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Building Amazon a Better Warehouse Robot
Nerval's Lobster writes: Amazon relies quite a bit on human labor, most notably in its warehouses. The company wants to change that via machine learning and robotics, which is why earlier this year it invited 30 teams to a "Picking Contest." In order to win the contest, a team needed to build a robot that can outpace other robots in detecting and identifying an object on a shelf, gripping said object without breaking it, and delivering it into a waiting receptacle. Team RBO, composed of researchers from the Technical University of Berlin, won last month's competition by a healthy margin. Their winning design combined a WAM arm (complete with a suction cup for lifting objects) and an XR4000 mobile base into a single unit capable of picking up 12 objects in 20 minutes—not exactly blinding speed, but enough to demonstrate significant promise. If Amazon's contest demonstrated anything, it's that it could be quite a long time before robots are capable of identifying and sorting through objects at speeds even remotely approaching human (and thus taking over those jobs). Chances seem good that Amazon will ask future teams to build machines that are even smarter and faster.
I agree with you, but not completely. For contrast, the Darpa grand challenge led to Google's self-driving car, which is poised to put 3 million truck drivers out of work.
You didn't reply to me, but I'll give it a shot...
Go back 115 years ago and look at how many jobs Horses had in the year 1900. They did everything from move people to haul stuff to ride into war. All those jobs sucked for horses.
Imagine the horses looked at cars and thought, "well, those cars might replace some of our jobs, but as we move into the city, there will be lots of people, so there will be plenty of new things for us to do.
As a human looking back past the year 2000, you know this is absurd, there are few jobs today that a horse can do that pays for its care and feed.
Horses didn't become unemployed because they became fat and lazy, they became unemployable. The horse population peaked around 100 years ago and it has been nothing but downhill since.
It won't happen next year, or even 5 years from now... but at some point... all those drivers, from taxis to trucks, will become unemployable through no fault of their own. They simply will not be able to compete with the cost of a robot.