Slashdot Mirror
Armies of Helper Robots Keep Amazon's Warehouses Running Smoothly
jones_supa writes Amazon is continuing to maintain its vision of an automatic warehouse. Since acquiring robot-maker Kiva, a Massachusetts company, for $775 million in cash in 2012, the e-commerce retailer has been increasingly implementing automation at its gargantuan fulfillment centers. This holiday season, Amazon's little helper is an orange, 320-pound robot. The 15,000 robots are part of the company's high-tech effort to serve customers faster. By lifting shelves of Amazon products off the ground and speedily delivering them to employee stations, the robots dramatically reduce the manual labor to locate and carry items. The Kiva robots, which resemble overgrown Roombas, are capable of lifting as much as 750 pounds and glide across Amazon's warehouse floors by following rows of sensors. Because Kiva-equipped facilities eliminate the need for wide aisles for humans to walk down, eighth-generation centers can also hold 50% more inventory than older warehouses. As Amazon is doing well, the company says that increase of automation hasn't yet led to staff reduction.
as Amazon grows, no need for more.
Someone at Amazon should engage in deep thought. With robots doing most of the work, who is going to have jobs that give them the money to buy from Amazon?
And this is coming on top of a long list of Obama administration schemes (i.e. Obamacare and raising the minimum wage) that are making automation more appealing not just to businesses but, in the long run, even to government bureaucracies.
A 3:35 video on youtube of their general operation, for those interested https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
This is old news, seen it on discovery a while back, the local news a while back. OK, yay, they use robots on the floor, I was duped into clicking on this because I thought they were using some newer technology.
Eventually robots will staff the entire factory. Problem solved, right?
I could've sworn I've seen videos of big warehouses that are mainly automated, with footage that looked pretty '80s at the latest. And looking around at what's been written about the topic, people as far back as the '70s were already writing algorithms to optimize movement of the robots up and down the warehouse aisles. Maybe that was just in Japan?
I don't think Amazon is really ahead of the curve here either way, just implementing what's pretty standard warehouse technology by now.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
>As Amazon is doing well, the company says that increase of automation hasn't YET led to staff reduction.
At least they are honest about it and are even implying that it will eventually lead to a staff reduction. Not to commend them for some of their horrible treatment of their workers.
But as a former Walmart employee, this is still a step up as during the single year I worked with them, by the time I had left, I watched them give a single guy the jobs of what was 3 other guys when I had started and it was getting to the point, I was even hearing the Managers complaining about how they can't get that stuff done reliably like that.
Or one of their advertisements I saw working in electronics on the TVs. Talked about buying products made in American and their example was a Cooler that had 4 parts to the whole thing with the writing at the bottom saying it was assembled in american for foreign parts. Betting the person who assembled it was a Walmart stocker making 25 cents over minimum wage too.
Kinda sad when this comment here makes them better than Walmart just for their shear honesty.
Only when you no longer need to work to have a decent living for yourself and a family. Till then, we are fucked.
Is in the business of serving a bit of text and some pictures, but won't if it doesn't like your browser. Because "user experience". Oh yes, the browser wars are back.
Automation reduces the cost of labor to zero and the cost of product to the cost of raw materials.
With robots doing most of the work, who is going to have jobs that give them the money to buy from Amazon?
That's a very stupid question. Amazon has something around 110,000 employees. Amazon had revenues over the last twelve months of roughly $75 Billion. For 110,000 employees to spend $75,000,000,000 at Amazon they would have to spend $681,818 PER EMPLOYEE which I'm pretty sure is more than most Amazon employees make by more than just a wee bit. Any amount Amazon employees could possibly spend at Amazon would be a rounding error.
And this is coming on top of a long list of Obama administration schemes (i.e. Obamacare and raising the minimum wage) that are making automation more appealing not just to businesses but, in the long run, even to government bureaucracies.
Righhhht. Everything is Obama's fault. [/eyeroll] Never mind the fact that the US has among the highest per-capita incomes in the world. If you want more labor-intensive (as opposed to capital-intensive) manufacturing and other jobs to come to the US the ONLY way that will happen is to reduce wages to be more competitive with the rest of the world. It has NOTHING to do with anything the Obama administration or Congress is doing and in fact there is NOTHING the President or Congress could do to change it. Simple economics 101 explains everything. High wages = high labor costs = increased automation.
If you want high wages you are necessarily going to make automation more attractive economically. You CANNOT have one without the other.
What you read on these pages likely is not factual. That means what you read on these pages you should not consider using. Got me?
That's only a problem about distributing the fruits of robot labour fairly. Eventually we are going to need to limit population growth if it doesn't happen naturally. That's about 2.2 childs per family. The current owners of robots will just have to yield eventually and let the robots feed everyone "for free". So everyone will be guaranteed some basic level of housing, clothing, warmnt, and food. On top of that you could earn extra by, say, tending the robots and creating new, better robots, and maintaining the robots.
Which solves the issue of people needing to work to buy that product how?
As stated before, this is an issue till people no longer need to work to have a decent living and a family.
Also, products prices aren't typically based on how much it costs to make except as a lowest threshold of profitability, the sale price is decided by what people are willing to pay for the product.
Automation is a fantastic thing, so long as the benefits of it is spread to all which would require required work hours and minimum wage be adjusted so all could work and live. But that doesn't happen and when the benefits are horded mainly by the top at the expense of others, it greatly diminishes the benefits of these advances and many times makes it where the overall impact of that advance is actually net NEGATIVE till they are forced to do otherwise.
The IBM 3850 mass storage system, announced in 1974, held up to 472G on strips of magnetic tape. The 3850 was a rectangular box large enough walk into, with the strips stored along its interior walls in a honeycomb arrangement of slots. A pair of robotic pickers took turns running along a set of rails where they would fetch a tape strip, carry it to a device that wrapped it around a drum for read/write access, and later return it to its slot. You could watch it operating through a window in the box (IBM loved to show off their stuff).
My point is that none of this is new. It is neither interesting nor innovative.
Agreed, but till the fruits of robot labor are distributed as such, the ones at the bottom of the barrel will still be un or under employed and still fucked.
And, Correct me if I am wrong, but in the first world countries, if you factor out the number of immigrants coming into the nation, the overall population would be in decline.
So I believe that our population control might not be as much of an issue if the rest of the world was brought up to current first world standards except in areas where large families are cultural.
Why didn't you google it you lazy ****
My week as an Amazon insider | Technology | The Guardian
I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave | Mother Jones
'Being homeless is better than working for Amazon' | Money ...
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Automation reduces the cost of labor to zero and the cost of product to the cost of raw materials.
Automation does not and never did reduce the cost of direct labor to zero, nor does it reduce the cost of any product to the cost of raw materials even in a state of the art factory. First off there is always a substantial amount of direct labor in any company, even a highly automated one and the amount is non-trivial. Second there is the important matter of overhead (Sales, Engineering, Marketing, R&D, capital equipment, utilities, rent, property, maintenance, management, etc) which you seem to be completely overlooking. Automation can minimize labor costs but it cannot eliminate them because it is not economical to automate all jobs even when it is technologically possible to do so.
Disclosure: I'm an industrial engineer and a certified cost accountant. I do this sort of stuff for a living.
Karl Marx, please pick up the RED courtesy phone. Yes, automation will require a much larger *share the wealth* attitude amongst the public. We definitely do need to base pricing on human cost of production to make it work.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
And yet they still lost money and have been for at least the last 2 years (possibly 3 once this years numbers come out).
Because they are reinvesting in the business and experimenting with new businesses. Unless you have a very short term Wall Street-esqe investment horizon that isn't really a big deal. Amazon could be substantially profitable tomorrow if they chose to be.
My point is that none of this is new. It is neither interesting nor innovative.
That's pretty much the same statement as saying nothing interesting or innovative has happened in IT in the last 40 years. Just because someone did a crude version of something 40 years ago doesn't mean there has been no advancement or innovation in the mean time.
With full automation, the planet can sustain many times the population we have now. Our only impediment is bad management that emerges from any one or more of the *seven deadly sins*.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Which solves the issue of people needing to work to buy that product how?
By lowering prices. Amazon has consistently used cost savings to lower prices and gain market share. As people spend less on these goods, they will spend more on other goods and services, generating jobs for those providing them.
If you seriously believe that rising productivity causes poverty, then you need to explain the last few centuries of economic progress, where 90% of jobs were eliminated by the mechanization of agriculture, and millions more by the automation of manufacturing. Throughout this process employment, incomes, and living standards when up.
"If you seriously believe that rising productivity causes poverty, then you need to explain the last few centuries of economic progress"
If you seriously believe that unbound natality depletes world's natural resources, then you need to explain the last few centuries of economic progress.
See the parallelism?
> Someone at John Deere should engage in deep thought. With machines doing most of the work, who is going to have jobs that give them the money to buy from John Deere?
ftfy. People have been worrying about that for a couple hundred years and what always happens is that a guy with a machine is more productive than a guy without a machine. His pay is about 25% of the revenue matched to his labor, so as long term productivity rises, wages rise to match. In the short term there is some disruption as the guy who used to operate a shovel learns to operate a backhoe, scribes learn to operate a printing press, etc. In the long term, the guy makes more money using a backhoe than he did using a shovel, because he gets more done using the machine.
I recently had to go back to Amazon for the first time in about 6 years to get a motherboard that was out of stock everywhere and too expensive on Ebay. I couldn't determine who the seller actually was. They just claimed it was MSI themselves, which is obviously bullshit. I couldn't figure out where it was shipping from. I didn't get a shipping quote until the final page so I had no idea what the total was going to be until I got almost done checking out. They screamed "Prime" at me like a thousand times and send a dozen followup e-mails. Their website was so busy it made my head hurt and there was stuff flying around and popping up and moving around so much, it was like a warzone.
So in other words, nothing changed since the last time I used it. Or since 10 years ago for that matter.
AND THEY'RE WORRIED ABOUT PEOPLE NOT PICKING UP BOXES AND SHIT FAST ENOUGH?! Hire a robot to fix your awful pile of crap website, Amazon!
"Yet." Whether the choice of jones_supa, samzenpus, the LA Times, or Amazon, that word is likely a most accurate descriptor.
The only thing stopping that is that it's still too expensive to build machines to do certain jobs. But that won't last forever.
That isn't likely to change in the lifetime of anyone reading this. You actually even explained why below. To eliminate all need for human direct labor you would have to invent a machine that is as flexible as a human and costs less per unit. In other words a human level AI on the cheap. That simply isn't likely to happen anytime soon. (and don't give me any BS about the so called singularity or other paranoid hypothetical dystopian futures) Any scenario where we get human level AI in a robot body for less money than a human would cost is simply science fiction for the foreseeable future.
Eventually, with the progress of technology, it will become very economical to replace workers with machines. Some jobs may require a robot that requires 20 years to pay itself off, that probably isn't worth it for a lot of businesses.
That is exactly why your hypothesis is wrong. The return on investment is simply too long for many projects to make certain types of automation economically feasible without the invention of robots with human level AI at absurdly cheap prices. To make automation practical you have to have large enough volume of product (measured in dollars) to achieve an economic return within the lifetime of the project. There are countless manufacturing projects where the lifetime and/or dollar value of the project is too short to justify complete automation and this will not change any time soon. The labor content of manufactured goods will minimize to a limit function but the need for human labor will not go to zero without invoking science fiction level advances in technology. If you need a model to look at check out agriculture. A lot of automation has gone into agribusiness but the equipment is VERY expensive (and not getting cheaper) and has not come even close to replacing the need for human labor and won't anytime soon either.
The notion that robots will replace all human workers in manufacturing is a paranoid delusion from people who aren't actually involved in manufacturing. I run a manufacturing company. I deal with this daily.
A tape library arranged in a straight line with one or two picker robots does not, in any way, even resemble the issues involved with an army of independent transport robots picking things from an entire warehouse. Other than the word "robot", the two really don't have anything to do with each other.
A tape library requires lighting speed, and a very high degree of precision. The issues with this system revolve around route planning, collision avoidance, queuing speed, and battery longevity.
But while you are talking about tape libraries: The IBM 3495 library was a conventional tape library for cartridges. However, development problems with the new robotics assembly led to IBM using a general-purpose welding robot, of the sort you'd see on an automobile assembly line. This was, needless to say, an utterly absurd application of such a robot; using a robot with about 8 degrees of motion in a task requiring only 3.
Hilarious true story. During product test, a bug in the x-axis software led to one of the robots driving right through the end of the frame at top speed, falling over, and crashing through the raised tile. This led to a requirement for a dedicated cabinet on each end of the chain having nothing but large hydraulic/spring bumpers of the sort you might see at the bottom of an elevator shaft to keep mutinous robots from trying to crush their human masters.
Plenty of companies (including manufacturers) have Amazon storefronts. Some of them use Amazon for fulfillment, some just use Amazon as a storefront. I don't see why MSI can't.
While Amazon's site for computer parts isn't nearly as good as NewEgg's (Amazon's spec search capability is pitiful), I've never had any difficulty telling who the seller for a particular product is. In your case, if it said "Sold By: MSI", you can be pretty sure that's who it was.
As far as not getting a shipping quote until checkout? That's pretty normal for lots of web stores. If you are going to charge for shipping at all, per-item shipping is certainly a choice, but plenty of web retailers do it differently. They can go by actual shipping cost, a rate based on total order size, etc. In Amazon's case, if the item is fulfilled by Amazon, you either go with the free shipping (or prime), or you pay according to their published shipping rate tables. If it's not fulfilled by Amazon, they just do whatever the retailer tells them to.
Personally, I find NewEgg's shipping to be the most confusing: depending on the individual item, shipping is either free (and slow), free (and less slow), per-item, or total-weight. And it's never clear which shipping rates are going to apply if your order contains items in multiple shipping categories.
Simple X-Y robots (that have been around for years) that pick regularly-shaped items off of shelves (usually decent-sized boxes) and drop them onto conveyors are pretty standard, and not that difficult. Picking up objects of an infinite variety of shapes and sizes, many of which are quite small, is something it's not possible for robots (at least not reasonably priced ones) to reliably do at this time.
This system (which brings the shelves to the workers, as workers are MUCH better at plucking small, irregularly-shaped items out of boxes) has fascinating challenges all of it's own, mainly related to traffic control, safety, and where to put the shelves after you are done. (A fixed location is very inefficient, but neither do you want to stick the shelf in the first available space.)
We had a general purpose 'robot arm' (fixed to the floor but otherwise fully flexible - probably the sort of thing they had paint spraying cars at the time) loading our IBM mainframe tape drives a few years back. On several occasions it 'got frustrated' and shoved a cartridge through the casing of a tape drive. It also pinned an operator against the glass screen once (he shouldn't have been in the enclosure while it was active), luckily he was not injured.
If some VIP came to visit the data centre the robot arm was always the highlight of the tour.
Rambling on, we also used to have 'radio tokens' to open the two sets of motorized doors that led to the machine room 'hands free' - 30 years ago this seemed like the coolest thing ever to me - like the relevant bit in the opening titles of 'The Prisoner'.
Nowadays the data centres are on the other side of the country and I don't have the need or clearance to access them...but I'm still working on some of the same mainframes (logicially, not the physical hardware of course, though we've still got two of the original FEPs, used for crtical purposes, with no fallback if they both expire - no support, no part available).
Rambling over...
AMZN is not losing money because they are reinvesting back into their operations. That is not how accounting works.
I'm a certified accountant so I'm kind of giggling over you telling me "how accounting works".
That is not how accounting works. "Earnings" is a balance sheet operation
I presume you are talking about Retained Earnings which is on the balance sheet. Retained Earnings != Earnings. Earnings = Profit and that comes from the Income Statement, not the balance sheet.
"Investment" is a balance sheet operation
Investment is FAR more complicated than simply transferring items around a balance sheet and it touches the Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Statement of Cash Flows.
Think about this way – If I invest $100m of profits in US Treasury Notes, how does that affect my earnings?
It depends on why you are investing the profits into those Treasury notes and whether you are investing in them as a profit making venture or merely as a place to park cash intended for other uses. The accounting is substantially different depending on the purpose of the investment. Furthermore the effect on earnings can be substantial in future accounting periods which I should think would be obvious.
If I invest $100m in property, plant, and equipment, how does that affect my profits?
The effect on profit depends on the return on the investment though in the immediate period the effect is either neutral or negative most likely. You're making the mistake of only considering the current accounting period. If you buy a building and capitalize the expense it has some effect on the current accounting period but the real effect on profit is depends on what you can do with that asset. It may reduce future profits or enhance them. Without more information no one can say more.
What if I paid out a dividend?
Then you are returning earnings to the shareholders rather than reinvesting them in the company or other assets. Basically a dividend is an admission by the company that the expected return from available investment opportunities is low. The company is foregoing future opportunities so the long term effect on earnings to the company is either neutral or negative.
It does not – in all cases one's profit is 100m.
Not correct and even if it were you aren't considering the net present value of that $100m.
The issue is that AMZN is trading profit margin for market share. Expanding quickly today to reap the profits of tomorrow – in theory.
Which is another way of saying they are investing in the business. Amazon is introducing products (tablets, phones, etc), investing in infrastructure (warehouses, IT) and similar. They have a long term perspective and aren't worrying about quarterly results. Perhaps this will burn them in the end but my thesis that they are investing in the business remains intact.
I'm not going to pretend that I know what technology will bring in the next 50, but it would seem to me that quite a few jobs are going to disappear, and I don't really see a lot of low qualification jobs opening up.
That's because you don't live in the right place. There are LOTS of unskilled labor jobs available in parts of the world other than the US and EU. Go visit China for a while and tell me there are no jobs for low qualification workers. Go out to a farm and tell me there are no jobs for low qualification workers.
Yes a lot of jobs we currently have will disappear and others we cannot even conceive of yet will appear. It's easier to visualize the former since we know what those are. Could you have anticipated the job of Web Developer 50 years ago? Probably not - at least not without invoking science fiction. Same thing will happen 50 years from now most likely. We have a hard time guessing about things that haven't been invented yet.
Guys, I saw this on "60 minutes" over a year ago. Seriously. Seriously. Give up Slashdot and let someone who actually gives a fuck run it instead. Seriously. How much do you want to sell it for? I'm ready to change careers and I could run this site blindfolded better than you guys. Please. Sell. You don't know what you're doing and you're one step away from losing the entire audience.
Please sell.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Not quite. One has to add the cost of capital, depreciation of assets, insurance and other operating expenses to the product price also. For example, these robots are not "free" and themselves require raw materials to build so their initial and operating costs must be amortized over all the stuff they pick. Similarly, the warehouses don't just spring spontaneously from the ground when Bezos says "let there be a warehouse".
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
ppl like Bezo and Musk, rather than the trash like Welch and Whitman.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Running across concrete all day in minimally air conditioned buildings and under the uncaring eye of the computer clock for not much more than minimum wage. I read several exposee articles in the past few years about this. Unons and liberal governments were about to crack down on difficult considitons. And now they may not need to. Some things are better left to machines.
Many will slide to a lower rung in the employment ladder. Some will ascend to the next rung up. For those jobs, wages will decrease.
We are already seeing this with pseudo-jobs like Uber and taskrabbit.
My mother has frequently said plumbers will always make a good living. When unskilled jobs disappear due to automation, many of those workers will be motivated to study a trade. The surge of new workers in the industry will reduce the 'good living' that plumbers make.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Usually doesn't, at first. It increases productivity by making it possible to use the current workers more efficiently. Slowly the unskilled workers who move boxes from point A to point B get replaced by slightly skilled workers who supervise the robots.
Thank God we don't allow the underclass to buy firearms here in the USA, otherwise we'd have to worry about a revolution.
Best Slashdot Co
With robotics, solar power, and vertical farming, one playing off the other, we could easily get the population to 70-80 Billion.
china has child limits
That hasn't been consistent. After the Luddites there was 70 years of chronic unemployment which society met by executing people who stole a loaf of bread. Then it became necessary for the whole family to work to make ends meet, your kid is now 5 years old? Better put the kid to work. Then as the need for workers fell due to automation, things like compulsory education were introduced to cut down the labour force, then expanded to even more education needed for most jobs until today where kids are expected to stay in school until almost 30 years old. Women were also removed from the work force about the same time with the idea of the stay at home mom. This wasn't so bad as wages did go up for a while due to the efforts of unions and the threat of socialist revolution. Eventually the population was convinced that socialist meant bad and wages stopped going up, women returned to the workforce so the family didn't fall too far behind and whole classes of people were created that were unemployable (felon) to keep the unemployment numbers looking good.
Now we live in a time where the middle class is shrinking, most people have massive debt while production is at an all time high. Meanwhile there are businesses such as Amazon who cater to the more well off (need good internet and a credit card to take advantage of those low prices) which push up the costs of other businesses due to less economics of scale.
Today the people who are doing well are doing very well while the majority are scraping by.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The limitation is energy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I hear that Amazon is now hiring people to maintain warehouse robots, program them, and even develop new ones. Historically, using a backhoe required a little different training than using a shovel. Using a laser CNC machine required different training than using a chisel. The new job made a bit more money, so the middle class now has two cars and a giant HD TV. Middle class houses have doubled in size compared to 50 years ago, when typists had to completely retype a page from scratch when they made an error.
I don't think there's any evidence of that changing. All evidence I've seen says we'll be using more computers to be more productive in more jobs, so cops, fireandfighters, and school teachers need to know how to copy and paste. Teachers don't need to spend weekends in the library with a pen and paper developing lesson plans - they can share lesson plans with peers around the country with a couple of clicks. Different training to get more done in less time.
Those who choose to keep training constantly can specialize in implementing new technology and by doing that my wife
and I have cut our work week in half - she stays home with the kid while I write software. I don't see any reason that would change. I just have to keep my training up to date, exactly like the elevator-operator turned hvac tech of 50 years ago.
Actually, tax rates could be adjusted to bring highly skilled jobs back.
You could reduce the tax rates to zero and it would have at most a marginal impact. The biggest driver by far is wages and benefits. The tax burden on companies is trivial by comparison. When you are talking $1/hour labor in China versus $15/hour labor in the US, it doesn't matter how much tax the US charges if the companies are competing directly. The rate could be zero and most of the business would still move to china if the labor content is high enough. Sure it would affect a few companies right on the fence but that doesn't apply to most of them.
The simple fact is that US labor rates are MUCH higher than in many other parts of the world and you should expect the osmotic gradient of high labor content jobs to flow to where labor costs are lowest. If labor rates in China rise substantially (and they have been) you will see the business move back across the Pacific or elsewhere. Anything the President of Congress does will be a very tiny impact by comparison.
>Today the people who are doing well are doing very well while the majority are scraping by.
whats with all the communists posting on slashdot lately? has bob avakian been touring college campuses?
Karl Marx, please pick up the RED courtesy phone. Yes, automation will require a much larger *share the wealth* attitude amongst the public. We definitely do need to base pricing on human cost of production to make it work.
... until SkyNet decides it doesn't want to "share the wealth" anymore...
Some people believe in community and some believe in taking advantage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I'm sick of hearing about Amazon's "amazing" robots. The story is everywhere. I remember touring the IBM plant in Rochester, MN, back in 1989 (this is the place where the AS400s were built). There were robots everywhere throughout the factory running all over the place. Congratulations Amazon, welcome to 1989!
Proverbs 21:19
Well, as Ted Kennedy once said, *We'll drive off that bridge when we get to it*
I think the numbers says we're good for maybe 150-200 years, only with the best tech yet to come, solar, nuke, geothermal, all of it, at the present growth rate, which is very unlikely.. especially considering that we are still petro-burning cavemen... Maybe the wall is *closer than it appears*...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”