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What’s The Secret Behind Diapers.com Success? A Kiva Robot Warehouse
- die_sekte 16y agoWhoa. I wonder when we will see completely robotic warehouses.
- bradgessler 16y agoI believe the US Mint operates one.
- ThomPete 16y agoI am always reminded of what John Smart said in one of his lectures some years back. America lost 2 million jobs to the Chinese. But guess who the Chinese lost 15 million jobs to... the robots.
- koeselitz 16y ago... and I am reminded of what a friend of mine who worked in a warehouse said to me a while ago: "This is the most idiotic job on the planet. Someday they'll have robots to do this."
- skinnymuch 16y agoHah. I have this poster in my home office: http://www.despair.com/motivation.html http://www.despair.com/motivation.html It reads "if a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon."
- pbiggar 16y agoMy friend used to say 'never do a job which could be done by a one line Perl script'.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- philwelch 16y agoThe other way of looking at it is by thinking about old projections from the 1950's that by 1990, the entire female population of the United States would be employed as telephone switchboard operators. We would have more jobs than we could possibly need if it wasn't for those damned computers.
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoWhat then do we do with all the people that are suddenly deemed surplus to requirements.
- melling 16y agoI want all my non-perishables delivered this way. Let's get the robots to pack a more complex box.
- grinich 16y agoAmazon.com has food. http://www.amazon.com/grocery-breakfast-foods-snacks-organic/b?ie=UTF8&node=16310101 http://www.amazon.com/grocery-breakfast-foods-snacks-organic... It's a killer deal when combined with Amazon Prime (free 2-day shipping).
- covercash 16y agoAlso check out Amazon Subscribe & Save: http://www.amazon.com/gp/subscribe-and-save/details/index.html http://www.amazon.com/gp/subscribe-and-save/details/index.ht...
- d_c 16y agoWhere can I find out more about the algorithms they use? Multi-agent systems? Any suggestions?
- martincmartin 16y agoSeeGrid does something similar, but without having to modify the warehouse at all: http://www.seegrid.com/ http://www.seegrid.com/ It was started by CMU Roboticist and futurist Hans Moravec, as the culmination of his life's work to date.
- gmack 16y agoWait, they fly airplanes full of diapers to the West Coast!? I wonder what quantity of jet fuel exhaust gets spewed into the atmosphere, just so you can get diapers the next day. Even with the increased per-worker efficiency, is the overall environmental impact worse or better than cloth systems, or simply getting them from the corner store?
- ars 16y agoCloth diapers are worse for the environment compared to disposable, no matter how you get it. (Disposable uses landfill space of which we have unlimited quantities, but cloth uses water which is in short supply. Also cloth uses more energy.) But it's easy to tell if this method is better or worse for the environment: You have to pay for jet fuel, or truck fuel, or whatever. All forms of energy cost about the same. If it's cheaper to get it delivered via next day air, then it must have used less energy.
- xal 16y agoDo you have some more information on this? Our first will arrive within the next 2 weeks and this sounds really interesting.
- ars 16y agoOh, this is a massive debate, and more emotional than rational. "But cloth should be better! It just seems like it should be better!" Wikipedia is probably as good an introduction as any: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloth_diaper#Debate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloth_diaper#Debate Also, cloth diapers cause more rashes. (Unless there is an allergy to the disposable one, in which case it causes more.)
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago>cloth diapers cause more rashes. I'd heard the contrary (we use both cloth and compostable disposables), any citations? I can see how those using strong washing detergents could have problems, we use ecover and haven't had nappy rash problems (anecdotal I know).
- exit 16y agohow much of the work force will automation eventually render permanently unemployed? i'm not a luddite - i think this is inevitable and there's no point resisting it. but some of the consequences might be worth thinking through.
- TY 16y agoYou might want to check out this book, available as free PDF download: http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/ http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/ Quote: Where will advancing technology, job automation, outsourcing and globalization lead? Is it possible that accelerating computer technology was a primary cause of the current global economic crisis—and that even more disruptive impacts lie ahead? This groundbreaking book by a Silicon Valley computer engineer and entrepreneur explores these questions and shows how accelerating technology is likely to have a highly disruptive influence on our economy in the near future—and may well already be a significant factor in the current global crisis.
- Raphael 16y agoRedistribute some wealth from those profiting from automation to the unemployed.
- cmelbye 16y agoWhy?
- philwelch 16y agoThere are lots of arguments for wealth redistribution, but they boil down to two. One of them is that socialism is just. I find that absurd--socialism is unjust. The other argument is as follows: if there are enough of them and they get poor and desperate enough, they will burn down our houses, rape and murder our loved ones, and smash all of our things to bits. If things get bad enough, there will be a revolution and they will kill us all. That is not in our best interest.
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- mkramlich 16y agobabies babies and robots and organic search with a great domain name
- jdabney 16y agoWhat I can't believe is this company won't ship anything to Alaska or Hawaii. I don't understand how companies think that is acceptable.
- philwelch 16y agoIt's significantly less reliable, more expensive, and of extremely limited benefit to ship things to relatively unpopulated states in the middle of the ocean, or across two international borders into the Arctic. People are of course free to live in those places, but they're not free to demand the rest of the world to accommodate their decision.
- jdabney 16y agoI would completely agree if companies had to setup their own shipping infrastructures to ship to these places; but they don't. Companies like FedEx, UPS, etc, already do this for you and they already ship to places like Alaska and Hawaii. Just charge the customer the extra shipping they are charged by the shipper and let it be at that.
- pbiggar 16y agoAlternatively, make it illegal to only offer shipping to the lower 48, so that the fringe states don't end up in the third world. This (I believe) is what the UK does with Northern Ireland.
- util 16y ago"We" for some value of "we" accept companies aiming at making money. If they're not shipping to Alaska or Hawaii, that suggests there's some reason they believe it wouldn't be profitable, right? If Alaska and Hawaii are really under-served, that seems like an opportunity for someone -- you? -- looking to make a buck.
- rakslice 16y agoSince this is basically what Piggly Wiggly brought to the world of grocery retail in 1916, but with the customers replaced by robots (tee-hee), I wonder how long it will be before robots do the moving around of products at a supermarket near you? Whether I shop at a warehouse store, or I go to the big department store and or supermarket chain stores that are all evolving into the same kind of 150,000+ sq. ft. 'everything' store (i.e. warehouse stores with better product packaging and shinier floors), I can see that retailers are already doing warehouse-sized volume in cities all over the planet.
- leej 16y agoafaik, amazon does not use this kind of tech, at least for most of the shipments. does anyone know why? not ready for amazon-scale operations?
- daveyb100 16y agoCan you imagine working in that warehouse? A never-ending series of tasks brought to you by a being that never stops, sleeps or wants to know what you're doing at the weekend. A job that requires no intelligence and is endlessly monotonous. That is a vision of hell. I think they have solved one problem but created a dozen others.