is to simply get rid of oh, say about 6 billion humans. That's still a billion people, give or take. Methods to achieve such a result are not, however, generally looked upon favorably.
Ever watch The Jetsons? George Jetson went to work every day to Spaceley Sprockets. His job? To press the big red start button for the robots.
That's it.
Only the 1% will get floating cities and flying cars.
The rest of us will be wearing nothing but rags in a post-apocalyptic wasteland so saturated with radiation that we'll have mutant saber-toothed cats and dinosaurs as pets.
Amazon use a bunch of eliza bots if you have a problem, something small like they took your money but didn't deliver your stuff.
Try it sometime. You will never get a response that actually addresses the content of your enquiry ot complaint in the normal manner of a response. You won't seen any obvious launching point from your mail to the amazon response. What they do is run some AI algo over the content then spit out a paragraph that scores highest as a possible response. I'm sure some enqurires or complaints are dealt with effectively like this and many aren't. I just find it horrible that they pretend they have a person reading your mail when they clearly don't.
I had fun with it last time saying "If you are real breathing person, work any of the following words into the response. Nile, sausage, voodoo, estury, skycraper, forklift, logistical solutions." or whatever list came to mind. There's enough in the AI to say "I can assure you your mail is handled by a real person" interspliced in the cut and paste that does not address any point you make. It's brilliant. Its extremely f**king rude but Amazon have made it pretty clear how much they *HATE* their customers and want to screw them as hard as possible.
I guess it could be worse, they could be actually paing living human beings to enact the Eliza algorithm, selecting which 2 stock paragraphs to use in response regardless of whether it completely ignores the questions asked or the concerns raised.
"you are important to us."
Just FYI, that's a real live person.
Her name is Staycee, she's 19, brunette, and enjoys going out to the bar after work where she can always get served if she shows off her tits. At work, she splits her time between stalking her current celebrity object of obsession, flirting with the cute guy who delivers packages, taking lunch, and if time permits she'll quickly cut and paste the company's official Talking Points into a response. If it sometimes appears disjointed or robotic then oh well #whatever #yolo
Why would it have to wait? At 12-4am in the morning there usually is no traffic. Robots don't care if it's late at night. Auto-drive rigs can easily make the rounds. Also it's just a matter of devoting some of those fuel tax dollars to auto-drive only roads. Nice and straight, standardized markings, extra sensor targets, etc and you are good to go without needs a very complicated auto-pilot.
There is also things like g-forces, where you can accelerate/decelerate objects faster than people without noticeably damaging them [not that Amazon cares about their workers, because new ones are cheap, just LOTS of paperwork].
But it wouldn't surprise me if they did this just to try stop the reports that keep coming out about them basically using up people in 1-6 months [where the people either quit because they are ill or fired for being unable to make quota anymore], then the people either need to be hospitalized [no health plan, yay] or just rest for months to recuperate.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Tell that to folks who don't get money for their families.
Big truck companies like Volvo are already putting the radar and computer vision systems from their high-end cars into trucks. The trucks cost more anyway, meaning it's a smaller proportion of the price tag, the truck operator doesn't have as much confidence in human drivers as the amateur car owner (because they get to see the real statistics of how many accidents take a truck off the road and require an insurance claim every year) and the truck cab is a big place with a lot of room for gadgets like this.
Today a brand new top-of-the-line Volvo truck, of the sort you'd buy for a long distance haulage company that cares about its drivers - will auto-stop from highway speeds when it detects an obstacle and the driver doesn't react to a warning sound. If the driver does react (because they were merely distracted and not asleep) it has everything set up to help them complete an emergency manoeuvre, e.g. sharp lane change without toppling or jack-knifing, crash braking.
Another thing long distance hauliers might be interested in is systems in which amateur drivers on a highway become "ducklings", forming an automatic convoy behind a large truck with a professional driver without any further intervention by their drivers. The truck advertises "I'm willing to be mother duck" and anybody with a compatible car can turn the system on and know they'll arrive safely at their chosen exit. That's been demo'd on public highways but isn't yet an option you can buy in the showroom. If they can get the legalities sorted out this could be a bonus for everyone - no-one likes long straight highway journeys but at least the guy at the front is getting paid to take proper rest breaks.
So why do they still have pickers? Clearly that is the next level of automation to execute...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I think you missed the whoosh of the joke flying over your head...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
But that puts our priorities upside down. The right thing to do is give those people what they need, not insist that Amazon find a less efficient way to do business so that it's forced to employ them in shitty jobs. Economically these options work out the same, the same stuff gets done either way, so why prefer the option that leaves somebody doing pointless extra work? Because you hate them for being poor?
You're kidding right? Books are freaking heavy.
As much as I love my dad and his cool job of truck driving
What's cool about truck driving? There's nothing cool about doing a job that a train could do better (if we'd supported trains instead of cars, for the benefit of The People instead of the automakers, we'd have much more rail) let alone one which a robot could do better.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Now every worker can be fully stressed out doing routine work. As you become better at your task, your task gets faster. You'll never be on top of it.
It's like Tetris. Maybe if you manage to be fast enough to fill a whole aisle with robots, they will deadlock and need to get cleaned out.
At Amazon, the head flies below the joke instead.
You have presented a false dilemma. In other words, they don't actually have to choose and nothing prevents them from eventually doing both. In addition, your idea that it is more efficient to do it the way they are now than they way you have imagined is presumption not fact. Maybe the way you are imagining it is more efficient still than their new, improved version.
I can imagine some workers zipping around on Segways to get special or large products. Maybe they just didn't think of it or haven't yet solved the coordination problems of having two different moving subsystems. Or perhaps they just assumed workers walking around is the most efficient solution.
Amazon.com didn't build these robots anyway, they just bought out the company that builds them (Kiva Systems). Maybe you should get to work building a company that makes smart, self-driving Segways, then Amazon.com can buy you...
I felt bad for the man who had no signature, until I met a man who had no comment.
Every time you turn on a light bulb, you take away a job from a human who could be standing next to you holding a lit candle. Traitor!
I felt bad for the man who had no signature, until I met a man who had no comment.
Way to report on crap that Discovery has had a special on for a year or so. We actually covered this much better in the comments section of that stupid UAV delivery article. Great investigative reporting, here...
Right after I'm finished telling it to the families of the post carriage drivers who lost jobs when the telegram took off, the lamp lighters who lost jobs when electric street lights were invented, and the stable hands who got laid off when the auto-mobile replaced the horse for most transportation.
It used to take the vast majority of the time and efforts of society just to find and collect enough food not to starve. It's incredibly naive and short sighted to think that the concept of farming that decreased the work in foraging and hunting vastly was somehow a retrograde step or fundamentally different from automating picking stuff up and putting it in boxes. The problem isn't that we find ways to do things without people it's that we're starting to run out of ideas about what people should do instead.
One of the weirdest arguments against legalising prostitution that I've ever heard was "No child grows up thinking 'I want to be a prostitute'"; as if somewhere out there are thousands of kids who want to be cleaners, warehouse drones, fast food cooks, temporary farm workers etc.
So it's season time again and Amazon does some serious commercial: first them drones, then the robots, etc. etc.
Not the GP AC.
These thoughts aren't necessaril organized. Here they go. Some aren't necessarily my ideas either.
We need some sort of negative income or guranteed income. For those having trouble finding work, for the lazy, for those who were recently laid off for reasons that may or may not be their fault, we need some sort safety net that is better than what we have.
Proposal: Negative income. Take federal poverty level and subject your federal AGI. Take half the difference, and give that out as a tax credit/handout/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. I'd do a $5k/person cap. All adjusted annually for inflation. So even though the poverty level for an individual is about $11.5k, the individual would get $5k, not $5.5k. Poverty level would be based on the family-size filing status, not how many people actually live with you. So it may end up being beneficial to file separately for some. This is all in addition to food stamps.
I'd also would propose, perhaps on a state-by-state basis, better labor laws.
1. Paid lunch breaks if your clockable hours (not counting lunch) exceed 7.5 hours in a day. (Small businesses exempt.)
2. 15 minute paid breaks every 4 clockable hours. 3 clockable hours for employees who are on their feet (or standing stool) for 6+ hours per day.
3. 40 minute lunch breaks if the worker is working in a warehouse environment. Defined as in a large building (75,000+ sq. ft.) with more than 50 employees average inside, regardless of the how many employers there may be. Other loopholes may need to be addressed. (Fully paid if they meet the 7.5 clockable hours.)
4. Preparations to work count as clockable hours, whether washing hands, putting on special clothing (at work), going through mandatory security checkpoints, etc.
Nixon tried to pass a negative income rate. I like the idea. The Earned Income Work Credit comes close.
As to your specifics, I would nix them. It is a one size fits all solution and ignores what is actually happening on the ground. There will be unforeseen consequences as firms try to dodge the rules. I personally would advocate union reform. Germany seems to be able to do the union thing much better then the US.
I'm curious as to why it's more efficient to bring the shelf to the picker than take the picker to the shelf. Those robots could just as easily be ferrying around the pickers.
I saw a similar system in operation in a UK fulfillment centre (for another company) around 6 years ago. The advantage was that one picker could pick from around 14,000 low volume items from one location.
Philosopher (n) - a wise person who is calm and rational; someone who lives a life of reason with equanimity
Funny timing to see this here, just watched Raff D'Andrea (co-founder of Kiva) give a talk on drones and discuss his future plans this morning.
I'd certainly suggest the improved labour laws you list if not simply because I don't see why we wouldn't want everyone to have such basics. There was an article on conditions in an Amazon warehouse in the UK recently and although it was hardly inspiring it certainly made me glad for the laws we have in place: > The right to parental leave (no firing because your wife had a kid and you need to be somewhere else). > Expecting employees to pick items from above shoulder height or the ground being clear grounds for compensation in the case of injury; a legal system that would help fun the legal action and rules such that false solutions (like ladders you aren't given enough time to use) would be no defence. > A company is not allowed to expect unpaid work as part of standard duties (travelling to a designated rest zone is work) and reasonable standards on length and quantity of breaks. > The legal requirement to provide 28 days holiday pa and to only restrict or mandate this if there is a clear business need
I'd never suggest the UK is perfect in this regard but whenever I see a story about an employer in the US treating employees like consumables to chew up and throw out it makes me feel a little better about the fact I have to pay a penny or two more to buy things packed by people treated like humans rather than animals.
Also a popular time for road maintenance, sometimes with pretty narrow detours across shoulders.
I just don't see how AI is going to deal with real traffic. Lets say traffic is diverted by ad-hoc traffic directors across the pedestrian pavement because workmen are blocking the road with heavy equipment. Is the AI going to be able to deal with that? I think until we have human level AI it will just throw it's hands up in the air and park the car far too often in real traffic, potentially in a spot where it blocks everything.
While I concede that the US equivalents may be weaker, there are laws similar to those you mention on the books here, with the exception of holiday pay (though there are general wage and hour restrictions, as well as specific ones for industries of particular concern).
Workers injured on the job have a clear right to compensation, and employers are required to fund insurance for exactly that purpose to avoid protracted legal battles and otherwise stubborn employers. The initial paperwork is fairly simple, beyond that there is an endless supply of attorneys waiting to assist you for a cut.
Expecting unpaid work (specifically in this sort of straight hourly wage job) is illegal, and there are standards for time and length of (potentially unpaid) meal and (paid) rest breaks.
Parental (combined with general medical) leave protections do exist, though there are restrictions there as well on how it applies.
I wouldn't say that either the US or the UK is perfect, and take no position on which has the better labor laws, though I would suspect that the UK's are more favorable to employees. That said, I also wouldn't consider workers humans on one side of the Atlantic and animals on the other based on either set of laws. The larger issue is the employer's attitude - if they're clearly just making the minimum effort to comply with labor laws, employees will and should feel like animals regardless of how great those laws are.
There is a (almost certainly apocryphal) story about an American economist who goes to an underdeveloped nation to try to help them improve their economy. The government guide shows him some civil engineering project out in a rural area (building a road or a bridge or a dam or something) with at least a hundred workers digging all over the place with shovels. The economist sees that there is a bulldozer sitting idle nearby, and assumes that it is broken and they don't have the technical skills to get it running. He tells the guide that they need to work with a technical school somewhere to get a steady supply of trained mechanics so that they don't waste resources like that. The guide assures him that the bulldozer works, but there is so much unemployment in the area that they can't afford to put all of these people out of work by using the bulldozer. So the economist recommends (facetiously) hiring hundreds more from the countryside, taking away their shovels, and giving them all spoons to dig with.
Getting things done and providing a safety net are two different (orthogonal, not opposing) things.
They really do bring the product shelves to the workers.
Whether or not they do is completely irrelevant to Frosty Piss' post. But then, I suppose that user who reply to posts without reading them are just as much a part of /. as editors who do not read the stories they post. ;)
Well, they only left out one
The problem isn't that we find ways to do things without people it's that we're starting to run out of ideas about what people should do instead.
That's the interesting point -- will we ever reach a threshold where we say, "great! another boring job has been replaced! that's one less person that needs to work." Or will that sense never change so long as profit is based off the ownership of the company?
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
The problem isn't that we find ways to do things without people it's that we're starting to run out of ideas about what people should do instead.
Not even that - the problem is that the economy is built around the idea that everyone has to work, and most people have to have a full time job. Mechanisation has long been done on the premise that it improves our lives by reducing the amount of time we spend working and therefore increasing the amount of time to do leisure activities - but that's at odds with the economy. If we're ever going to achieve that goal of decreased work time and increased leisure time then there will at some point have to be a big paradigm shift in how the economy works. Some of that may be reducing working hours (i.e. instead of 1 person working 40 hours a week, why not 4 people working 10 hours a week?) But ultimately its difficult to see how to achieve that whilst everything is priced for the full time worker.
One of the weirdest arguments against legalising prostitution that I've ever heard was "No child grows up thinking 'I want to be a prostitute'"; as if somewhere out there are thousands of kids who want to be cleaners, warehouse drones, fast food cooks, temporary farm workers etc.
Also I think the original premise is probably wrong anyway - I imagine there are prostitutes who enjoy what they do and aspired to do it. IMHO the problem with prostitution isn't the prostitution itself, it's the grey/black-market status of it which creates undesirable elements. Make it an above-board reputable job and a lot of that goes away.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Having a minimum income would probably be great once there was enough automation to supply the basics to all humans with negligible human effort.
vast majority of people will choose never to move a finger to do anything useful for strangers with 'basic income', which already exists (and it shouldn't) as welfare.
Maybe. I know a lot of creative people who would never just sit and watch TV, that's an anecdote to counter yours. Perhaps there are enough people who love to create, and these would be given incentives. The wage for simple tasks like cleaning would go up, as the supply of workers went down. Many would consider this to be fair. For a while people could do menial tasks and be compensated well for it, until it finally would be cheaper to design advanced robots.
'basic income' doesn't exist now as welfare. It's not meant to be a permanent solution, and people like I don't consider it ethical to use it as such. If I was given basic income I would probably work on open source projects and develop hardware for a while. In the end though it wouldn't be good enough as my passion is with experimental physics, and those experiemnts aren't cheap. Much of the work could be done remotely by volunteers though. Depending on the level of compensation (or donation, I suppose), I would probably prefer to work on basic income vs to go through the awful waste of time that is applying for jobs. As a counterpoint, I'm using my free time to write this long reply to a post on slashdot modded 0 instead of working on my Java application.
People shouldn't be just given free anything simply for the great feat of being born if this means any degree of collectivist intervention.
I don't agree. One shouldn't force people to donate a lot to others, as in communism. Freedom and property rights are important. However, when giving away the basics is almost free, then people indeed should be given it for free. There's no dogma to support that, but it seems fair, doesn't it?
As to work without profit - it is called a hobby. A business has to be profitable to be sustainable and to serve large number of customers.
Pointless semantics. Money is like an IOU. If you make a profit it shows that what you do positively benefit others more than negatively affecting others. This is also true for many "hobbies". This doesn't mean that economics is perfect at assigning value. Why do we then have bubbles, crises? Free software even. Is there any reason to believe that wage levels or capitalism in general are more fair and sane? Astronomy was a hobby when they discovered the heliocentric picture. The second point I don't even get, why must a business serve a large number of customers? The benefit is efficiency, but the ultimate in efficiency is automation, and if all is automated then nobody will have work, and people will basically die of starvation in the food store.
to be fair, I've seen quite a few pornos that start off with an interview of the girl, and there are several where she says "I always wanted to do porn" as a response to why did you get into porn :P
“Amazon is very secretive, when they start talking about something you better pay attention,”
A spokeswoman for Amazon declined to comment.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Just to add, look at all the junk brought to us by capitalism that we don't need. Junk mail, ads, toy fads for kids, etc. In the software industry we're adding layer on layer, buidling more complex systems, for what? It's like the developers are running around hamster wheels, just trying to make themselves something more to do. There is a great deal of improvement, granted, but there's also a huge flow of useless junk. If people had more freedom to choose what to do, instead of frantically chasing paychecks, there may be more improvement. Could also be like in open source, that nobody would bother with boring stuff like UI, documentation and translation, but maybe we're at a point **also in IT** where most basics are a given, and people can focus on the interesting stuff. Open source libraries are in some sense similar to a basic wage (or capital). I'll stop now...
I'd never suggest the UK is perfect in this regard but whenever I see a story about an employer in the US treating employees like consumables to chew up and throw out it makes me feel a little better about the fact I have to pay a penny or two more to buy things packed by people treated like humans rather than animals.
I'll reply here and not to the AC on principle.
I'll agree with his point that many similar laws are on the books in the US. The problem in the US is that these rules are not well-enforced.
In the US it is illegal to not pay people for time worked. In practice I know LOTS of people who were asked to record only their scheduled hours and not their actual hours worked, but they were expected to complete their duties before leaving regardless of schedule. That is, they wanted to compensate them like hourly workers and treat them like they are salaried employees. Ironically one person I know who was asked to do this was employed by a public school - a government institution.
In the US it is illegal to allow employees to work without proper safeguards. Companies usually make their internal policies match the law for obvious reasons. In practice many employers routinely fire the slowest workers and do not enforce safety policies, so employees who value their jobs often disregard safety policy. If something goes wrong the employer points at the policy and provided safety equipment that was not used. The employer usually doesn't point out all the people who they fired for using the equipment (er, for not getting as much done as those not using the equipment).
In the US there are exceptions to the labor laws for professional employees, which probably includes the majority of those on Slashdot who are employed in their intended field in the US. As professionals we are believed to have the power to fend for ourselves - if my employer wanted me to skip meals I could just take one of the many other jobs in my field that are open on the market. That is a mixed bag in terms of outcome.
As far as worker's compensation goes - I know a judge who handles these cases. At least in the state I live in maybe it is a viable source of income if your alternative is Walmart, but if I got hurt at work the last thing I'd want to do is tick off my employer so that I could get $500/month or whatever.
We're just overpopulated.
Well, they only out one word
Fixed that for ya
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
The whoosh sound is from the drone carrying the joke.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Anyway, I think the days of the truck driver might be numbered. There is no net loss for society though. It will be a net gain. If you want to compete in the new economy, you want to always be learning especially if you're not currently employed.
What would we do with a million unemployed truck drivers? I don't know if you actually know any truck drivers, but I do... and there aren't a lot of them who are PhD material if you catch my drift. "Learn more and get a better education and a better job" isn't an option.
Let me also point out that if there were better jobs that truck drivers *could* be doing, they'd be doing them already and we'd have a shortage of truck drivers. But we don't have a shortage of truck drivers.
It's already past the point in our modern society that we have to invent jobs for people to do. We invent crap people don't need, and advertise to sell it to people who don't want it.
The biggest reason we don't bring our military home is because it's *jobs* for millions of people who would otherwise be unemployed. That simple. It's the same reason we keep building and filling new prisons.
There simply aren't enough jobs for everyone, even when we work overtime imagining new ones. And now you'll lay off all the truck drivers. At some point, who's gonna be left with a job? How do you imagine a society to work when half the people are redundant? Sure, robotic trucks are cool, but you have to think about some consequences.
This isn't a "buggy whip" argument, either, so don't even try. That argument looks at a time in history when there actually were jobs for everyone and then some. Maybe it's more of an overpopulation discussion.
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
Most of the editors were around before Dice. You need to give them a break -- these guys aren't English majors, they're technologists. Save your annoyance for typos and stupidities in a large newspaper, where they have editors with degrees in English and literature rather than engineering and programming and math.
Although it would be nice if Dice actually did hire two or three English majors to proofread what the editors and firehose have selected for display.
Free Martian Whores!
PINK SLIP!
You missed one: ordering shelves in hot zones so less used shelves are farther away.
Setup a Indie Porn Studio would legal and simple!
What the hell are you talking about? Bytes don't weight anything!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Don't worry, we'll be hunting you for sport so you probably won't have to suffer long.
Hey let me ask you a silly question - since the USPS charges its customers for service, in what way are they socialist? Or were you just failing to make a point?
I know which one I pick! Mainly because I've worked for them. They're dysfunctional and only propped up by law. UPS would eat their lunch in a year if the first-class monopoly were lifted.
When the car/truck explosion began, cities were cesspools of disease. Things like zoning (controlling the types of buildings and their sizes) were illegal until the Supreme Court allowed it under the justification of tuberculosis control. Everything you think you know about modern city life was basically invented in the 20th century to help ameliorate the problems. Being able to spread out into suburbs was a tremendous source of wealth and productivity.
Europe had the same problems, except they had no money to fix them. Instead, their people flocked to the U.S. Many of the rest died in two brutal World Wars. That left 21st century Europe with 19th century technology, which ironically is better suited for the 21st century.
The point isn't to make truck drivers unemployed, it is to tell the next generation,"You won't find job security in truck driving in your generation." Truck drivers will likely still be needed for 15+ years from now even if everything rolls out perfect for the self driving car.
God spoke to me
According to some online book weight calculator I randomly tried, a 500 page, common-sized book may weigh 700 grams. So the shelf could hold 170 books before approaching the weight of a 120 kg operator. That's a lot of books for one shelf. In all likelihood the shelves hold fewer than 170 books.
--Jim (me)
We already effectively have some sort of that, it's just spread around three things: minimum wage laws, tax credits, and unemployment welfare. The end result is very convoluted and inconsistent, and we'd do much better setting the goal explicitly, and writing one simple law to achieve that.
I'm actually in favor of universal basic income guarantee. A fixed amount for everyone, set yearly to match the minimum living expenses (the bar for which would be defined by legislatures, preferably local to reflect differences in cost of living). Then ditch progressive taxation and all tax credits. End result is that for people who work and earn enough, this basically works as a tax credit, while for those in crappy jobs or unemployed, it's direct welfare. And we vastly simplify our tax code while we're at it.
Furthermore, we can make it so that the check only comes when you file a form requesting it (also on a yearly basis, probably along with tax return) - said form can then double as a national census, and will probably be more accurate because there's a strong incentive to participate.
Because implementing the robots that pick up items and put them elsewhere is more expensive then implementing robots that wheel around carts (specifically, it's more expensive than the minimum wage).
Fucking idiot. Go back to your pedophile anime.
how new...assuming it's 1982.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
actually it's:
"You won't find job security in driving in your generation."
I've actually seen automated driving systems for trucks, and they work beautifully.
I suspect once acceptance happen, truck drivers will strike and cause chaos, then they will get a check for the rest of their lives even if they aren't working. Much like what happened to the men that loaded boats before the container had been invented.
Still have million+ displaced buy a system that needs, at most, 1000 people to develop and roll out and maintain.
Soon burger places will be nearly completely automated, the there are million of more jobs lost.
And of course, we will get to a place where the creation of automated systems will be done by automated systems.
The robot apocalypse is under way. Not with bullets or plasma rifles, but with economics.
That can be a very good thing if people realize that we need to move to a communi^H^H^H^H^H^H robotism society.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
" will have a bit of fear for the big ol' trucks running under the control of T2000"
no they won't.
They should be afraid of the majority people operating them now.
"The key today is you need to be on your toes, always educating yourself.
towards...what? a million fewer jobs is a million fewer jobs. t's not like other avenues will open up becasue the tradition types of avenues that would open up are not down through automation.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
good luck getting a train to every store...
Hell good luck getting a train to every major city.
A lot of people actually like that job, so stop being a judgmental ass.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Pretty much the same here in London. I do not know where the GPP is from in the UK, but I do know that there is quite a few things he thinks happens in the workplace that typically doesn't. For example, in the years I have spent as a student, I have worked four minimum wage jobs with 12hr+ shifts standing up with no breaks. Two of those were blatantly in violation of saftey rules (first was repackaging clothing where fabric dust would clog up your lungs, but you would get told off for wearing any kind of facemask due to it giving the buyers a bad impression, second was a Chinese restaurant whichs back room was host to all kinds of dogy things including a bath (in which we kept cut potato chips) around 3 inches directly below both an open unprotected plug socket and a leaky cowboy-built garden style tap, and a fryer that's safety valve was missing and left the operator with only aluminum foil and an elastic bands between him and 300 degree steam jets)
Because then you would start having to do major layoffs and the Gov't would step in to stem the "Robots are taking our jobs" panic.
technology was supposed to free people up to not have to work.... except that the profits from such advances don't trickle down to the people, but instead stay within the company
You are so right! Nobody owns cars, or televisions, or lives in centrally-heated residences. Computers have not become more affordable for people. Nobody has running water, or access to antibiotics. The internet has not trickled down to anyone. Modern transportation systems have not been built out to any extent. If only the profits from technology would trickle down, just a little bit, we might be able to advance from sending letters written on papyrus to some more rapid means of communication. In the 18th century, the number of people with health insurance was zero; that is still true today, so it's downright strange that we're even familiar with the concept.
Damn those companies for not providing these products and services to anyone! The profits that they don't earn from providing these products and services are so misused.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Some people, when fortunate enough to gain a lot of leisure time, do spend that time on self-education, art, or other constructive pursuits. Others spend it on destructive pursuits. What's needed is a way to inculcate an ethos of desiring the constructive pursuits and reviling the destructive pursuits.
But don't blame technology. By all realistic accounts, life before technology was even more brutish than it is now.
I suppose if you show a propensity to misuse your leisure time, you should get less of it. But instead, you get more. (Time is an abundant resource for the incarcerated.)
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
"no human jobs are being taken" is complete, utter BS.
You're correct, of course, but but more importantly: every new technology destroys jobs in one field, while creating even more jobs in other fields, for a net gain of jobs. Far more people have jobs today than had jobs 200 years ago -- and it's not a case of "if you have lots of babies, the jobs for them will magically appear;" it's a case of the additional jobs having been made possible by new tech.
To pessimistically focus on the lost jobs, while ignoring the created jobs which are greater in quantity and quality, creates the anti-technology mindset that infects the world's Luddites.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
FTFY: Everywhere is where everyone wins with technology.
[Explanation: every new technology destroys jobs in one field, while creating even more jobs in other fields, for a net gain of jobs. Far more people have jobs today than had jobs 200 years ago -- and it's not a case of "if you have lots of babies, the jobs for them will magically appear;" it's a case of the additional jobs having been made possible by new tech.
To pessimistically focus on the lost jobs, while ignoring the created jobs which are greater in quantity and quality, creates the anti-technology mindset that infects the world's Luddites.]
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
That article is infected with an over-the-top victim mentality right from its very title. If Mac were truly a "slave," he would still be in that job; slaves are not free to quit their jobs. Everyone who accepts a job in a warehouse does so because it's the best job offer they received. Slaves, on the other hand, continue to be slaves because the alternative is to be hunted down as a runaway slave.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
The Shires (not shire ;) ). I certainly can't comment for every company in the UK and clearly there are some severe examples of abuse going on. I've worked for 3 medium to large businesses in the manufacturing sector and when it comes to safe working it is virtually always the business trying to force people to follow policies they don't want to (and not because of performance measures that aren't related to it). I've been involved in two business units trying to get dust masks used and I kid you not that in the first the push-back was because the operatives liked having a chat while they worked.
Every country will have people breaking the law. The measure is how often that happens, how actively the country is checking for it and how severe the punishment is when caught; the UK today seems to have a pretty pro-worker balance in this regard. Just compare the work conditions between Amazon US and UK.
I would do small steps first.
Let's assume no more than 20% are in poverty. Let's say 60 million at most.
Take federal poverty level minus federal AGI.
Really rough numbers...
1 person: $11.5k - AGI
2 people: $20k - AGI
6 people: $30k - AGI
Divide those figures by 2 for the amount to give. $5k cap per person. So regardless, the most this program will cost is $300 billion, but I don't think 60 million are without income. (Paid for by higher taxes and DoD cuts.)
This idea isn't a replacement for the Earned Income Credit and other things. That would be too big of an overhaul.
However, I would concede to a universal basic income program for citizens (and perhaps legal residents). That, however, would require modifying the tax code heavily to pay for it. Although, if the rich have most of the income in this country, we do have a problem.
By the way, would you favor a law that would subject corporations to income tax when they move overseas? If we Americans can't move overseas to avoid income tax, why can corporations, who are "people", able to do so? Or am I missing something here? I say if a corporation has moved overseas, they should be subject to American income tax for 10 years since they were last in the U.S. Foreign taxes paid would be deducted. So if it's 35% in America, and 10% in country X, then they'd pay 25%. If they are paying more than 35%, no tax.
I'm pretty sure you haven't read the article. I can tell because you missed the fact that Mac's a she.