More Warehouse Robots Coming To Market As Softbank Invests $20M In Fetch

Hallie Siegel writes: Japanese Softbank just injected $20M in funding to Fetch Robotics, a Silicon Valley company that is developing robotic solutions for warehouse and logistics. This is one of the first warehouse systems that is coming to market since Kiva. Softbank is also invested in Aldebaran Robotics, producing the Pepper robot — a social humanoid robot that is scheduled to make its debut in Nestle stores later this year as a sales and marketing assistant.

Comments

Japanese Paradox

[monkeyxpress]

Having recently visiting Japan I find these unskilled human replacement robots quite intriguing. Despite the fact that Japan has terrible demographics resulting in a growing shortage of workers, they have a huge number people doing quite pointless jobs such as the ubiquitous greeter in almost every store, teams of traffic controllers outside construction sites, and more staff at a regional train station than you would find at Oxford Circus during rush hour.

I discussed this with a Japanese person who commented that there is a shortage of work for unskilled workers, so they basically make up these jobs so that everyone can be employed. The real worker shortage, as everywhere in the world, is among the skilled and highly skilled and even Japan cannot create enough of these workers through its education system.

That is ultimately the problem I have with how these robots fit into our existing economic system. They are not replacing the skilled jobs that we are desperately short of (which is pushing skilled salaries up) and are simply competing with people who really can't do much else (which will push their salaries down to the marginal cost of a robot - which will be very bad for them once robots can make robots). Now in Japan they have the sort of weird social structure to support made up jobs rather than put people out on the street, but sadly I don't think the same will apply to western workers.

For us tech workers things will be very good, but having come from a working class background it really troubles me what is going on. The reality is that robotics should mean more prosperity for everyone, but if we stuff it up we will likely just end up with the same class based society that strangled growth in the world for centuries before the oppressed workers of the world ran away to the USA. Unfortunately we've run out of new continents to escape to so we'll have to fix this one among ourselves. I hope tech people start thinking about this stuff. We sadly have a long heritage of creating amazing stuff and then letting a bunch of narcissist use what we've done to feed their own greed. But hey, as long as we have a foosball table in the office right?

Re:Japanese Paradox

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The effect on high-skill jobs(tech and others) will presumably also depend fairly heavily on the indirect effects of the displacements elsewhere in the labor market; as well as any direct automation of former jobs.

Even if, for simplicity, we assume zero replacement of programmers and EEs and such by robots and expert systems, we still have the question of 'what will all the incrementally less skilled workers(and those who would have trained to become their successors) do because robots threaten their jobs?'

When nobody needs screwdriver monkeys, because all consumer hardware is assembled by robots and thrown away when broken; and all enterprise hardware is assembled by robots, installed in the datacenter by robots, and thrown away when broken; the screwdriver monkeys will be forced to either leave the market or break into doing software support, low level desktop admin, or the like. If 'cloud' and/or well sandboxed devices that can be wiped if anything unexpected happens and re-provisioned just by bumping them against an employee's RFID badge kill off the low end admins and the support people, they'll be forced to either leave or start knocking higher up the food chain. And so on, all the way up.

Obviously, some people are where they are because they've already hit the limits of their competence or the education they are in a position to accrue. What will happen to them is...unclear...but they won't be moving up. Anyone who was merely unambitious, or otherwise has a shot at moving up will take it; because that's now their only option. This will obviously have an effect on those already further up the chain. Unless they are, in fact, just that amazing; their wages and/or working conditions are going to reflect the number of hungry candidates coming from below(if any advances come along that happen to make their jobs somewhat easier; but not automate them, this effect will be even more pronounced).

Re:Japanese Paradox

[drinkypoo]

I discussed this with a Japanese person who commented that there is a shortage of work for unskilled workers, so they basically make up these jobs so that everyone can be employed.

Wow, it's almost like the Japanese understand that if people don't have money to buy stuff, economies don't function. Too bad our fearless leaders here in the USA either don't get it or don't care