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Chinese Warehouse Cut Labor Costs In Half With a Fleet of Tiny Robots (qz.com)
Many people around the world fear their job will eventually be replaced by a machine, including many Slashdotters. But workers in China may be the most fearful as Asia produces more robots than the rest of the world combined. Last week, a Chinese shipping company, called Shentong Express, showed off a mildly-dystopian automated warehouse that reportedly cut its labor costs in half using a fleet of tiny robots, according to the South China Morning Post. Quartz reports: In a video, tiny orange robots made by Hikvision ferry packages around an eastern China warehouse, taking each parcel from a human worker, driving under a scanner, and then dumping the package down a specific chute for it to be shipped. The human's main job in the video appears to be picking up packages and placing them label-up on top of the robot, a task modern robotics is only just starting to put into warehouse production. A spokesperson told the Post that Shentong is using the robot in two of its warehouses, and hopes to expand use to the rest of the country.
This is how you outsource a job to China.. on American soil.
and they're even cheaper than the slave-wage laborers they already have.
Show's where my mind is.
Eventually it's going to reach a tipping point where you choke enough people into poverty that eventually they're just going to say "fuck it, I have to survive somehow" ....and start just taking all those pretty coins that robotics have allowed you to save...
This is just a basic fact of life, you can't make people poor and expect them to just sit there and take it.
When this hits a country that doesn't have the ability to kill off opposition to such efforts, it will not be any bit pleasant.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
don't make 'em mad.
Every person freed from mundane repetitive tasks easily performed by machines is a person who is free to contribute to the intellectual and spiritual growth of mankind! A future where everyone is not required to work just to survive is a bright future for the human race.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Those things look like a Kiva Robot knock off. Amazon bought Kiva a while back but those things look REALLY similar. Just compare the two of them
Also how do they keep the package from falling off?
Procrastinating life a way at a rapid rate of speed.
Interesting that even they are doing that.
As to picking boxes and handing to robots, that is very doable today, if not as cheap yet. Maybe when they do their full role out they will automate that part as well.
President Trump is going to bring my job back
It looks like a pretty inefficient system to me. Line based systems slightly modified to work in concert with robots (I think Amazon does this) would probably have a higher throughput. It could be more cost effective in the short run, but it also appears to have some serious limitations (package size, error correction, etc).
They've managed exactly that for 105 years now.
US isn't to quite the same level yet, but they just vote a rich white guy living off other people's work into the white house as well. Look how well he's working out for the poor and disenfranchised.
That isn't including Turkey and a bunch of other places.
stop kidding yourself. The ruling class will build robots (e.g. Drones) and wipe them out. Hell, look at the peasants in the middle ages. They had it pretty rough and suffered frequent famines and sucked it all down. Why? Because a hundred underfed pesants was no match for 10 well fed and trained knights. Now I'll remind you the "knights" of today have kevlar instead of platemail and laser guided rockets instead of lances.
If you're going to do anything about rampant wealth inequality now's the time. Don't just keep telling yourself it's a problem that'll take care of itself. Christ, haven't you heard of the Dark Ages? They called it that for a reason. It lasted about 1000 years.
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and the Chinese are threatening to. Brutal violence has kept the Unions in check so far, but why bother with that when you can just automate. Plus you don't have those pesky liberal Americans and Europeans complaining about the poor working conditions. You just consign everybody to abject poverty and starvation. Nobody every complains about the working conditions in Africa ya know...
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If you haven't noticed level of poverty is closely monitored so it doesn't reach a critical mass. Our lords do not wants another revolution. We get all the amazing things that keep us happy and away from revolting - all using a simple credit line. At the end of your life - your end sum is zero. You worked at least 40 years but someone else profited from it. Isn't it great!?
It's almost the only country in the world that can properly provide relief: Unlimited paid public work opportunities.
"tiny robot" is just a euphemism for child labor.
Have gnu, will travel.
and the Chinese are threatening to. Brutal violence has kept the Unions in check so far, but why bother with that when you can just automate. Plus you don't have those pesky liberal Americans and Europeans complaining about the poor working conditions. You just consign everybody to abject poverty and starvation. Nobody every complains about the working conditions in Africa ya know...
thus providing even more empirical evidence of capitalism's abject failure, it falls over and fails to feed the people even without "pesky" government regulations to slow it down
any financial system that results in starving people is by its very definition a failure, the whole idea behind money and capitalism in the first place is to spread the wealth beyond the ruling class
This reminds me of Kiva's system from years ago, but it seems a pretty silly imitation if it can't pick up / drop containers on its own. Nothing to see here.
Stop using this gender neutral nonsense, it's called a spokesman even if the person is a female.
I had to read it a few times before I realize my mistake!
We have to admit that automation in micro scale is beneficial. It is illogical to avoid automation. We also have to admit that automation in macro scale has a completely opposite effect. People are left without jobs. Without income can't afford products from automated businesses. At some point system will collapse. Businesses won't have reason to exist without clients, no matter how automated they are going to be.
Why something that works great for single company is so bad for the society? Because right in the middle of it, we have bunch of parasites sucking all the benefits.
Automation is good when savings are evenly distributed. In healthy economy when you automate a job the costs drop. Therefore price for that product or service should drop. More automation, cheaper everything gets. But it is not what is happening right now. All the benefits from automation are not reducing the prices. CEOs who automate get huge salaries, bonuses and golden parachutes. Businesses push savings to dividends, pumping stock value on wall street or are hoarding billions in bank accounts in tax havens. All the benefits from automation go to narrow 1% group at the cost of 99% of society.
At some point with automation we should be able to reach utopia. Everything from energy production and raw materials gathering to the high end assembly and testing will be automated. In theory in such system everything can be free. Before you argue that someone has to pay for the automation remember that they will make itself. You don't have to pay a robot to make another copy. Ownership of those robots has absolutely no benefit for society and should be eliminated.
Can it work? If we look at industrial revolution, we can see how it worked. We were, as humanity, on the right path. Factories with machines allowed a single worker to produce goods at an unprecedented rate. Costs dropped to the point that some goods were distributed for free to those without jobs allowing them to survive. We eliminated lots of jobs in manufacturing and agriculture, but that resulted in a drop in prices. In the US and many parts of the world, it was common to see families where single salary was able to provide shelter, food and afford luxuries for the family.
This path ended when small group became the only beneficiary of gains in productivity or savings from automation and elimination of jobs.
We can fix it by introducing universal income. But we can also fix it without this weird concept. We can have a system where everything is really cheap. Business must reduce ridiculous salaries and benefits at the top and focus on the clients. We can reduce work hours to more evenly distribute remaining jobs to more people. Without reducing their income this will even out affordability at current prices. We can also increase wages, so a single person will once again will be able to provide everything for the family.
One thing is clear. What we have now is not sustainable.
I'm going to make a Trump-clone-robot factory, and send Trump-bots into all the countries who have workers displaced by robots, and the TrumpBots will fight for jobs bigly and fantastically! They'll know more about protecting jobs than the Generals and economists, who are losers and bad hombres.
Table-ized A.I.
with a help from tiny leprechauns.
Meet George Jetson...