https://blog.robotiq.com/bid/65024/TakkTile-Sensors-for-Indu...
The technology has applications in the robot sex work industry.
LLM isn't going to drive a forklift; it needs more agency than a textbox in order to do that.
But it's really going to be products (ex. Microsoft Word) rather than a technology (ex. Electricity) that'll replace jobs (ex. Typists).
In reality, I'm a strong supporter of everything above. Maybe we can really provide people better jobs by delegating repetitive and boring things to machines and allow everyone to do something they enjoy to earn their lives.
One can dream, I guess...
Machines are anything but reliable. They need constant servicing and maintenance and still break entirely
When you are not budget constrained, and building things for businesses, a little overengineering goes a long way.
I have a Xerox 7500DN color laser printer next to me, and it's working for more than 20 years at this point. It has gone through a lot of spares, but most (if not all) issues are from parts wearing down naturally. Nothing breaks unexpectedly on that. Same for robots. Give enough design budget, overengineer a little, and that thing will be one hell of an ugly but reliable machinery.
When you work with real "industrial" stuff, the landscape is very different.
If you keep up the maintenance plan for machines they rarely break before their predicted retirement date when you replace them. And since the maintenance and retirement dates are predicted in advance you can plan for them and thus ensure they happen when you want them to.
There are options to deal with your shitty knees, hip, and back, but none of them get you back to 100% of your original capabilities and, carry an element of gambling, and will involve the kinds of painkillers that can ruin you far more comprehensively than a shitty joint will.
https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+raise+wages+warehouse
FWIW I design industrial equipment for meat processing plants, where you'd be lucky to get 6-7 months out of a robot arm. I wish it was affordable to use robotics there, because there's a lot that could be done to eliminate some truly awful jobs.
We are now switching over to a self optimizing system approach.
We had big data and didn't do anything with it but now whenever we do something with an LLM, we give it feedback, its getting processed benchmarked stored and used.
ChatGPT 3 was not impressive because it was good, it was impressive because it showed everyone that we started this ara now. This lead to massive reallocation of resources around the globe from a human and money perspective.
Whatever we had with ChatGPT-3 was build with humans and money significant less than what we now have. Which leads to progress unseen before and this will continue at least for now.
Additionally, this is now a common feature in CMS space, automated translation of content and assets.
The later is a much easier problem.
Robots also get cheaper over time because we learn. You can buy many parts in bulk including computer libraries to control them. You can find many people who know best practices who will not make some of the early mistakes that cost money.
It is strange how this isn't obvious
Also, from the comments:
"My favorite thing about this is how 2 weeks after this video went up, they had an accident where two robots collided and caused a gigantic fire that cost them like 50 million dollars."
One of these things can be fixed, the other will always be a risk as long as humans are involved.
That's correct, the second one can get fixed with higher wages and benefits, like when Ford introduced the “$5 a day” (doubling market average).
Wonder if the matter has been resolved.
It’s a shame that the problems being solved are embedded within a business that embodies throwing things away at the first sign of weakness. I’m still upset they bought what seemed on track to be a nice successor to Simple Bank. Now it’s been pivoted again for the third time since acquisition.
Interesting to know companies are still using them as a means to automate their work.
They purchased an AutoStore, then reverse engineered it, made a few changes, and claimed it as their own invention.
This seems difficult to square with your claim that Ocado "just copied AutoStore". (I suppose it's not quite inconsistent with it; maybe Ocado copied a pile of things that AutoStore never patented, and the patented bits were always a sideshow?)
I just looked at videos of the two technologies and it seems difficult to ignore the relationship.
Perhaps this is a case of "technically correct", i.e. that they technically did not infringe the patents, but that in practice they leveraged as much as they could around the patent claims?
Ocado's initial patents as well were actually modifications of Autostore's robots, running on an Autostore grid, and Autostore manufactured the robots to Ocado's specification before Ocado decided to build the whole thing themselves.
So hard to argue that it wasn't a copy.
IMO I think the UK patent victory was a bit of a joke... Ocado's innovation of the robot above a single cell is both obvious, but also has it's own obvious downsides.
Their patents were invalidated in the U.S. due to "inequitable conduct or equitable estoppel" meaning either that Autostore violated someone else's patents or that they led Ocado to believe that Ocado was not violating Autostore's patents in some way. Both parties indicate that the latter happened, but the usual remedy is just a mandatory license, so the invalidation of the patents indicates that the former also occurred. (https://www.autostoresystem.com/investors-press-releases/aut...)
A system that works well with 15 robots will often fall apart if scaled up to 150 or 1500 robots. Reliability, planning algorithm complexity, radio performance, all sorts of issues start to come up.
That’s why Hatteland patented the autostore tech in ~1995 and by the time the patents expired they only supported ~100 robots.
It’s not always easy to appreciate, because everyone publicises when they install a new automation system, but nobody publicises it if they scrap it 18 months later. Being discreet about it is better for the share price.
Of course there’s still a perfectly good market for less scalable automation; grocery just has crazy financials.
Amazon uses a lot higher stacked spaces than Ocado does.
Are there any real numbers you can reference than just stating that Ocados way is better?
Specifically, both of them had to stop using black-colored boxes and move graphics in from box boundaries.
The factory of the future will have only two employees, one human and one dog.
- The human feeds the dog.
- The dog makes sure no one touches the equipment.
No need for a human to feed the dog, a robot will refill the dog feeder.
I think the solution might be multiple dogs.
In hindsight, I think they were completely right and I feel kind of lucky that they drilled that in so much, because even into my mid 30's I don't have a ton of trouble or resistance to picking up new things. Sometimes I don't love the way new tech is going [1], but I still try my best to keep up with what's in demand in the industry (generally looking at job boards and looking at their keywords and making sure I have at least a cursory understanding of the stuff they're talking about). I will admit I don't completely love that AI is being used instead of junior engineers in some cases, largely because a lot of AI code is shit or flatout wrong in non-obvious ways, but I still have tried my best to utilize it and learn from it because it's clearly the way that things are going. [2]
I've been hired and lost/quit more desk jobs than anyone I know, and I attribute my ability to find work quickly to this characteristic.
[1] e.g. treating memory like it's infinite, disregarding CPU performance as a means of "getting more shit done", making configurations (arguably) needlessly complicated like Kubernetes, etc.
[2] For example, my latest project has been building an HLS and Icecast "infinite radio station" which picks a random song from my collection, feeds a prompt to OpenAI for DJ chatter in between songs,
As a higher income individual I conversely seem to have a lot of time to study and am not given a constant stream of work I must complete every moment. I also have the benefit of working from home and being able to spend a lot on training and upskilling.
When you are poorer you typically don't get this. The vast majority of your income is spent at the end of the week. Your job gives you zero time to explore and learn more. You likely commute and and may have a second job to make ends meet.
Just saying 'learn to code' here doesn't address the systematic issues.
Generally, though, I'm against the arguments of "automation is bad cuz less jobs". I think that might be true in the very short term, but we're never going to have a case where "all possible work is done", because that's a completely malformed premise. There's pretty much an infinite amount of potential work to do.
The short term matters. It's zero comfort to a factory worker who has lost his job if there will be another, better job for him in a year or two. He still needs to eat between now and then, and he can't buy food with pie in the sky promises of future employment.
The reason for AFAIK, my understanding is it is more common for people to be left behind than to transition entirely to a new industry. (That is my memory of seeing some data around that, not saying I'm correct, but that I find it just as plausible to speculate that industrial transitions don't always transition with the same workers.) Perhaps we should talk farming? That is the biggest example pethaps. Some 80% plus of all populations used to do agriculture. The Grapes of Wraith were all about this very topic.
I wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to forcing companies to pay some amount per month to people whose jobs were automated away for N years, and/or providing job training for a new career.
Just like how it was bad to have kids crawling around in the textile factories back in the day.
I agree with you. And yet, the people who are working those jobs are doing so because they need them to get by, not for funsies. They will not be better off if they lose that job and there's no income stream to replace it. The two must go hand in hand or you're just ruining people's lives.
The people making the decisions to replace their workforce with AI and automation are doing so to maximize their profits, not to improve society or the quality of any life but their own.
Assuming you aren't a member of the capitalist class, and thus complicit, you don't have a say in the matter. They aren't putting the future they're implementing up to a vote. They don't care if you want it. They don't care if you die in the street like a dog.
Isn't that a pretty tiny number?
I assume a human probably does 1 every 5 seconds (it's much easier to put an item on a shelf than to take it off).
So that's about 5 months human output.
In this case, legislation could help ameliorate this problem, and maybe taxing the actual cost of things (e.g. environmental impact) instead of just letting the future generations deal with it.
Most of what you said can be applied reflexively.
Humans will and agency is the foundation of society. It is required to pass legislation or taxes as well.
What I do think is powerful is cultivating anti-consumerism or selective consumption behavior and belief. The desire for reparability falls within within this.
"People should just" pass legislation would be specific to congress, so not quite the same thing, or at least not the kind of argument that I was referring to. You're free to think it's a dumb argument but there's a slight pedantic difference.
Isn't that even worse? In that case it's entirely externalizing the problem.
I think I take the opposite position to you. I think that arguments (or discussions) about society at large are the most important and critical.
I think there is a common trend to ignore and dismiss the importance of decentralized social values and individual choice, instead only focusing on concrete policy proposals.
The latter is almost never productive without consensus on the former. If 90% of people want disposable crap, it will be difficult to shove a law down their throat preventing them from getting it.
Either way, as a result of being triggered by social opinions, you seems to miss the point of the parent post, namely, that right to repair only addresses a tiny fraction of consumerism, nor is it a prerequisite to buy less garbage in general.
The solution to people buying single use toys and inflatable Jacuzzis on Amazon is not to mandate their repairability.
To be clear, this isn’t to say community outreach is bad or a waste of time. I think getting the larger populous onboard with the narrative that you think is going to make the world best is a good thing, please don’t let me stop you.
I have mostly seen these arguments pop up with giving teenagers access to birth control, with conservatives saying stuff like “people should just stop having sex out of wedlock” or something to that effect, and act that argument along is an insightful or useful comment.
It points out that the tax doesn't solve the actual problem. It points out that any solution will require people not wanting to go to church. It is not a complete instructions set.
I think you are confusing use in normative statements (value judgments or opinions) with instructional statements (step by step how to).
You can assume that that’s the kind of person you’re conversing with but you’d be wrong.
I agree with you on taxing things to account and pay for externalities.
I mostly have a visceral reaction to "people should just.." arguments because I heard stuff like that brought up a lot during abortion arguments, particularly in regards to birth control.
"Teenagers should just stop having sex!!" was something I thought was particularly dumb, because a) have they never been a teenager? that's all a lot of them think about cuz hormones and b) whether or not they should, they're going to anyway.
Anyway, sorry for the kind of pissy response, no offense meant.
For example, my dad was an electrical engineer who could fix any radio or TV. Reality: radios & TVs were relatively expensive AND the circuits within them were relatively large (observable with the naked eye or at least a magnifying glass). Today "repair" means at most replacing a capacitor although it's often cheaper & more efficient to just swap out a board. That of course assumes the board is still being manufactured and there are costs for companies to continue doing that, especially how fast technology moves forward.
Of course there are reasonable rights to repair we should have like being able to replace the software with software of our choosing, being able to modify parts within things we own, etc. But it won't be like it was prior to the 2000s where you could actually meaningfully enact repairs on electronic components by swapping out small easily available generic parts.
There are also secondary considerations like security that we haven't figured out technical answers to for right to repair (i.e. right to repair today also often means right to inject security vulnerabilities).
So repair shops fill the gap for all these smaller companies and factories to get support higher than the on staff maintenance. Not everything is fixable though. They may use unique hardware signatures on drives or FPGA's or PAL's with security bit enabled. That has been true for a while though. Even in consolidation there is still plenty of business and repairs to be made.
Conversely the medically industry might be a good example. Anyone making medical equipment has to provide documentation on it. Which makes them far more repairable and easily diagnosable.
TV's especially are peak commodity. They are so cheap that the skilled labor cost to fix them isn't economically. They also are not easily transportable so repair and resell is a rough business for them. Things like laptops and phones though seems much more reasonable. Plenty of people do that professionally or even as a hobby. I like a large portion of repairs on those types of devices can be fairly economical and Chinese part makers provide plenty of affordable parts. It would cost OEM's extra to keep these parts in stock, but it's not a terrible hard task. Providing schematics also isn't a huge ask. Most are reverse engineered anyway.
When it comes to security I think this is fairly simple. Provide a blank security chip and create a secure method to connect and program it. Apple does this with its self repair when it comes to matching hardware UID's in the firmware so all the functionality is unlocked. Companies like Apple and Samsung can keep their Knox and Secure Enclave/exclave. Data can be seen as something that is not repairable in most cases. But they can provide the parts the secure a device again and leave it as a blank slate.
The biggest problem with Right to Repair is pricing. Right now Chinese makers can whip out parts for really cheap. Comparing to official parts from Apple or Google or Samsung when they did sell them and they are way higher and sometimes prohibitively so. Would be better to treat it like auto parts. Where you can get the OEM part or the third party part and both can work. Some things like security would need to be first party, but that would be a great deal. So it's doable, but would require a LOT of political will against tech companies. So it's just a really tough sell to get to that point.
Casinos provide free drinks, cartels offer free prostitutes, it's not unprecedented.
Because people will spend money. The premise here is no-one has money, but somehow adverts exist.
So the easy solution is just to pay a lot and threaten to fire (and possibly blacklist) anyone who no-shows. Since the pay is much higher than they can get elsewhere, the people are much more likely to show up.
The high pay probably also helped find people who would tolerate the extremely intrusive practices of Ford's "morality police" (my term), who would inspect worker's homes to ensure they were living "the right way".
See: Dodge vs Ford
It's a bit more nuanced than that. The court held that company directors have to be acting for the benefit of shareholders. They still have wide latitude about how to do that.
The reason Ford lost is because his legal position was essentially "I am king, therefore I can do whatever I want". But you can't do whatever you want. You can't lock the workers in the factory and burn it down with them inside, for example. You need to have some kind of colorable argument that what you are doing is somehow in the interest of shareholders (either long or short term).
The problem for Ford was that he couldn't articulate any reason for how his actions were beneficial to shareholders (probably because the real reason, killing the Dodge Brothers Company, would have been illegal under the antitrust laws of the time).
The Dodge brothers were major investors in Ford Motor Company, and thus entitled to a large share of dividends. Henry Ford tried to bankrupt the Dodge Motor Company by avoiding to pay FoMoCo dividends and thus starve his competitor of cash. The fact that the mechanism Ford used to make his own company unprofitable (and thus avoid paying dividends) also benefited the workers is just coincidence.
In fact the reason we have the modern precedent "companies must operate for the benefit of shareholders" is precisely because Henry Ford's defense in Dodge v. Ford was "I can do this because I want to and I am king". If he had argued "paying workers more makes them happier and thus makes Ford more profitable in the long term", Ford probably would have won that lawsuit. He didn't make that argument because it just wasn't on his radar: His goal was screwing Dodge.
He routinely would keep dialing it up and up and up until too many people rage quit and then dial it down just a notch.
One of the first things unions negotiated for when they stated was control of that knob.
What you are describing is a political problem, not one for entrepreneurs. IMO the solution would be a form of UBI that we can smoothly increase as automation in fact removes jobs or lowers wages. I'd like to see that start ASAP, but OTOH we are still close to record-low unemployment and the last years saw the largest wage increases at the lower end in decades.
The most successful entrepreneurs like Bezos are also the biggest political influencers, and instead of UBI they are advocating for less tax for themselves.
>I'd like to see that start ASAP, but OTOH we are still close to record-low unemployment and the last years saw the largest wage increases at the lower end in decades.
The last years also saw the highest rates of inflation in decades. Even basic necessities are the least affordable they've been in a long time, let alone something like housing.
Look at street markets in countries with high wealth disparity. The well-off wouldn't shop or eat there, and they certainly wouldn't invest in a street vendor, the vendors are meant to serve the needs of people in poverty.
See Citigroup's plutonomy paper[1] that explores what that would look like and what investment strategies investors should take. The tl;dr is that the formal economy will abandon lower classes in favor of making a ton of money serving plutocrats and their friends and families instead.
Say someone who is has driven a taxi all their life or driven a forklift. They can appreciate how adding air-conditioning to their vehicle allows them to drive in hotter days, therefore they can do more work. But automating their whole job away with autonomous vehicles doesn't benefit them, so they don't want it.
Personally, I think those people can't be picky about their jobs. If you do something that is automatable, you will be out of a job sooner or later. When that happens, don't get mad and go find another soon-to-be automated job.
All those jobs in Detroit that went away were replaced by…? As best I can tell they were replaced by poverty and crime.
It's more an example of how racism and reliance on singular industry can quickly create pits that are largely insurmountable. Similar cases can be found in coal country in Appalachia. The lesson isn't to prop up local industry to maintain job and economic stability. The lesson is to stage out disruption. ILA recently took this on with automation in shipping. The goal isn't to prevent automation but to not give companies a blank check to mass fire workers and replace them with automation.
Inflation-adjusted wages are at all time highs in the middle.
Inflation-adjusted wages are at all time highs at the bottom.
https://data.epi.org/wages/hourly_wage_percentiles/line/year...
https://data.epi.org/wages/hourly_wage_percentiles/line/year...
Job quality is deteriorating, more people are holding more than one job, part time jobs are increasingly common, almost half of US workers are in low-wage jobs, wages have stagnated... It's a nice statistic, but unemployment rates don't tell much of the story on the ground, in people's lived experiences. That side of the story is overwhelmingly getting worse.
Robotic workers lower operational costs and can make goods more accessible, and it's common for various manual labour jobs to be lost when industries change - the labour shifts elsewhere, and generally higher.
(If this wasn't true, unemployment would have constantly grown worldwide since the first automaton replaced a human job or government outlawed certain manual industries, which isn't the case. Workforces do and must adapt to needs and trends.)
But there's a very, very big difference between "automate dumb task with unimpressive efficiency that beats humans because humans have to pee, eat and sleep", and AI supplanting humans in society.
Robots isn't an important step in that path tbh. Intelligence is, and we still aren't close, even when throwing entire hyperscale datacenters at the problem...
Amazing how that bit of PR is still being quoted over 100 years later. In reality, Ford had huge turnover problems with his workers - one estimate is over 370% annual turnover. One way to help prevent turnover is to pay more, and it solved the problem. (Even so, the base pay was still actually $2.30 and to get the extra $2.70 you had to abstain from alcohol, keep your home clean, etc.)
https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/henry-ford-implements-5...
In exchange, in the long term they won't be able to afford the cars they produce anymore.
Still it's tough to beat a place where you can walk in with no skills and start making $20/hr
That bad, huh?
If you're curious can read the subreddit /r/amazonfc
They did recently start allowing you to buy their own approved headphones but before you'd get written up for being on your phone/having headphones in
I'd rather see quality improve, even at a reasonable cost increase, and the disappearance of the alphabet soup brands and similar.
omneity•9h ago
The demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWXco05eK28
krapp•9h ago
wielebny•8h ago
Not slower than human stocking items for a whole day.
vntok•8h ago
nosrepa•8h ago
CoastalCoder•8h ago
ta1243•8h ago
CoastalCoder•8h ago
cusaitech•6h ago
dataviz1000•8h ago
CraigRood•8h ago
dlt713705•8h ago
krapp•8h ago
There's a reason human beings are worked to the point of exhaustion in these warehouses - the goal is to move as much product as fast as possible. Quality and productivity are at cross purposes, and between the two only the latter makes money.
dlt713705•8h ago
krapp•8h ago
reverius42•8h ago
bigtunacan•7h ago
bluGill•7h ago
FirmwareBurner•7h ago
Fillpy the robot will not:
All those pale in comparison to repair costs. That's why companies are pushing for automation. Because Flippy does its job quietly and diligently 24/7 without complaining.maintainarmsx•7h ago
mapt•7h ago
WillAdams•8h ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/EDC/comments/dmnuts/53mamazon_fulfi...
and Inbound (or the previous person picking) was usually a bit less careful.
usrusr•8h ago
If five cheap robots outperform a single skilled worker, robots win. But depending on jurisdiction, those five robots might still lose to a dozen or so slaves kept near starvation. For the skilled worker it's bad news one way or the other.
bluGill•8h ago
DrillShopper•8h ago
Wait until LLMs get better and destroy the ability for junior developers to get their foot in the door.
warrenmiller•7h ago
_Algernon_•7h ago
mystified5016•7h ago
dec0dedab0de•7h ago
DrillShopper•5h ago
(The suits think that's a good thing)
LoganDark•8h ago
bluGill•7h ago
Yes some are better than others. However there is still a vast gulf in skill between those people than engineers (much less doctors), while the gap between them and someone off the street is much less. (the article doesn't say how long it takes someone to get to that high skilled state or even if it is possible to train to that level - if someone can show me data on this I might change my mind on skill)
dullcrisp•7h ago
LoganDark•5h ago
Dylan16807•6h ago
pixl97•1h ago
usrusr•5h ago
bluGill•3h ago
Several months of me as a doctor and I'd still be incompetent.
bluGill•7h ago
A restaurant can improve performance during the "lunch rush" by letting neat slip, but that carelessness is already costing them performance at the end of the lunch rush - this works because just as this catches up they get several hours in the afternoon to clean things up. Then supper crowd where they do it again - then they have the rest of the night to clean up from that. (the restaurants I worked in didn't have a breakfast rush, YMMV)
A factory by contrast needs to keep things neat and consistent all the time because there is never a rush/downtime. They want things rolling off the line at a consistent pace all day. Any compromise for speed now is a cost latter in the day.
I have never been in an Amazon warehouse so I don't have great insight into what things are like. I would expect they want to be more consistent all day - but I don't know. Maybe all the trucks arrive at once and then they get time when they are gone to clean up. I wouldn't expect that, but maybe.
zaphar•7h ago
potato3732842•6h ago
Look at the above restaurant example, the system has a built in buffer to handle spikes so it can be cheaper or make other tradeoffs everywhere else compared to an equivalently performant system that can do 100% duty cycle.
A robot or human that can deal with messy inventory is facilitating positive tradeoffs elsewhere in the system.
seadan83•4h ago
The saying I do believe has a difference between robots and humans. The idea largely being that human inaccuracy increases exponentially relative to speed. Ergo, slowing down can lead to dramatically bette accuracy and throughput. Though, robots don't necessarily lose accuracy because they are moving more quickly. Though, I'd agree it is likely that both humans and robots need "smooth" in order to be fast. The key difference is robots do not always lose smooth when moving at high speed.
esperent•8h ago
djtango•8h ago
spwa4•7h ago
abricot•7h ago
From the article:
> “When you’re a person doing this task, you’ve got a buffer of 20 or 30 items, and you’re looking for an opportunity to fit those items into different bins, and having to remember which item might go into which space. But the robot knows all of the properties of all of our items at once, and we can also look at all of the bins at the same time along with the bins in the next couple of pods that are coming up. So we can do this optimization over the whole set of information in 100 milliseconds.”
raisedbyninjas•7h ago
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LightBug1•7h ago
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