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How Amazon's Robots Move Everything Around
dkatana writes: Amazon's drones have a long way to become reality, but the real magic of the Internet of Things (IoT) is already happening at Amazon's vast fulfillment warehouses in the US. Amazon runs a fleet of thousands of small robots moving storage pods around so orders can be fulfilled in record time. They are so efficient that they can move an entire warehouse and have ready to operate again during the weekend. All together the small robots have traveled over 93 million miles — almost the distance from Earth to the Sun.
In the future, there will be robots.
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
The irony to this is that a lot of low skilled workers are currently demanding more money for their current jobs. Raises to the min wage of $15/hr and so on.
http://www.businessinsider.com...
The company's robot can "slice toppings like tomatoes and pickles immediately before it places the slice onto your burger, giving you the freshest burger possible." The robot is "more consistent, more sanitary, and can produce ~360 hamburgers per hour." That's one burger every 10 seconds.
One of these robots in a McDonald's could probably replace 4 or more employees. If McDonald's isn't testing these now, they're nuts.
Momentum Machines cofounder Alexandros Vardakostas told Xconomy his "device isnâ(TM)t meant to make employees more efficient. Itâ(TM)s meant to completely obviate them." Indeed, marketing copy on the company's site reads that their automaton "does everything employees can do, except better."
The same is true of the Amazon Warehouse robots, those jobs are history...
Yes, yes, there will be new jobs building these robots, but do you believe that someone who used to flip burgers is now going to build robots? Do you think it will take just as many of them to build the robots?
We are approaching a point where we no longer need all the people we have to do all the things that need to be done. This will be an interesting challenge for the 21st century, what do we do with all the people who are no longer required to make stuff?
>All together the small robots have traveled over 93 million miles — almost the distance from Earth to the Sun.
Ya, but in parallel. Ants do this every day too.
It's not irony.
Chinese noodle workers who make under $400 a year were replaced by robots.
Think you can live in the 1st world for $400 a year?
There is plenty of food, water, and resources for everyone.
We share or things get ugly asthey have over and over and over in the past.
Robot jobs are two to three orders of magnitude fewer than the industries they are replacing.
We'll either go to a basic income, or a revolution, or a tax on robotic labor, etc. etc.
You can have 30% of the population starving, homeless, and not expect civil unrest.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The same thing we've always done: belittle and mock them for being unable to get a job. While we wait for that time to come, we'll do the same thing we've been doing: belittle and mock people for thinking that robots will ever replace people at their job.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
We are approaching a point where we no longer need all the people we have to do all the things that need to be done. This will be an interesting challenge for the 21st century, what do we do with all the people who are no longer required to make stuff?
The bigger issue is how do we get people to stop making MORE people that will not have a role in society to fill when they reach adulthood. We're automating the world for the benefit of mankind, but continue to breed like we're all still living off the family farm.
what about moving around people gumming up the works who are a in a win win win they keep there job or win they go to prison where the state pays for there room, broad and doctor.
Clearly they should be putting money into providing language education instead of female companions.
We are approaching a point where we no longer need all the people we have to do all the things that need to be done. This will be an interesting challenge for the 21st century, what do we do with all the people who are no longer required to make stuff?
Interesting challenge?
This challenge will overwhelm the American governments capacity to deliver social services, healthcare, policing, etc
Unemployment and underemployment will only continue to rise as automation and robotics take jobs away, not just from unskilled, but also from highly skilled occupations. The numbers will grow every year. No amount of election year politicking about job creation will change any of this.
What will be used to maintain control, deliver services, etc to a growing population of unemployed?
The same thing that put them in that predicament:
Automation and Robotics
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Demanding more money = making automation more cost effective = fewer jobs for those demanding more money be careful what you wish for if your intention is higher wages for lower skilled workers
The bigger issue is how do we get people to stop making MORE people that will not have a role in society to fill when they reach adulthood. We're automating the world for the benefit of mankind, but continue to breed like we're all still living off the family farm.
The developed world has a declining native population. In a few generations, we won't have to worry about robots taking our jobs, because there won't be any humans left.
Look at Japan, for example.
And what happens when BurgerBot breaks down? Is it assumed that every McDonalds will have a hot-spare or do you just close the store because there aren't any people around to take over?
You call the 24-hour support line to get it fixed. No-one's going to keep a spare human staff around just in case the Bot breaks.
It's not as though I've never gone into a McBurger and been told 'we can't make Big Whoppers today because the Widget Maker is broken'.
Don't forget electing governments that have kept interest rates artificially low for a decade or more, thereby making borrowing for capital investment very cheap.
Only employees who do nothing but make burgers. In practice it can probably improve efficiency enough to do away with one employee in a ten man shop.
Touchscreen kiosks can replace the three that are taking orders. Even better, would be to appify the process, so you can place and pay for your order on your mobile device, get a text message when it is ready, and then pick it up at the drive-by-window by scanning a QR code.
They are so efficient that they can move an entire warehouse and have ready to operate again during the weekend.
Get it together, editors. How did you get this job?
There is plenty of food, water, and resources for everyone.
No, there's not.
We share or things get ugly asthey have over and over and over in the past.
Hint: things are going to get ugly.
Are economic ones the only roles that society has?
Are economic ones the only roles that society has?
For Marxists, yes. You're either a cog in the great social machine, or chaff to be tossed aside.
This will be an interesting challenge for the 21st century, what do we do with all the people who are no longer required to make stuff?
Same thing we do with them already. Management.
I stole this Sig
Are economic ones the only roles that society has?
For Marxists, yes. You're either a cog in the great social machine, or chaff to be tossed aside.
For Capitalists, yes. You're either a cog in the great economic machine, or chaff to be tossed aside.
There! Maybe Capitalism and Marxism aren't that different after all?
So, while my automated factory dismantles the solar system to build my trillion robot army, where you expect to get your resources from?
Only those with a massive lack of imagination (like, say, Marxists) believe there are plenty of resources.
This will be an interesting challenge for the 21st century, what do we do with all the people who are no longer required to make stuff?
It was also an interesting challenge for the 19th century, when steel plows, tractors, and reaping machines displaced all the people who were no longer required to grow stuff.
The editors are robots. They bleep up often, but are much cheaper than you.
Table-ized A.I.
For Capitalists, yes. You're either a cog in the great economic machine, or chaff to be tossed aside.
No. In Marxism, you work or starve. Since you have no capital of your own, you are totally reliant on the State to feed you. In Capitalism, you work... or do whatever you feel like with whatever capital you've accumulated.
Just a little tiny bit of a difference, there.
Indeed. We're heading for a world where all the workers own their means of production.
Yet the Marxists seem really rather annoyed about that.
Sure, they moved to manufacturing. When those jobs went away everyone moved to service. At this point though we've run out of sectors of the economy, there isn't anywhere for everyone to move to.
We share or things get ugly as they have over and over and over in the past.
During the last century the worst ugliness was caused by the mandatory "sharing" that you propose as the solution.
How does that work? I buy a burgerbot and lease it to McDonalds instead of working there myself? Why would McDonalds deal with me when they can buy 500,000 burgerbots in bulk at a price far lower than I could ever negotiate for my single bot?
Or I buy a burgerbot and just compete with McDonalds, along with the other 499,999 people that thought this was a good idea?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I find their are generally two kinds of conservatives:
1) Those who believe trickle-down actually works and that if you "deregulate" the 1%, wealth will flow down to the middle and poor.
2) Those okay with heavy inequality and are basically social-darwinists (dog-eat-dog) in order to "keep the human species strong" by letting the uncompetitive die.
Most, but not all evangelicals fit into #1, as #2 is not very compatible with Jesus's teachings. Ayn Rand fans tend to fit into #2.
My view is that #1 is factually wrong in the modern world, and that society changes too fast for #2 to be viable: today's most valued skill may not be tomorrow's.
Table-ized A.I.
Actually 0% interest rates make investment capital prohibitively expensive. Almost nobody has any real savings and so borrowing savings at a normal interest rate is impossible. What the Keynesian policy of 0% interest rate is doing, it is killing off real investment capital and only making it possible to gamble with the newly minted (or electronically created) fiat.
No business is expanding in the USA or most of Europe for that matter because it can borrow cheaply. It cannot borrow at all. The only people who have access to the newly minted fiat are entities like governments, borrowing more for social and military spending and gamblers. Gamblers can borrow (banks, fubds) to operate in highly risky environment because the government also insures their losses for them.
Basically there is no normal productive economy, which is why people are losing hobs to automation, outsourcing, plain bankruptcies etc.
The solution is to remove government control over money, interest rates, business, labour. This will happen organically as the economy collapses if it is not allowed to happen in our own terms and volition. I do not expect people to allow it to happen by them understanding the problem and applying the correct solution, so it will happen by itself, on its own, and it will be much worse that way.
You can't handle the truth.
The bigger issue is how do we get people to stop making MORE people that will not have a role in society to fill when they reach adulthood.
An obvious solution is to provide unneeded people with a basic income in return for sterilization.
We're automating the world for the benefit of mankind, but continue to breed like we're all still living off the family farm.
Birth rates are declining everywhere, and the decline is strongly correlated with urbanization, reduced infant mortality, and rising living standards. We could accelerate the process by giving 3rd world women access to cheap, safe, and convenient contraceptives.
Capitalists have an extra option in there: you either own the means of production, or you work for the owner
My means of production is a $29 keyboard. If I buy my own, does that mean I will no longer have to work?
The problem is we really don't have any growth in industrial employment and a lot of the automation is replacing work in the service sector. The 19th century saw gains in both industrial employment and service employment. We've cut one of those categories and automation aims to cut the other.
So where do they go?
I suppose one answer might be an increase in nominal agricultural employment through urban, grow-local subsistence agriculture.
Don't forget electing governments that have kept interest rates artificially low for a decade or more, thereby making borrowing for capital investment very cheap.
Also making home loans for the middle class very cheap. I refinanced at 3.5%.
Momentum Machines is something of a fizzle, it's been years since they made their marketing stunt but they've been unable to convince any of the big burger chains to pick it up or start their own prototype restaurant. All this talk of freshness and customization ignores the fact that the toppings are drowned in dressing and despite offering customization few actually use it because if you order a common burger there's often one almost ready to eat, you don't go there for a made-to-order burger. And 360 burgers an hour is not really impressive for a machine that's sure to need maintenance, repair, refills and what do you do if it's out of order, close the shop? Also I doubt it'll come with all the sensors to spot spoiled/contaminated food, humans have an abundance of sensors that robots only poorly and expensively replicate so most likely it'd fall to a human employee to check before loading it up. And the machine better not have any spills or leaks to ruin the food itself.
I must admit I haven't studied the inside of a burger shop kitchen, but I bet it's Taylorism all around where everything has been timed and optimized to minimize the number of seconds for every job. You can get a lot done by half-automation, during days with big celebrations I've seen an absolutely massive number of burgers coming out of that kitchen in a surprisingly short time if they know they'll be flying off the shelves anyway. It's more surprise on-demand load like a huge group coming in the middle of a slow day that slows them down, but I don't think the latency to put more burgers through production would get substantially better anyway. And when they haven't really embraced self-service ordering which should be the easy part, well I think the employees are safe a little while longer. It's self driving cars that strikes me as the next big revolution,
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
He wants families to be forced out of work and to starve. That is so Republican of him. So Republican. They hate families.
Jeff Bezos has supported and donated primarily to Democratic causes and Democratic candidates.
Are economic ones the only roles that society has?
You may not think of it as such, but *everything* is an economic transaction or endeavor, since at its core, economics is the study of dealing with scarcity: of time, of resources, of personnel, etc.
Maybe this works for regular burgers. Can this machine make a Big Mac, with it's three buns and two meat patties? How about bacon burgers? Can it fry up the bacon? Chicken burgers, with breaded or grilled patties? How hard it is to reprogram for new specialty items? What about your local Taco Time? They've got all sorts of menu items that require a wide variety of preparation techniques, and they add new products all the time.
Any sort of device that could effectively prepare all those items would be enormously complex and expensive. And after all that, you're still going to need humans to keep it stocked, cleaned, and maintained. This machine might have a future in a restaurant that had a menu designed exclusively around what these machines can produce, but would people really want to eat there, with nothing but vanilla burgers served? Does anyone really care about the "mix" of meats used, as the company is promoting as a future feature? No, I think fry cooks are going to be around for a while yet.
Yes, robots are coming, but I think people overestimate how well they'll do at any task that requires real hand-eye coordination or any sort of flexibility, at least for the foreseeable future. Restaurants and many other small specialty shops don't necessarily benefit from economy of scale like warehouses or assembly-line factories do.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Only if you can find someone else to work that keyboard for you.
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.
You know a parody when you see one, right? Or are you a bot yourself?
There's no need to worry. If technology reaches the level you postulate AND if humanity has failed to progress past the primitive ethos you seem to embody, then the human race will quickly and efficiently destroy itself, thereby solving the problem.
Republicans are so hateful.
There is plenty of food, water, and resources for everyone.
There's adequate food, water and resources. Not everyone is happy with that. (That may be a problem with their happiness, but the problem is still there.)
During the last century the worst ugliness was caused by the mandatory "sharing" that you propose as the solution.
Unless he means a different kind of sharing.
And when they haven't really embraced self-service ordering which should be the easy part, well I think the employees are safe a little while longer.
Regarding this point, there is a fine line between saving money and having good customer service. That being said, Siri often understands me better than the 17 year old kid behind the counter. Honestly I don't want to use a touch screen order system, but if I can just speak my order, I'll take that.
Also, keep in mind the push to replace fast food workers hasn't hit yet because the min wage is still $7.25/hr. Oh sure, a few places it is higher, but you don't develop for a national chain like McDonald's based on a few exceptions. If the national wage went to $15/hr, I think you'd see that change in a big hurry.
What often gets missed in the talk of $15/hr min wage is what happens to the current people making $15/hr today? They aren't going to accept getting paid what a McDonald's worker is getting, so it will push up wages across the board for everyone.
Which sounds good, until it causes many companies to start reconsidering their staffing needs and what options they have to cut back on them.
At $7.25/hr, I'd agree with you, employees would be hard to beat.
The question becomes, how high does that have to go before that changes?
It might cost a million dollars to put a robot into a McDonald's that can make most of their menu. That probably makes no sense at current wages. Maybe it doesn't at $15/hr either. But at some number it should.
And it won't remove all employees, just cut down the number of them. You might go from 8 people during lunch to 4.
What I want to know is: with all this tech, why haven't they learned make a good website?
He wants families to be forced out of work and to starve. That is so Republican of him. So Republican. They hate families.
Jeff Bezos has supported and donated primarily to Democratic causes and Democratic candidates.
Don't confuse him with reality :)
To these folks the word "Republican" is just a meaningless pejorative. Their use of the word betrays no actual knowledge at all.
It was also an interesting challenge for the 19th century, when steel plows, tractors, and reaping machines displaced all the people who were no longer required to grow stuff.
Lots of people keep saying that sort of thing, but sooner or later we're going to reach the end game of it.
Yes, machines now make our food, those people do other things. They went to work in factories making stuff, but that now is done by robots or overseas by virtual slave labor (which won't last, but robots will pickup that slack).
Then they moved into tech and service businesses. But that has only so much room and will become automated at some point.
Or do you believe that we'll always find something new for humans to do no matter how automated our world becomes?
Everything you mentioned in your first paragraph is completely trivial. Do you seriously believe that it's significantly harder to build a robot that can handle a bacon burger, or a two-patty-three-bun burger, or a chicken burger?
This is just a robot that makes a tower of ingredients. Sometimes the ingredient list is "bottom-bun, patty, top-bun", sometimes it's "bottom-bun, patty, middle-bun, patty, bacon, top-bun". That's basically trivial. The only substantial difference between a big mac and a chicken burger is the cooking method, which is highly automated already.
I don't understand why you think that's difficult, or that a plain burger is at all a likely result. A robot that can make a tower of various ingredients is the same complexity as the design projects we ask groups of 3 second-year engineering students to do, in between their other courses (I remember my second year design project, I judge it to be more difficult). This microcontroller is easily capable of doing that on-demand, in fact it's overkill: http://www.mouser.com/ProductD..., and it costs less than 5 dollars.
This is certainly not enormously complex or expensive. It doesn't take a great deal of manual dexterity to assemble a burger.
Where it gets slightly more difficult is when you have all burgers, and you suddenly want to add a wrap, or a pizza, or a bowl of soup, or an ice-cream cone. Something that is completely different and doesn't fit with the existing robot's design. You might want a different robot for that, or maybe reduce to one employee who makes specialty items.
I think you massively overestimate how difficult it is to make a hamburger robot, and underestimating how much of the cooking is automated today. A big reason McDonalds isn't automated is because it doesn't just sell hamburgers. Another reason is that the sort of ordering interface that customers would use only recently became commonly available & understood. You need a touchscreen or similar, that can handle requests like "no pickles" or "allergic to nuts" or whatever, vending-machine-like payment methods, etc. -- I've used these at human-staffed places where there is no cashier and it works great, but it's not super common yet and some people will always hate it just like some people hate self-checkout at grocery stores, even though I prefer it. Apparently McDonalds is looking into doing that to the ordering process.
(Another reason is drive-through, mainly because drive-through windows were not designed to be easy to robotically pass credit cards and food to a person who positioned thier car in any idiot position, and it's not an easy retrofit).
Wine from nose: Snort!
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
And we pushed really hard to increase high skill labor headcount, pushing a percentage of those people up. Great.
Do you think we can keep doing that forever? That everyone, given the chance, can get a PhD?
So, while my automated factory dismantles the solar system to build my trillion robot army, where you expect to get your resources from?
Only those with a massive lack of imagination (like, say, Marxists) believe there are plenty of resources."
I'm one of those marxists and before you could start your robot army we already built one (is good to have a whole country's resources at your disposal) and crushed you.
One can think that human race will learn sooner or later and my marxist country will be an utopian land of freedom, or we can think we won't learn and my marxist country will be something resembling a mix of Stalin's USSR misery with China's modern efficiency. Nevertheless, you Mr Lone Ranger, will be crushed anyway.
> This will be an interesting challenge for the 21st century, what do we do with all the people who are no longer required to make stuff?
Those people will still need to eat, need a place to stay.The answer is farming - either collective, or individually - everyone has the option to own in a piece of land and grow food to feed his family
"The morality of: 99% votes to take the most from 1% is obvious for what it is - highway robbery. Under such circumstances any methods of fighting against this oppression are justified."
OR, we can make the 99% to own the means of production instead of just 1% and therefore those 99% will not be taking an unfair share from the 1% but will take from their already owned 99%.
"Let people build new companies"
Yes. And then allow the people to own them. Taxes (at its current levels) can be used to build roads, pay for foreign wars... and also to build companies.
Parody does not compute. *flips burger
"During the last century the worst ugliness was caused by the mandatory "sharing" that you propose as the solution."
Uhhh... People living in Northern Europe probably will disagree.
"In Marxism, you work or starve. Since you have no capital of your own, you are totally reliant on the State to feed you."
So, by your own confession, In Marxism is obviously NOT that you work or starve. You could try something along the lines of "In Marxism, you do what the State tells you or you starve" and then, the State will tell you to work, or to praise the wonders of the Marxist system, or to stay at home all day watching the government propaganda. But you are too biased for even such a simple rational process.
"Or do you believe that we'll always find something new for humans to do no matter how automated our world becomes?"
Maybe yes, after all.
Asimov (surely not the only one) envisioned the end result of that trend in the Solaria-style worlds (10.000 robots per human and very low human population density): you see, it seems countries tend to reduce their natality rates as they progress social and economically so, as long as the "robot revolution" doesn't happen overnight if may very well happen that as more and more jobs are automated, the more the population gets reduced.
they're screwed either way. Either they don't make enough money to survive or they get replaced by robots. God knows we're not going to just give them enough money to live (the damn Welfare Queens (tm) ). They've got nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
written by Marx. The only thing he gave a shit about was who owned the means of production. You can still own crap. It's OK. Nobody's coming for your BMW. They're after the factories that make the BMW. Marx saw all this automation shit coming. It's a logical extension of the factory system. He also figured out that capital (ownership) was going to pit labor against each other in an endless race to the bottom. And finally he figured out that a smaller and smaller group of assclowns would end up owning all the capital. Seriously, what the fuck difference does it make to regular joes like you and me? We're screwed either way, either the state owns everything and abuses it or the 1% own it all and abuse it, right?
There's another way you know. It's called Democratic Socialism. Instead of bothering with all that messy ownership crap (and the shitstorm that comes with the Revolution of the Proles) you just regulate ownership and prevent people from abusing it. Wanna say you own the fuckin' earth? Go right ahead. Fat lot o good it'll do you when we tax you 99% and use Basic Income to distribute it so that nobody's dependent on you for daily bread.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I guess you're implying that *you* have a brain and obviously you can explain this:
"Almost nobody has any real savings and so borrowing savings at a normal interest rate is impossible"
How do you borrow savings? I can't wait to hear this.
It's how banks used to work. People put their savings into the bank, the bank paid them interest on the savings. The bank lent out the savings at a higher interest rate and made money that way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
On the other hand, in an age of lowering wages (inflation means that $7.25hr has less buying power every year) and basics like food, transportation and shelter increasing in costs faster then inflation, who is going to have spare money for luxuries like McDonalds.
Used to be 3 McDonalds where I live. Population has gone up (almost doubled) along with the cost of housing and now there is only one. Hasn't really been other restaurants opening up either. We do have a Walmart now though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
You're simply focusing on the idealized mechanics, and ignoring the real world requirements of the device. Such a machine needs to be:
* Affordable - the machine has to pay for itself in a reasonable amount of time.
* Reliable - a business will rely on this machine for it's daily revenue, and so it has to be extremely resistant to mechanical or electronic failures, and must produce high-quality products.
* Flexible - it must be programmable, easily integrated into proprietary ordering systems, and be mechanically capable of creating a wide variety of hamburgers.
* Easy to use - the machine must be operated, stocked, and maintained by typical fast food workers.
* Safe - it must be easy to clean or sanitize, resist bacterial growth, and safeguard against mechanical accidents involving workers.
Naturally, you could pretty easily design a machine if you had an unlimited budget, or didn't care about the reliability of it's more fiddly mechanics, and so on. Being able to check off ALL these boxes is the tricky part. And of course, it's "trivial" to build anything when you're just imagining how it might work, or sketching an idea out on a napkin, or don't have to concern yourself with how to mass-produce the thing. As with most real-life projects, the devil is in the details.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
We either share voluntarily or we will share by force. Sharing by force usually goes too far.
And I repeat there is plenty of clean food, water, and food for the current and projected population of the earth for the next 30 years (even the new higher estimates). It won't be the same quality as 1970's food (much less 1950's food) but that's not required.
What we have is a distribution problem. We are literally destroying food which could be going to hungry people daily. Large amounts.
If you don't share, you will be forced to share. Once it gets that bad, your chance to control the process will be gone and you'll lose a lot more than if you were fair to begin with. It's your choice.
If you are in your 50s like me, this is all academic. The further you are under 50, the more this applies to you.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Why would they disagree? That's exactly what it was.
Banks haven't worked like that for a long, long time.
A million dollars? That's far more than I would have estimated.
I find there are generally two kinds of self-styled "progressives":
1) Those who feel the need to create straw men.
2) Meh. Actually there's only one.
Do you think he's serious, or is it satire? Seems a bit over the top to be serious.
Perhaps, but such things tend to be expensive because they are low volume and are used in commercial kitchens, so they can be priced higher.
Still, I suspect it wouldn't actually take that long to pay for itself. A McDonald's open 24/7 that can cut its kitchen staff by 2-4 people, works out to $1,839,600 at a total employee cost of $10/hr, with an average of 3 employees removed.
Now in fairness, it might only save 1 person overnight, and you might need 2 machines for busy places, but frankly it could pay for itself in a year.
Raise min wage to $15/hr and it becomes a no-brainer, because your true cost for employees becomes more like $20/hr at that point.
Um. Yes there is.
See I can do the same thing.
Link it.
We have a distribution problem. Not a raw resource problem.
Everyone on earth could live better than u.s. citizens did in the 1950s. No one needs to starve. No one needs to be without shelter. No one needs to be without water. And really no one needs to be without entertainment or cheap intoxicants.
That, friends, and family is all most people in the world has needed to be happy for most of time.
The few rare birds with genius level talent could still excel. Everyone doesn't have to suffer.
But yea.. things are going to get ugly despite all that. Hoping it will be after I'm 6' under. Will do what I can tho while I'm here.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
what do we do with all the people who are no longer required to make stuff?
1. Lucky ones will die with some dignity. (OR)
2. Capable and lucky(dont have the need to go to job) tech people will create robots to automate agriculture and feed them.
I really wish to be part of 2, but my fucking day job and family is eating all my time, leaving little time acquire skills on machine learning.
The company's robot can "slice toppings like tomatoes and pickles immediately before it places the slice onto your burger, giving you the freshest burger possible." The robot is "more consistent, more sanitary, and can produce ~360 hamburgers per hour." That's one burger every 10 seconds.
One of these robots in a McDonald's could probably replace 4 or more employees. If McDonald's isn't testing these now, they're nuts.
Someone will be testing these robots, but I would be surprised if its McDonalds.
Contrary to popular belief, the golden arches is not a burger company, they are a branding and supply chain company. The restaurants are all employee owned franchises, who pay a fee to McDonalds corporate for use of the McDonalds brand, the McDonalds supplies, the McDonalds uniforms, and so on. That's where the money is, not making and selling the burgers.
Would an enterprising franchise owner invest in a burger making robot? Or would they sell up their McDonalds franchise and start up their own employee-free business instead? That's the more interesting question I think.
Not a bad idea, except the others won't have a burgerbot, they'll have a burrito bot. Then you can exchange goods barter style and settle the difference in goods value with cash. TL;DR it will be like mom 'n pop stores, only miniaturized.
I own more means of production than many companies of just a few decades ago an am definitely not in the top 1% (probably not in the to 90%). Maybe there's something more to it than ownership of means of production.
All 26 million of them?
continue to breed like we're all still living off the family farm.
The US is shrinking without massive immigration.
You buy a burger bot and sit at home eating burgers while it makes burgers for you raised by farmbot.
what do you do if it's out of order
Maybe have a backup spare that can take over until the broken one gets repaired. You know, like how things work in the real world.
I spent an hour on ebay last night and was completely amazed at how much I could buy with so little money. Things (non computer related) that I would have spent tens of (1980's) dollars on, I can now by for a couple of 2015 dollars.
That doesn't match my experience and I order from them a few times a month. I can't even remember when was the last time I bought a non-food item from a store. It's been over a decade since I've been to a mall.
Why would I buy an overpriced burrito from my neighbor when Taco Bell sells the exact same burrito for 50 cents less because they continue to pay less for "beef" in bulk?
Like the ones driven out of business by Wal-Mart, only miniaturized?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
"work or starve" is a truism for 90%+ of the population in a Capitalist society, but it's mundane point. While I wouldn't care to be thrown into whatever line of work the State would dictate under Communism, I equally wouldn't care to increase working hours and decrease my wage as productivity falls and automated systems take over more of the grunt work. We've coined the term "modern slavery" to describe the working conditions endured in some countries with whom we trade - I don't think conditions will get that abhorrent here but certainly it's possible to reach "slavery" levels again if everyone is required to work but also expendable and inessential.
And whose argument is he misrepresenting?
We're talking minimum wage workers, people without an internet connection or computer and probably no credit card, little well enough disposable income to buy stuff on ebay.
Just like the poor often can't grocery shop at the cheap stores as they're often in the wrong location, they often can't shop online.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I make less than minimum wage, yet have figured ot how to do this. Are they mentally retarded? There are programs for this. What would these people have done 100 or 500 years ago?
The morality of 1% of the populace taking 40% of the rewards of society while others suffer, starve, and go homeless is obvious.
More to the point, the higher the percentage taken and the greater the number suffering in misery, the more dangerous it is for the 1%.
Bears make money, bulls make money, pigs get slaughtered.
I'm not advancing a political position- I'm giving a warning. When the top 1% takes too much, they will suffer.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Solaria was a freak exception in Asimov's Spacer Universe. In Asimov's work, it wasn't an end result, but a dead end set up to die. His ideal Spacer world was Aurora, which had a high degree of automation but still had plenty of human interaction.
The robot revolution has started, and is moving fairly fast. As far as population growth or shrinkage goes, it is happening overnight.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You could get all the criteria except affordability now. (It doesn't need to be integrated into existing proprietary ordering systems, which can be replaced.) Robots are getting cheaper, and we hope people will continue to get more expensive.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Quite a few evangelicals are very happy speaking out against what Jesus taught. There's been "prosperity gospel" churches around for a long time, despite the fact that Jesus was very clear on the accumulation of wealth and the paying of taxes.
Personally, I find it frightening that I'm closer to what Jesus is said to want than that many Christians.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You're missing my point. I agree.. history shows the morality of the mob IS to murder and steal.
You want to be morally right and lose everything including your life or do you want to be alive and happy and still be incredibly wealthy compared to the rest of society?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
They already do that in Moscow, Russia. In smaller ones they remove half of the POS, replacing them with take out zone for completed orders. You can order in touchscreen kiosks (and pay by CC), or at POS, but they just place your order on same queue as self-order ones, so you will receive it in take out zone. So they revised they internal logistics too.
I think he says "conservatives" very clearly.
There are 35,000 McDonalds restaurants. Even assuming you made a machine that couldn't be used at any other chain, that's not what I would call low volume.
Anyway the low-hanging fruit for fast food restaurants is the register. Self-serve kiosks are cheap - McDonalds already uses them in countries with high labor costs and ubiquitous electronic payment systems. I doubt we'll see burger machines while they're still paying people to take your order.
I was going to reply to you here, as I do have a reply. But I'm going to make it a point to not bother.
If you, Bryan Killett (aka "khayman80") continue to harass me in Slashdot threads that have nothing to do with the subject, or if you reply here on Slashdot to comments made on Twitter, those comments (like this one) will not be accepted. They will be flagged as inappropriate and likely reported as harassment.
ESPECIALLY if you can't bother to stop sock-puppeting as Anonymous Coward. You've been told before that's disgraceful behavior. Figure out why.
Fair points...
I suppose that it just shows that it makes sense to pay people to do that job, at $7.25/hr, but if min wage was really raised nationally to $15/hr, they'd start with order taking and move on from there.
Honestly, I'd personally rather have robots make my food anyway, it will come out better, cleaner, and healthier than if humans make it.
Except he didn't really describe an argument so much as a worldview strongly associated with conservatism. That's uncontroversial. But since you protest, you might like to explain how you reconcile with identifying as conservative and yet not believe trickle-down economics is effective or that inequality is ok, since the call for intervention seems to be associated with Liberals.
Is that ad hominem really the best you can do?
It was a comment about the paper "Sherwood et al.", not the author Sherwood, you bozo.
Now get stuffed. This comment, like the one before, is getting flagged as inappropriate.
Lonny, I just showed that your ad hominem is completely irrelevant, unless you want to start accusing Carl Mears, William Ingram and Soden and Held (etc. etc.) of having credibility problems as well?
You showed nothing of the sort. I repeat: my comment was about the paper's credibility problems in the climate science community. It had nothing to do with the authors themselves. No ad-hominem existed. If you don't understand that there is indeed a credibility problem with the paper, a few minutes on Google will explain it to you.
Once again, you out-of-context misrepresent my statements. It's a shameful practice, and the only likely motivation I see for it is harassment.
Again, your baseless hatred of Sherwood et al. is completely irrelevant.
Pure libel. Wrong on both counts. First, the things I say aren't "baseless", and second, I have no "hatred" for Sherwood. I've made no such statement, and you're making false accusations again. That's just not despicable behavior, it's illegal.
Again, you have been reported. GO AWAY.
You still don't understand that your "recent comment" baselessly accusing that recent PAPER of having credibility problems is completely irrelevant?
Since my comment about the paper is what this entire exchange has been about, which YOU started by the way, how could it be irrelevant?
It's so utterly, bizarrely illogical that you would rant for so long about something that you say yourself is irrelevant, I have to say, once again, that you have given me strong reason to suspect you're a dangerous, stalking, harassing nutcase. And by "dangerous" I mean that you appear to me to be seriously unbalanced. GO AWAY.
Further, if your quoted passage (that was presented out of context as has been your usual habit) was NOT from the paper, then my mistake. Fine. But I cleared that up straight away. So what the hell are you ranting about? There is nothing more to be said.
I told you, I will not discuss tweets here on Slashdot. By definition, that's another demonstration of your out-of-context bullshit. Which by now any reasonable person would have to conclude is 100% deliberate misrepresentation. You can talk about lapse rate here all you want, but that wasn't I was referring to on Twitter, mistakenly or not.
If you want to discuss something on Twitter, then do it on Twitter. IN CONTEXT.
You have been reported yet again.
If?! IF the quote I showed him which I labeled "2013" wasn't from a 2015 paper, then Lonny's comment about a 2015 paper wasn't what this entire exchange has been about!
Yes, "if". Do you really expect me to be interested enough in your BS to check dates on the incessant quotes you make? What a laugh.
But since YOU brought it up: that paper has ALSO been criticized for its low-credibility theory of how low clouds and a new model of convective atmospheric mixing could (unverified and currently unverifiable) explain discrepancies in model sensitivities.
Yawn.
Yep. 2 papers (2013 and 2015) = 2 new unverifiable climate models that disagree with everyone else's climate models.
You have been reported. Again.
I will not discuss tweets with you here on Slashdot. If you want to respond appropriately, you will do so in the same medium you are supposedly responding to.
Doing otherwise is strong evidence that you intend (just as you did here) to misrepresent statements out of context. It is also evidence of harassment. Which brings up: why have you been so obsessed with my comments to other people?
Cross-media posting is one of the characteristic hallmarks of cyberstalkers.
You have been reported. Again.
For instance: John Cook
John Cook is not a "mainstream scientist". He's a cartoonist. Get real. But of course, you have seldom let facts get in the way of your libel.
According to many past statements of yours, anybody on "your side" of the argument is a "scientist". Anybody else is a denier.
I have reams of examples.
Further, your statement that I have "harassed" those people, as opposed to just making occasional critical comments of their work, is libel. It's utterly false. And rather egregious libel at that. You're projecting your own behavior on to me, when in fact (again there are reams of documented evidence): I have not "harassed" these people. You, on the other hand, clearly HAVE harassed people. As you're doing now.
Every time you make comments like this, you dig a deeper hole for yourself.
"And by the way, if you really wanted me to go away, you wouldn't have written back again [archive.is]." Repeatedly. On both Twitter and Slashdot.
The circumstances are not remotely comparable. I haven't deliberately and incessantly intruded into YOUR conversations in order to harass you, or any other individual. You clearly have been doing so to me. I reply simply to defend myself from your misrepresentation and libel.
Your behavior is nothing like mine. In any significant way. Dream on.
No, you don't even have a single solitary example of me using that d-word.
Admittedly it was a paraphrase. Far be it from me to intentionally put words in the mouth of someone else. However, the gist remains... I have you on record belittling nearly every scientist I mention who disagrees with your belief, and putting on pedestals those who agree with it. I also have you on record telling me all about your apparently unshakable belief in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, and that someone who disagrees is endangering humanity.
I also enjoyed (no, "enjoyed" is not the right word, "got some satisfaction out of" would be more accurate) your tacit admission above that by harassing people, you feel you're acting as the point man for the Climate Police Goon Squad. Pretty rich, that one. Not your exact words, of course, but as you do seem to realize, actual context is very important.
I don't care what your religion is. That doesn't give you license to harass or libel people.
I actually thought Amazon was already using drones for their shipments. .. I guess I was wrong.
Your rantings have nothing to do with anything that has been said by me in recent days. I can only conclude that your sole purpose is harassment.
Your comment has been reported as such.
Wait... I will amend that.
Your comments DO have something to do with comments of mine in recent days which have been misrepresented, out of context. Yet again.
Your incessant postings of things which are completely irrelevant and not even roughly comparable (in context), is just more proof of the impression of "clueless nutcase" your presentation of yourself screams to others.
I am aware that you were not happy of my showing how ridiculous your arguments were on Twitter. But this isn't Twitter. If you're going to discuss Twitter, why don't you copy ALL of what I said here?
The obvious answer is that yet again you want the advantage of misrepresenting things, outside the real context in which you were shown to be acting and writing foolishly.
No sympathy here. As I stated earlier, you have been reported. Your blatantly unethical behavior is being recorded for posterity. Have a day.
Oops. Time to correct myself. After a quick glance over (which is all this is worth), I see no mention at all of how I demonstrated your foolishness on Twitter earlier today (10/2).
I thought I had seen such, but it seems I was mistaken.
Interesting, though, that you would come HERE and add more harassment after you lost an argument THERE. Why is that, you think?
It could be that you are finally seeing the true way of ethical behavior, and replying to my previous Slashdot comment, in the same medium in which you were addressed the other day.
But from experience, I think that's about as likely as contracting leprosy from a wild armadillo... in Vermont.
More likely -- again just my opinion but justified by circumstances -- you were trying to "get back" at me here because you lost the Twitter argument so miserably.
Thats great the Magic of IOT :)
The Jolly Singh
And your links to "lecturing scientists" are rather amusing... including the one where after all you had done was try to attack the messenger, I called you out on it.
The discussion here was not about the hotspot, and you didn't "debunk". You quoted one person's opinion.
Jane, you'll never realize that you're only demonstrating your own foolishness by compulsively lecturing scientists about what scientists think.
I didn't lecture you about what you think. I asked you a question. Which you did not answer.
And you're the one here spouting about time machines, not me. I don't know what your schedule is, nor do I care. You didn't give me (or anyone) any actual evidence that it wasn't you. You just made the claim. I still find it strange how you project your own imaginings on others. It's an interesting (if unsociable) habit.
Now, if you wanted FINALLY get to the actual subject that was under discussion, then by all means: show me that John Cook is not in fact a cartoonist. Or show us that...
Abstracts were randomly distributed via a web-based system to raters with only the title and abstract visible. All other information such as author names and affiliations, journal and publishing date were hidden. Each abstract was categorized by two independent, anonymized raters.
... as claimed in the paper was true. Show us that the #3 author did not write this in their online forum:
"We have already gone down the path of trying to reach a consensus through the discussions of particular cases. From the start we would never be able to claim that ratings were done by independent, unbiased, or random people anyhow."
Or that Jose Duarte's summation is false:
There appears to be no question that they knew, well before submitting the paper, that they had not implemented independent ratings, since as she mentioned, they were discussing particular papers in the forums the whole time. Yet, they still reported in their article that they used independent raters. What is this?
Those are the only relevant issues discussed in my comments, and you haven't addressed one of them. Yes, you did lose the argument. So what did you do as a result? Admit you were wrong? Apologize? NO, you came here and wrote a page of whines like a child, trying to make me look bad again.
Pathetic.
And finally, stop sock-puppeting as Anonymous Coward. It makes even you look bad.
Just a note, ignore him. I think he is making some interesting points, but he isn't doing anything illegal and reporting won't do anything, nor will flagging the comments.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.