Autonomous Forklift May Eat Up Warehouse Jobs (technologyreview.com)

Jamie Condliffe reports via MIT Technology Review: Seegrid, a provider of material-handling equipment, takes the kinds of forklifts that move 8,000-pound loads around warehouses and makes them autonomous. It does that by popping five stereo cameras on top of the vehicles, having a human drive them around to map a space, and then using image recognition systems similar to those in autonomous cars to navigate the facilities. (Unlike autonomous cars that use sensors like radar and lidar, Seegrid can use just cameras, because lighting conditions in warehouses are more consistent than those on the open road.) But while it's easy enough to have a forklift move objects from one side of a factory to another, reliably loading and unloading them poses a bigger challenge. Other robots designed to haul loads like this tend to pick things up from below, rather than spearing pallets with forks. So autonomous forklifts usually require humans to be present during pickup and dropoff to make sure nothing goes wrong. Seegrid's new GP8 Series 6 forklift has been engineered to reverse its forks into pallets, pick them up, and set them down without a human in the loop.

Comments

Thanks Seegrid!

[FunkSoulBrother]

Another small but vital step in getting a UBI in place in this country. :-)

Re: Thanks Seegrid!

[LordWabbit2]

Agreed, my sister works for a large retailer and she was part of their team to implement automated loading. In their case however a lot of it WAS purely to remove the human element from the equation.

The reason being is that every year during the xmas peak times the forklift drivers would strike and demand higher wages. That forced them to get in part time workers to at least keep stock moving, of course the strikers don't like that so often there is violence and they have to get private security to protect the part time workers (often school kids on summer break - yeah it's summer here over xmas).

Also theft (or "shrinkage" in retailer talk) is bad enough that it was also a contributing factor in removing humans from the loop. Some of the stock still needs humans, but all the dry goods are automated, and they are looking at automating the rest.

This is obvious hogwash

[rsilvergun]

I have it on good authority by top experts on /. from previous threads about automation that there will be no job losses from automation. Also, skyrocketing productivity has had no negative impact on wages or employment. See, when it comes to labor the law of supply/demand is reversed. When demand for labor goes down it actually _increases_ its value. I know, crazy, right?

Re: This is obvious hogwash

[Maxo-Texas]

Buggy whips were not replaced by electrically powered artificial humans who cost less than $40,000 per year per shift.

Re: This is obvious hogwash

[Entrope]

You're right; they were replaced by nothing, because automobiles made horse-drawn buggies essentially obsolete. What was your point? Mine was that rsilvergun presented such a distorted version of the march-of-progress argument that it's hard to see any good faith behind presenting the distorted version.

Re: This is obvious hogwash

[Maxo-Texas]

No no.. you missed the metaphor...

Humans are not buggy whip makers. They are horses.

Re:This is obvious hogwash

[bluefoxlucid]

It's kind of an argument between "knives don't cause wounds" and "any contact with a knife will leave a permanent, bleeding wound and you die!"

Technical progress reduces labor. It boots people out of jobs. This also reduces the cost and, thus, risk of entering and operating in a market. For higher-cost goods, you expand your market, moving luxuries down to commodities. The same pressures that set the price point before (competition, consumer interest) create a new price point. Consumers will tolerate something costing $50 if the best price they can get is $48; but if the next guy in town has it for $30, they're leaving your store and going to his. They might not leave your state for a 5-hour drive (but hey, Ebay, Amazon...).

Prices don't always come down. For a core basket of goods, the Fed indexes inflation and prints up money to make sure prices go up; wages just go up slightly-faster. For some other goods (notably cars and electronics), people buy at a certain price point relative to their income, and manufacturers keep moving more tech into the bottom end and thus provide that price point with ever-increasing features, thus maintaining the same usage of the labor pool per unit of product (look at the history of standard features in cars). New goods tend to be luxury goods, and comparable goods tend to index against each other, so of course a $5,000 OLED 55-inch TV becomes a $3,500 TV, compared to a $500 LED IPS--and it will eventually be a $500 OLED IPS.

So yes, you're going to see a loss of jobs.

That thing where prices come down--where the proportion of middle-income spent on a product shrinks--leaves people at every income level with left-over spending power after buying the same things. Nothing is zero-labor, and so buying more stuff invokes additional labor. Even self-driving freight trucks and automated warehouses need some form of logistics management, some (minimal) IT behind them, electricity generation, maintenance, all the mining of materials and fuels that goes behind that, and so forth. Load on supporting infrastructure increases, and we suddenly need both high-end engineers and low-end basic labor.

So what really happens here?

Well, if you eliminate 20% of the jobs in 6 months, the economy doesn't even hardly keep up. Welcome to the Great Depression! Even my Universal Social Security probably won't hold up against that very well--it might not even weaken the recession enough to stave off the dire consequences. It'll let Americans shrug off the Great Recession no problem, but anything significantly-larger would be an ... interesting academic study, albeit a painful one. America might collapse as a nation despite any effort I can come up with.

If you eliminate 20% of the jobs over 3-4 years, the economy might sweat a little up-front, and it'll make pace with the rate of change before the end of the first year. You'll start on a mild recession, and then start holding it back, and then start recovering while the recession is trying to get worse.

One of these looks just fine from the perspective of national economy, but you'll get hell from the truckers and warehouse workers who lost their jobs. Everything is not fine for them; it will be in a little while, or else unemployment will go up and up and up as your economy dies, but up-front they're going to be carrying the load. Let's also not forget that we face around 5% unemployment constantly, so they're all tossed in a pool with other people who are trying to recover--as individuals, any of them could get left behind.

That' why we need welfare systems: we're all getting richer off the backs of a few unfortunates. When you buy a product, you must pay enough to generate revenue to cover all the wages involved for the time spent per-unit by every human involved in making that product. Get fewer humans to do it and the prices come down, and now you can buy two things; and there's a little gap in there where you're getting

Re:This is obvious hogwash

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you? A forty year old middle manager envious of the younger kids that surpassed you into VP/director/CEO positions?

These systems are already in use. If XYZ company is incompetent and can't get it to work, they fail. If they do get it to work they either a) get to take home much higher profits or b) reduce prices to compete.

Either situation is good because now you have higher economic output per person. Either everyone buying the product gets it for less and has more money to buy other goods OR there is a set of rich company owners who now have more money to spend. The unemployed *at this job* can now work for the company owners in some OTHER, previously non-existent capacity or can invent something to sell the general population that now has more money.

This exact thing has been happening since the dawn of human civilization and is how we went from 100% of our waking hours being related to surviving to now barely any of our time is surviving and the rest is "extra" economic output - entirely made to fill the time void created by our basic needs being met. The remaining time is spent on arts (music, movies, TV, photography, painting, literature), entertainment (hundreds of sports, video games, parties, events, etc.), hobbies, services (hair styling & coloring, fancy restaurant food/service, electronics, appliances, unnecessary upgrade to necessities (fancy homes, fancy drinks, fancy food) etc.

You are an idiot if you think this "extra" component won't continue to expand since it is already probably over 95%+ of economic output if you strip out unnecessary components (e.x.. a home/hotel built with marble or eating a fancy restaurant meal are not necessary)