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.

Comments

Revolution

[Dutchmaan]

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.

Re:Revolution

[roman_mir]

You are under impression that for some unfathomable reason people are supposed to be guaranteed positions at businesses, I can't figure out why you (and many others) think that. I run a company, if I can automate some task away I am going to do that and if at some point it means that somebody loses a job (more like a new person doesn't get hired) then that's a great day for me. It means I achieved more efficiency and freed another task from unnecessary human intervention. The company runs more efficiently, the company is my machine that I am building hopefully to make some money, if it can run without human workers that would be fantastic.

From my point of view this technology of sorting parcels with robots is great, it increases productivity of the company (of the owner) and allows him to sort more parcels for the same amount of money so he doesn't have to charge more for that providing competition, pushing prices for shipping lower while quality and predictability of shipment go up. Win win win.

The humans are always a temporary solution to any issue until there is a better solution.

Re: Revolution

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to be under the impression that people without jobs will still be able to purchase your products.

Re:Revolution

[Dutchmaan]

Is that what you took away from my post.. Sorry but you're wrong, I'm speaking on a much more macro level of human behavior. I could just as easily say that YOU are under the impression that people **on the whole** can be squeezed indefinitely with no consequence. Congratulations on running an efficient company, hopefully, there aren't thousands upon thousands of desperate people living around you who need to survive.

The whole "adapt or starve" mantra corporate apologists like to trot out for these kinds of stories seem to forget that "adapt or starve" is called "desperation" as a synonym. People NEED A PATH to survive, and if they don't have one then you're shiny efficient business is going to look like a shiny pile of resources to people who just don't care anymore... and people like YOU put them there, so I doubt all your hard work and dedication will mean a thing to them.

Re:Revolution

[roman_mir]

people **on the whole** can be squeezed indefinitely with no consequence

- you are under impression that a company that increases its efficiency at doing what its doing and minimizes the costs is somehow 'squeezing' people. I don't think so at all. A company that maximizes its efficiency is the company that improves the standard of living of people who are using the product/service of that company and on the macro economic level that company minimizes the amount of resources needed to perform its function.

There are literally millions of people working in shipping and logistics, hopefully we can reduce that amount by 99%, so that only 1% of people doing the work today are required for that work 20 years from now and almost everything will be automated. That's the goal of any company - to increase its efficiency to the maximum to the point where there are no inefficiencies left.

Inefficiency is in human labour, in the expenses induced by the system and the government, the labour and business laws, regulations, price controls, money controls, everything that reduces the overall efficiency of the system. This has to be minimized, we have to reduce inefficiency to the maximum to get the most profit out of serving the most markets.

Personally I want to develop a monopoly in my market, to take 100% of everybody's business. Let's say for the sake of the argument that I am successful at that, that there is no competitor left because nobody can compete on price, quality, everything (at least for some time) until some breakthrough shifts the balance towards an innovator.

So lets say that 100,000,000 people are out of work because I replaced them *all* with my perfect (for the time being) business machine that does *all* of that work and requires no other human intervention. Would you say that it is a bad thing or a good thing?

AFAIC that's the best possible outcome. It also means that the only way to 'unsqueeze' those people is by breaking my business into pieces, destroying it so that it is inefficient and by creating this artificial inefficiency to supply many people with a reason for them to exist.

They existed and were able to feed themselves because they were an inefficient machine, I replaced them all with an efficient machine, they have to find something else to do, as they are people and they can adopt to the changing environment.

On the other hand they can attack the machine and try to destroy it to reduce efficiency to gain a piece of that efficiency for their own income. This of-course reduces economic power of the rest of the population, who was now enjoying the most efficient way of getting that service.

Somebody here will argue that the most efficient (biggest in their respective field) businesses need to be taxed more to supply the inefficient people with a form of subsistence. I disagree entirely, there is no reason to build all that efficiency in the first place if you are then going to add the inefficiency back on top of it.

Let's say I run a 100% efficient business, where I am making only enough money to survive and no other salary can be paid at all because the prices are absolute bottom without any space in them to pay another dollar in salaries to anybody else. That business cannot survive long, all businesses need savings to survive, otherwise they have no money to innovate, no money to survive through economic downturns. So an efficient business also has to have a healthy return on interest to allow for those savings. To take those savings away from a business to feed the inefficient is the same thing as running a business without savings at all, not allowing for any unexpected economic slow down.

So what you are calling 'squeezing' I am calling evolution, development and progress, minimizing entropy to achieve the maximum economic outcome.

A path to survive for people has to come through freedom from all forms of government regulations, so that new business ideas can be executed without red tape and without the added artificial inefficiency of regulations and taxes.

Re:Revolution

[barc0001]

The problem is even more basic than that. You automate and save pretty coins, the fast food chains automate and save pretty coins, the factory automates and saves pretty coins. However, pretty soon you're not saving any more pretty coins because nobody is buying your shipping service, the fast food chains are closing locations due to lack of customers, the factories are closing, the real estate leasing companies for the space the fast food companies' outlets occupied and factories leased start losing revenue and lay people off, and so it goes.

When the tipping point hits, I think it'll happen fast enough that by the time people are thinking revolution, a lot of the supposed fat cats will also be broke with nothing to their names but a factory that makes junk nobody can afford to buy or even wants compared to their next meal.

Re:Revolution

[Anonymous Coward]

As a business owner myself, I agree with your position. As someone who's been touting the coming economic apocalypse, I also agree with GPs positon (my business is automation; I literally get hired to put people out of work).

I think you both are talking about slightly different things. GP is talking about a scenario where a business owner gets more efficient, but doesn't pass that efficiency along onto his customers and instead continues to raises the prices (or at least creeps them up with inflation, etc) and amasses more and more wealth, basically pocketing the salaries of the workers he's displaced.

The problem is that if a company (or by extension an individual, aka director or shareholder) accumulates more and more wealth, the economy as a whole becomes less effective at moving resources around. There are issues of what happens to the company if people cannot buy its products anymore (but these companies would have savings to last a long time anyways) and there are issues of what happens to the people if they cannot afford the necessities of life anymore.

What GP is arguing is that if your hypothetical company amasses so much wealth (and perhaps pays an insanely low tax rate) it will piss off the people who no longer have jobs, and at some proportion these people are just going to take what they want from the company (or shareholders/directors) because they need to survive. Imagine in 20 years if (X close to 100)% of US citizens are well below the poverty line and desperate and the top people on the 'States have a few trillion between them. What will happen once there are (Y very large number) of desperate people for each hired goon to protect the rich's assets?

Re:Revolution

[Jason1729]

You seem to have never read a history book before. It's not a matter of one company saving a few bucks. It's a matter of creating a system where the vast majority have no hope of ever getting out of a subsistence existence where the small few with the money to buy those robots take all the luxury for themselves.

If you tell them to eat cake when they can't afford bread (or cake), they will silt your throat and take your cake. It happens *every* time the rich get too greedy.

Re:Goodbye Amazon Employees

[l810c]

There is this old slogan "Buy American"

The new slogan for the 21st century must be "Buy Human"