Slashdot Mirror
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.
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"
Except the people living in extreme poverty is dropping rapidly, in 2016 the estimate was 9.1% of the world population. This is down from 9.6% in 2015, 20.4% in 2005 and 35.0% in 1990. This year a famine was declared in South-Sudan because of the civil war, but otherwise the world has been free of famine for the last six years. World literacy is at an all time high at 86.1% and climbing with youth literacy at 91.4%. Average life expectancy was 71.5 years in 2014, up from 67.2 years in 2010. About 46.1% of the population have access to a residential Internet connection, up 2.7% from last year and 4.77 billion people have a cell phone, up from 4.61 billion.
Yes, I know US median household income has been stagnant since the 1970s but for the world as a whole almost every arrow is pointing in the right direction. The poor people are still poor, in some cases relatively speaking even poorer compared to the 1%ers. But the poor aren't starving or freezing to death or dying from unclean water and basic sanitation and medicine, at least not in anywhere near the numbers they used to. Short of active war zones we pretty much manage to give aid where it's needed. China and India is rapidly modernizing. Africa is still a disaster area, particularly south of Sahara but even there progress is just sluggish not spiraling downwards.
Maybe robots will fuck all that up but I doubt it, it's easier to just let us have reasonable comfortable lives and let us produce 1.x kids reducing the population naturally, if the robots are so efficient the dead weight won't be much of a burden. Less than riots and revolutions and all that, I think we got a pretty good idea how far people can be pushed before they really hit the "fuck it, I got nothing to lose" level. I mean most of us have a fairly civilized society, looking at actual war zones it could be a lot worse than living on food coupons.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The reason Amazon treats its warehouse employees so badly is because it considers them a temporary and costly inconvenience. Their only role is to serve as temporary placeholders until robots get good enough to run the warehouses entirely, then there will be no more meatbag employees.