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

Misread as Whorehouse

[Anonymous Coward]

Show's where my mind is.

Re: Misread as Whorehouse

[OrangeTide]

A robot whorehouse? Everyone has their kink I guess.

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

[Joe_Dragon]

and the will the state have basic income or pay $100 a day or more to lock someone up?

Re:Revolution

[MightyYar]

The only reason we have the government-construction called "the corporation" is to benefit society. There is no guarantee to a job, true. But one big reason people tolerate the government handing out corporate charters is because they have been a job engine. If the jobs go away, the populace may not be so supportive of a system that simply results in raw capital accumulation.

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

[Kjella]

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.

Re:Revolution

[Harlequin80]

But if you look at things like this you can't rage at the MAN!

The US really does need to look at rebalancing its society. But that is incredibly difficult to do as someone alway has to lose out in a change like that. But US GDP has been steadily growing. If your median salaries haven't then there is a problem. Look at that problem and decide what you need to do to fix it.

My experience has been that the US has a markedly different attitude to the value of people in business compared to other countries. I have seen US firms buy companies here and appoint US experienced managers. They seem to be very good at seeking people efficiency, ie cutting excess staff. But they also seem to be very poor at seeing that some of those skillsets can't be replaced. Perhaps that is a big econony (US) vs small economy issue. But I have seen a number of consulting type companies implode after US purchases.

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:Revolution

[phantomfive]

Yes, I know US median household income has been stagnant since the 1970s

And it isn't, if you look at total compensation per hour.

Re:Revolution

[Anonymous Coward]

So much of our economy is based on taking advantage of people that whenever any efficiency is gained, it's used as an excuse to further depress wages, rather than improve them or reduce working hours. People then don't make investments in themselves, such as educating themselves or losing weight, being fit, and so forth. We could have a really awesome society if we'd focus on reducing the cost of engineering hours and R&D hours.

Case in point.

What happens when the public figures out out lobbying congress is the best possible investment they can ever make in their lifetimes? Better returns than 401K, IRA, a college education, or a new house or car. Seriously. Assume 10 million people donated $100 to the EFF for 10 years; that would buy you your internet privacy back, the breakup of the large ISP's, and that in turn would reduce your internet bill enough you'd get that $100 back probably several times over in a year. And that's an easy example.

Re:Revolution

[Dog-Cow]

It would give me great satisfaction to learn that a homeless man who recently lost his job to automation finds you and rips your intestines out with a fork.

Re:Revolution

[Dog-Cow]

roman_mir is an anarchist-cum-warlord who doesn't care about anyone or anything besides himself. As far as he's concerned, the unemployed can die in their own filth, if they can't figure out how to take what they need from others.

Re:Revolution

[nnull]

Who's making them poor? Everyone is getting into robotics, even the mom & pop stores. This isn't going to change and it isn't going to make everyone poorer overall. The people getting on the robot scheme now are going to temporarily improve their margins, but not for long. Yes, it's a gravy train right now, but there's no way these places are going to keep up their same prices as they did with regular workers. Eventually everyone is going to compete against you the same way on pricing and costs. And eventually your margins are going to be more or less the same as before. As long as government doesn't get involved, this is a net benefit for all, as products start declining in costs dramatically and the way we look at huge profits will change as well.

The other net benefit is that it opens up a lot of business opportunities for a lot of people as the costs will have dropped dramatically to get into a market and people will compete on logistical costs instead (It'll be much cheaper for some local guy to make you stuff than in China for example).

Re:Revolution

[Anonymous Coward]

How much taxes do you pay?

Re:Revolution

[gtall]

So in other words, your job hasn't yet been automated or made redundant because one of your competitors found that replacing the company president with a bot made the other company more efficient. Ermmm....why exactly should you be allowed to keep your job? Would a bot that says silly things on Slashdot and makes AI-infused company decisions be more efficient. You should look into this, I'm sure with some effort you can find a bot replacement.

Re:Revolution

[Monoman]

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

FIFY - The current solution to any issue is always a temporary solution until there is a better solution.

Re:Revolution

[jandersen]

[...long talk about how business is the only important thing...]

You are focused only on your business interests here, and maybe that is necessary in order to run a business; but 'focus' so often becomes nothing more than tunnelvision. But you don't live in an isolated vacuum; your business depends on there being, somewhere along the line, a consumer who is willing to consume whatever end product your are making a living of shifting along. Thus it is in your interest in the long run to care a bit about what happens to those people; no jobs means no consumers means no customers means no business, in which case you are sitting on a pile of highly efficient, but worthless junk.

What you don't seem to quite grasp is the fact that business is only a sideshow - a consequence of there being a complex society with enough surplus for business being sustainable. People can survive without your business or any business at all - we evolved that way, over a long period of time - but your business can't survive without a highly comples society, from which you can skim a bit of profit, so perhaps you should be a little bit less haughty.

Re:Revolution

[Razed By TV]

Personally I want to develop a monopoly in my market, to take 100% of everybody's business.

Let's say I run a 100% efficient business, where I am making only enough money to survive ...

If you're running a monopoly, and you're running 100% efficient, in what world would you be "making only enough money to survive"?

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.

If you failed to achieve your monopoly, but have managed to collude with the other corporations to jack prices up anyway, tell me again why that is a good thing?

Overall, it sounds like you idealize a world where the corporations replace as many humans as possible, your facilities will be sabotaged by humans in order to create jobs for humans (repairing factories), and the next step on your side up is automated turrets to protect your automated facilities from sabotage.

Re:Revolution

[Z80a]

How well those corporations will run without consumers?

Re: Revolution

[Type44Q]

Your reading comprehension skills were so impressive... that you've earned your very own participation award!

Re:Revolution

[Ol Olsoc]

tl;dr version:

Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.

Re:Revolution

[Ol Olsoc]

[...long talk about how business is the only important thing...]

You are focused only on your business interests here, and maybe that is necessary in order to run a business; but 'focus' so often becomes nothing more than tunnelvision.

I wonder if Mir Mir believes that if the next companies up the food chain eliminating his company for efficiency's sake and better profit is a good thing. You can't be consistent without wanting the highest paid person in the company fired.

Re:Revolution

[Ol Olsoc]

So in other words, your job hasn't yet been automated or made redundant because one of your competitors found that replacing the company president with a bot made the other company more efficient. Ermmm....why exactly should you be allowed to keep your job?

Of all the work that could be replaced by automation, the Owner/CEO and army of accountants has got to be the easiest.

I defy them to provide any cogent argument as to why a computer program wouldn't do the job better.

Any of the masters of the universe want to take on that discussion?

Re:Revolution

[Ol Olsoc]

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

FIFY - The current solution to any issue is always a temporary solution until there is a better solution.

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

Re:Revolution

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a fairly accurate representation. At least I've never seen roman_mir be anything else than a spectacular jackass.

Re:Revolution

[RuffMasterD]

Fair enough, from a company perspective. But from a global economic perspective, who will buy your product or service if the majority of people don't have a job? And what happens to these people? Do we let them die because they can't afford the basic necessities of life? Or should the government care for these people? How do you think the government will afford that? They are going to raise tax of course. In societies without social safety nets, people tend to care for their family members anyway, rather than let them starve, so people with good jobs such as yourself end up supporting multiple family members. So if you want to benefit from the stability of a civil society, then you end up paying for the care of people who are unable to care for themselves one way or another.

Re:Revolution

[Kiuas]

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.

There's nothing about increasing efficiency and cutting humans out as factors of påroduction that inherently means people will be plunged into poverty. Businesses need customers to operate. Imagine the day in not too distant future where close to 100 % of all menial jobs such as warehousing are automated. This will bring immense savings and increased efficiency for large companies like Amazon, but if all the millions of people made unemployed by these innovations have no source of income allowing them to buy items from Amazon, then they may very well end up losing money.

The structure of the consumer economy is such that companies compete for the money that consumers have. They really don't care where that money originates from: salary, dividends, social security, doesn't matter. If you have disposable income companies are going to try to get you to give some of it to them. Currently the majority of people gain their money as income from a job, so work is the mechanism by which money is moved from the top (=the wealthiest) to the bottom, so these people can then move it back into the top by buying goods and services. What's going to happen as automation takes more and more jobs away from people if the ownership class doesn't want consumer demand to come crashing down and start hurting their bottom lines is that as the labor costs will come down, tax-costs will increase as systems like basic income are developed and implemented. Right now many see this as an impossible because it seems like this would require hardcore capitalists embracing some socialist principles. But what people fail to see is that these income redistribution principles can (and will) be embraced for entirely selfish, profit-motivated reasons. Unless the loss of income caused by automation is offset with new sources of income the consumer economy will collapse, which in turn will drag the whole economy down.

That is, the wealthy class will eventually have to look at the situation and think which is easier: letting the masses dwell in poverty and watch their profits go down as people resort to crime for their survival as you put it, or start giving them income that will not only help them survive but keep competition and demand alive.

There's a lot more profit to be made in the latter scenario.

Re: Revolution

[tsqr]

Inflation.

US median income in 1970: $7,701

US median income in 2014: $53,013

$7,701 1970 dollars equivalent worth in 2014: $46,987

Median income growth over inflation: 12.8%

Re: Revolution

[virtig01]

You seem to be under the impression that people without jobs will never have jobs.

Re:Revolution

[virtig01]

You seem to have never read a history book before.

History books tell us that:

- the US went from 90% agricultural employment to 1%
- human diggers were replaced by steam shovels
- hundreds of thousands of switchboard operators displaced by automated switching

In these cases, some people lost their jobs but the majority benefited greatly. Even the job-losers had a chance to replace their dreary work (let's be honest, if a robot can do your job, it probably isn't that stimulating) with something else.

Increased efficiency is a Good Thing.

Re: Revolution

[apoc.famine]

As a vague theme along what is being described here, I don't see why that's a bad assumption. Most technological innovations have been about shifting where human labor is applied. What we're talking about here is outright replacing it. Anywhere it could get pushed to, we can replace that with robots too.
 
We're not too far off from robots handling almost all commercial agriculture, and almost all packing, shipping and delivery. Our robots will build other robots, and other robots will service those robots. Or just recycle them so the first group can rebuild more robots.
 
Robots already make a tremendous amount of the food we eat - if it's pre-packaged in the store, good chance that human hands never touched it. Self-serve kiosks, touchless carwashes, Siri, tax prep software, ATMs and online banking, etc., etc., etc.
 
We've still got our fingers in the art pie, at least for a bit now. Although we can now synth entire orchestras well enough for movies and video games that even those are getting squeezed. It will be a bit before we have robot opera singers and ballet dancers, painters and graphic designers. But how many people do these things?
 
What jobs are there for the tens of millions of people who drive something for a living? Who work in the food service industry? Who work in investment and tax fields? Law? When machine learning does a better job of medical analysis, do we still train doctors to do that work? Do we still need that many doctors?
 
It's not going to be a fast shift, but this isn't like the other technical advances in history. I honestly don't know what jobs people losing their jobs to automation are going to find. Because anything I can think of could likely be done better and cheaper by a robot.

Re:Revolution

[HiThere]

I think you're ignoring the impressive amount of attention being given to military robots and drones. And I really doubt that the peasants in th middle east are the eventual targets.

Re:Revolution

[HiThere]

I think you have a very narrow view of the situation.

This is more similar to the period where the Roman Republic collapsed. (Granted, that wasn't due to automation, but there were lots of other similarities. And this may be more similar to the period a decade or so before the final collapse.)

The problem is that the new jobs that you are proposing don't exist...or are already filled. Even the time of the Enclosure Acts (in Britain) had more paths upwards than currently exist for those who are both poor and poorly educated. Those who are well educated are currently frequently burdened with a tremendous debt that would take decades of full employment to pay off, and which can't be discharged by bankruptcy. And the jobs often don't exist, or aren't available. (H1Bs are a part of the reason, but increasing automation is another, and another is the redesign and deskilling of jobs that existed while the training was in progress.)

This is an on-going process, by the way. It was certainly happening 50 years ago, but then it was happening a lot more slowly. It's been speeding up ever since then (by fits and starts) and is a part of the reason I subscribe to a weak form of the "technological singularity".

Re:Revolution

[HiThere]

Sorry, but almost all wealth is a social construct and only exists within the context of that society. When things break down, what is "wealth" changes. A good question is "How far did they break down?", because until you've answered that you don't know even whether owning a rifle is more important than knowing how to find water. Or whether a stash of gold has any value. Gold has value when the population is stable or increasing...but if things really break down that's a few decades away.

Now your stock certificates and gold bonds are only valuable after a truly minor breakdown. Ditto for your title to property. Etc.

The best hope is that we find a path through that avoid a breakdown, but current government policies make that seem a bit dubious. We may end up envying the Somali.

Re:Revolution

[Nethead]

So it wasn't just me that gets that vib from him.

Re: Revolution

[HiThere]

Who do you count in the "median income"?
Is it adult humans?
Is it adult males humans?
Is it those holding a job within the last 6 months?
Is it those currently holding a job?

The sample population makes a big difference. What's the source of your figures and who did they count? And was it the same both times?

Re: Revolution

[Dixie_Flatline]

Weren't the 70s a time of extremely high fuel prices and high interest rates? When you look at inflation, you have to account for what's inflated in cost. If fuel costs less but food costs more, that's a lot worse than fuel costing more and food costing less.

Re: Revolution

[tsqr]

Weren't the 70s a time of extremely high fuel prices and high interest rates?

Fuel prices definitely jumped. To nearly a dollar a gallon for regular gas. Fuel costs more now than it did then, but not 6 times more (the change in the purchasing power of a dollar from then to now). Mortgage interest rates peaked at around 18% (4.5x higher than today), but home prices were much, much lower than they are now, so even with high interest rates, the cost of home ownership was lower relative to today. I couldn't find a source that related prices in 1970 to prices within the last few years, but this one says the US median cost of a home in 1970 was $24,640, compared to $450,990 in 2004 (18x).

When you look at inflation, you have to account for what's inflated in cost. If fuel costs less but food costs more, that's a lot worse than fuel costing more and food costing less.

The comparison of 1970 to 2014 in terms of "dollar purchasing power" is, of course, some sort of average that is difficult to apply to individuals. If you have a lot of mouths to feed, then food prices are dominant. If you're single and have a long commute and drive a gas hog, then fuel prices are significant. If you're trying to buy a house in the middle of a housing bubble, then home prices are a big deal. If you're a hermit living in the middle of nowhere and raise your own food, then nothing matters much.

Re:Revolution

[lsatenstein]

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.

Is it possible that the roles will be different. Manufacturers will give away products, just so the factory can stay open.

Re: Revolution

[lsatenstein]

You seem to be under the impression that people without jobs will never have jobs.

Yes, eventually there will be a guaranteed minimum wage. Its being tested in Canada and some other countries.
The word welfare will disappear.

Re:Revolution

[Travoltus]

When you run out of money because you have no job.

Re:Revolution

[Travoltus]

You've never lived in Flint, MI have you?

Trouble ahead.

[sethstorm]

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.

who you calling Tiny?

[turkeydance]

don't make 'em mad.

Awesome!!

[EzInKy]

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.

Re:Awesome!!

[jenningsthecat]

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.

I'm pretty sure you're trolling, but I'll bite anyway, with this FTFY: "A future where everyone has no opportunity to work in order to survive, and has no other means with which to secure the necessities of survival, is a hellish future for the human race.

What makes you think the owners of all the businesses that employ all those robots will willingly support the rest of humankind? Do you really think they'll pay living wages even to those able "to contribute to the intellectual and spiritual growth of mankind"? What about those who aren't able to do so? Can you really see Roman Mir giving a portion of the profits of his business to unemployed and unemployable people, even though the raw materials which he uses in his products come from an Earth which in a moral sense is owned in common by all of humanity?

Re:Awesome!!

[EzInKy]

"A future where everyone has no opportunity to work in order to survive, and has no other means with which to secure the necessities of survival, is a hellish future for the human race.

I agree, it could be very nasty if the necessities of survival aren't provided to everybody. History is chock full of bloody revolutions.

What makes you think the owners of all the businesses that employ all those robots will willingly support the rest of humankind?

What makes you think the rest of humankind will support the owners of all those businesses?

Re:Awesome!!

[FlyHelicopters]

That is all true, until the 1% have Terminators...

Re:Awesome!!

[gtall]

Yep, those unemployed NRA members will be contributing to the intellectual and spiritual growth of mankind any day now...soon....shortly...just around the corner....

Re: Awesome!!

[Type44Q]

Mod the fuck up.

Re:Awesome!!

[Nethead]

Possession is 90% (99%?) of the law.

Kiva Robotics knockoff?

[tecker]

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?

Re:Kiva Robotics knockoff?

[aaarrrgggh]

They seem to have a larger family of robots than Kiva, but their "Kiva" pallet bots look a little less elegant in how they move and how handling is still done via forklift.

Re:Kiva Robotics knockoff?

[JanneM]

Kiva wasn't exactly first with any of that either. Quite often some new ideas are "in the air", as technology improves, with everybody taking and adapting bits and pieces off each other. It makes little sense to try to rank the different entrants as knock-offs or copies of another.

Re:Kiva Robotics knockoff?

[viperidaenz]

how do they keep the package from falling off?

They don't. If you look at the video in one of the links, it shows a robot tipping it's empty top down a chute... Its package must have fallen off some time after it was scanned and before it reached the drop off chute.

Labor is cheap in China

[aberglas]

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.

Re:Labor is cheap in China

[rkordmaa]

Newsflash, labor is China is not cheap anymore. Hasn't been for over a decade.

Re: Labor is cheap in China

[Type44Q]

Sorry to confuse you a d/or throw your presumably-pedantic point into disarray... but not cheaper than where??

You're wrong

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:You're wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I wouldn't count the peasants out so easily. Look at what ISIS has managed with small arms, home made explosives and some measure of grit. A less fanatical but no less determined group could have brought the governments to the bargaining table and won concessions in exchange for peace. Time and again history has demonstrated that groups that fight receive more and better concessions at the peace talks, even if they never would have won victory by strength of arms.

Re:You're wrong

[mentil]

hundred underfed pesants was no match for 10 well fed and trained knights

Debunked

Robots don't unionize

[rsilvergun]

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...

Re:Goodbye Amazon Employees

[viperidaenz]

Amazon already have robots that bring a shelf to a human to take an item and pack it in a box?
They're now trying to get the robots to pick the correct item from a shelf.

I assume they already have robots that scan the freight label and take it to the right place to be collected for shipping

if you haven't noticed..

[kiviQr]

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!?

In China ...

[PPH]

"tiny robot" is just a euphemism for child labor.

Re:Goodbye Amazon Employees

[pete6677]

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.

old news

[rakslice]

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.

Re:Goodbye Amazon Employees

[l810c]

There is this old slogan "Buy American"

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

Re:robots can't be dissidents.

[jbengt]

The question isn't whether these are cheaper to run than having people walking around the warehouse floor putting packages in the right chute. That's a given in all but the most wage-depressed places.
The question is whether this is cheaper to operate than a conventional automated conveyor system.

How to join micro and macro scale

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Orange robots?

[Tablizer]

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.

Re:Goodbye Amazon Employees

[Anonymous Coward]

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

You misspelled "bye,".

Re: Goodbye Amazon Employees

[cyber-vandal]

Yes that would be wonderful but what will actually happen is that a lot of people will struggle to buy necessities and those hoarding the money will call them lazy.