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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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]

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.

who you calling Tiny?

[turkeydance]

don't make 'em mad.

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?

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.

Re:Goodbye Amazon Employees

[l810c]

There is this old slogan "Buy American"

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

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,".