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> The robots were too efficient. They could bring items so quickly that the productivity expectations for workers more than doubled, according to a former senio

> The robots were too efficient. They could bring items so quickly that the productivity expectations for workers more than doubled, according to a former senior operations manager who saw the transformation. And they kept climbing. At the most common kind of warehouse, workers called pickers – who previously had to grab and scan about 100 items an hour – were expected to hit rates of up to 400 an hour at robotic fulfillment centers. The gist of the message above. It seems that robots made the process so efficient that workers were suffering from repetitive motion injuries. It also would seemed to be a matter of time that the packing/picking will be fully replaced by robots. At which time Amazon will no longer have a safety issue, but an entire separate political issue.

BelleOfTheBall 6y ago
They'd get rid of their union 'problems' and face a whole other crisis. But that wouldn't really stop Amazon and I'm sure bad PR isn't as expensive as having to pay out workers who got injured because they couldn't keep up with 'supreme' robotic workers.
Animats 6y ago
The robots were too efficient. They could bring items so quickly that the productivity expectations for workers more than doubled Here's an old Kiva Robotics video that shows how picking works.[1] It's an utterly mindless job. An automated laser pointer points to the bin from which to take an object. A lighted button shows which box to put it in. A new bin then moves into position, and this goes on. Training time required is about 30 seconds. Amazon liked the system and bought Kiva. The company, not just the system. So anyone with basic eye-hand coordination can do picking, computers check that it's done right, there's no future in the job, and Amazon is trying to automate the picking process anyway. Classic assembly-line job. [1] https://youtu.be/CWNuaPE4DTc https://youtu.be/CWNuaPE4DTc
- Klinky 6y ago
  Well, until it's fully automated, human safety is still important. I think the problem we have is that destroying a human body with mindless repetitive tasks is often still "cheaper" than engineering an automated solutions. It is simply cheaper to feed off desperation than to value human lives, and there is the engrained notion that humanity cannot be productive without putting humans into positions of desperation. This is a mindset issue that needs to eventually change.
  - Aperocky 6y ago
    When I was a graduate student, the lab next door was working on robotic arms and picking challenges, their PhD grad was then hired by... Amazon. I don't think it's cheaper, it's just that a solution has yet to exist. Once it start working, it will go out at breakneck pace.
    - Klinky 6y ago
      I'd imagine hiring PhDs to work on hard problems is not cheap, and I doubt Amazon would invest unless they believed that the long-term investment would result in a cheaper outcome than what they have now. The problem is that human labor has been so cheap that automation is often not even worth any R&D effort for most companies. If human labor cost more, this would cause more impetus upstream to find automated solutions. Also the burger-flipping robot and self-driving car have been just around the corner for the last two decades. Although the end solution to those issues may very well be that we need to stop eating so many burgers and stop designing cities around cars, rather than robots coming in to allow even more consumption.
      - gowld 6y ago
        Full automation is always out of reach, but McDonald's is extremely automated.
        Klinky 6y ago
        Is that automation or scale? Doing things on a large scale can be more efficient and require less labor, but McDonald's is still hiring people to do effectively the same thing in the stores as they did 50 years ago. A lot of industrial food tech is not new or cutting edge, and has limits, like you can't freeze dry a fully-made hamburger for later consumption.
        Animats 6y ago
        That problem was solved over 50 years ago, but it wasn't cost effective.[1] [1] https://youtu.be/FmXLqImT1wE https://youtu.be/FmXLqImT1wE
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  This is why I see capitalism eventually failing. On one hand, I think it's great that these mind-numbingly boring jobs can be automated away. On the other hand, the end result is that more profits go to Amazon, while many more people have fewer opportunities to participate in the economy. For the old predictable arguments of "Well, these people can do something else, do you expect buggy whip makers to still be around?" - at some point if the rate of automation is faster than people are able to retrain, and faster than the economy is able to create new opportunities for these people, the outcome is still the same: all the benefits of capitalism go to very few people while huge swaths of people are made "redundant".
  - throwawaysea 6y ago
    Is that a failure of capitalism or of our education systems or simply an oversupply of humans?
    - TeaDrunk 6y ago
      An oversupply of humans?
      - ci5er 6y ago
        Well, we do replicate. Maybe not as much as rabbits. And, recently, we die less in childbirth and infant-hood. So - even with falling childbirth rates, we still tend to multiply a bit. But given that absolute and relative global poverty rates and starvation rates and disease mortality rates have plummeted and population grows dramatically - it becomes a resource allocation problem. Germany (for example) needs more laborers because of plummeting domestic birth rates. The retired community's social net requires young tax-payers to pick up the burden. Demographics are screwing with this math. Somalia or Syria (for example) have a lot of folks that need to escape. Problem: Once Turks or Arabs or Persians or Somalians or Syrians or Northern Africans get to Germany - they may or may not want to learn the language - but as refugees, they get full public benefit. And are not willing to learn or work to support retired Germans (this is an isolated example). Maybe we have an exploding population in all the wrong places? (I am not recommending genocide - just: It is a wicked problem)
- qppo 6y ago
  > It's an utterly mindless job I worked as a picker/packer one summer. This is an understatement, even before the robots did the walking for you. It's interesting that the only thing left is to make a robot that can handle the objects to be placed, currently they cost more than minimum wage human labor unless the thing being picked is designed to be handled by a machine. Ultimately that's what I think will happen, the packaging will be designed for picking by machine and the job can be fully automated.
  - 8note 6y ago
    That's essentially what's happened with shipping containers
    - gowld 6y ago
      Jeff Bezos has a speech he gives, a about how shipping containers are interfaces and Amazon's primary value proposition is to metaphorically apply the shipping container "interface" concept to the retail industry.
  - amelius 6y ago
    The question is whether the solution will be heavily patented, or that it will be a generic machine-learning application (like classifying images). So either Amazon will own it, or we all own it and distribution centers can become like public utilities.
    - Animats 6y ago
      Alibaba already has warehouses using robots that work just like the Kiva robots.[1] [1] https://youtu.be/FBl4Y55V2Z4 https://youtu.be/FBl4Y55V2Z4
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - hinkley 6y ago
    Amazon is getting big enough that it's only a matter of time before they start trying to dictate packaging on products, to make it easier for robots to pick them up. Walmart has been flirting in the same space to automate inventory management.
- programd 6y ago
  THe Kiva video is not state-of-the-art I think. Check out this automated grocery warehouse, something right out of Factorio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKrcpa8Z_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKrcpa8Z_E Humans would just get in the way and get mangled.
  - tpmx 6y ago
    That's a rendered video of the Ocado warehouse system, which I think is a ripoff of the Swisslog Autostore system. There was a lawsuit. Then Ocado hired Swisslog... Btw: This Autostore system is becoming the standard automated warehouse system for Swedish e-retailers, as they prepare for Amazon entering the Swedish market in a month or two. I think there are at least like 10 very large Autostore installations in Sweden for various niche online e-retailers. And like 20 "large" installations.
    - Animats 6y ago
      I'm amazed that Swisslog system works reliably. All that precision track and rack. All those moving parts. There have been big automated storage and retrieval systems for decades, but they're often a maintenance headache. The Kiva system just needs is a flat floor. The robots are mechanically simple and totally interchangeable. On-site maintenance is limited to replacing batteries and wheels; for anything else it goes back to a repair center.
      - tpmx 6y ago
        I think the major design philosophy differences between the two systems are: - Kiva robots are designed to work along with cheap labor - Swisslog Autostore is designed to minimise labor, because labor is expensive in Europe (it does more of the work). Here's a four year old video of an Autostore at komplett.no/komplett.se: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWK5xL_o3f4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWK5xL_o3f4
    - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
      Amazing. Now imagine that combined with something like [1] http://www.cargocap.com/ http://www.cargocap.com/ or [2] https://www.smartcityloop.de/ https://www.smartcityloop.de/ or [3] https://www.cst.ch/en/ https://www.cst.ch/en/ maybe even extended right into your condo via elevator! edit: Surprise, Surprise! [4] https://www.four-parx.com/en/four-parx-smart-city-loop-for-underground-city-logistics-hamburg/ https://www.four-parx.com/en/four-parx-smart-city-loop-for-u... in my hometown! Yay!
jedberg 6y ago
I'm curious as to what political issue you think they will face by replacing all their warehouse workers with robots? Do you think people would demand they pay more in tax? Wouldn't that be a political issue that all large companies face together?
- ShimmyGuy 6y ago
  The issue is the one that Andrew Yang built his platform around. If full automation outpaces the rate that people can retrain, you end up with a growing unemployed population. This in turn can drive political change to account for that fact (such as the institution of a UBI system, possibly funded in part by taxes on large automated companies).
- d1zzy 6y ago
  Depends on if those companies are negotiating lower local taxes when opening a local office with the argument of "hiring people". If so, that argument won't hold anymore.
  - all_blue_chucks 6y ago
    Those tax negotiations regarded high pay white collar jobs. We are talking about warehouse work here.
- Aperocky 6y ago
  We've already seen the large tech hate, it's just going to be more intense after even the most menial jobs are automated out of existence. That and potential driverless trucks are going to create a potential jobless future of the less fortunate/educated, that is an enormous political issue - though the burden will not be completely on Amazon, it will be a huge part of that.
- m-ee 6y ago
  Local political perception of a company seems pretty divorced from the economic reality, just look at the Foxconn Wisconsin boondoggle
- 6y ago
palijer 6y ago
That's an item every 10 seconds without missing any. Not sure about the exact work, but damn, did a human even look at those numbers and try to do the job?

BelleOfTheBall 6y ago

They'd get rid of their union 'problems' and face a whole other crisis. But that wouldn't really stop Amazon and I'm sure bad PR isn't as expensive as having to pay out workers who got injured because they couldn't keep up with 'supreme' robotic workers.

Animats 6y ago

The robots were too efficient. They could bring items so quickly that the productivity expectations for workers more than doubled Here's an old Kiva Robotics video that shows how picking works.[1] It's an utterly mindless job. An automated laser pointer points to the bin from which to take an object. A lighted button shows which box to put it in. A new bin then moves into position, and this goes on. Training time required is about 30 seconds. Amazon liked the system and bought Kiva. The company, not just the system. So anyone with basic eye-hand coordination can do picking, computers check that it's done right, there's no future in the job, and Amazon is trying to automate the picking process anyway. Classic assembly-line job. [1] https://youtu.be/CWNuaPE4DTc https://youtu.be/CWNuaPE4DTc

Klinky 6y ago
Well, until it's fully automated, human safety is still important. I think the problem we have is that destroying a human body with mindless repetitive tasks is often still "cheaper" than engineering an automated solutions. It is simply cheaper to feed off desperation than to value human lives, and there is the engrained notion that humanity cannot be productive without putting humans into positions of desperation. This is a mindset issue that needs to eventually change.
- Aperocky 6y ago
  When I was a graduate student, the lab next door was working on robotic arms and picking challenges, their PhD grad was then hired by... Amazon. I don't think it's cheaper, it's just that a solution has yet to exist. Once it start working, it will go out at breakneck pace.
  - Klinky 6y ago
    I'd imagine hiring PhDs to work on hard problems is not cheap, and I doubt Amazon would invest unless they believed that the long-term investment would result in a cheaper outcome than what they have now. The problem is that human labor has been so cheap that automation is often not even worth any R&D effort for most companies. If human labor cost more, this would cause more impetus upstream to find automated solutions. Also the burger-flipping robot and self-driving car have been just around the corner for the last two decades. Although the end solution to those issues may very well be that we need to stop eating so many burgers and stop designing cities around cars, rather than robots coming in to allow even more consumption.
    - gowld 6y ago
      Full automation is always out of reach, but McDonald's is extremely automated.
      - Klinky 6y ago
        Is that automation or scale? Doing things on a large scale can be more efficient and require less labor, but McDonald's is still hiring people to do effectively the same thing in the stores as they did 50 years ago. A lot of industrial food tech is not new or cutting edge, and has limits, like you can't freeze dry a fully-made hamburger for later consumption.
        Animats 6y ago
        That problem was solved over 50 years ago, but it wasn't cost effective.[1] [1] https://youtu.be/FmXLqImT1wE https://youtu.be/FmXLqImT1wE
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
This is why I see capitalism eventually failing. On one hand, I think it's great that these mind-numbingly boring jobs can be automated away. On the other hand, the end result is that more profits go to Amazon, while many more people have fewer opportunities to participate in the economy. For the old predictable arguments of "Well, these people can do something else, do you expect buggy whip makers to still be around?" - at some point if the rate of automation is faster than people are able to retrain, and faster than the economy is able to create new opportunities for these people, the outcome is still the same: all the benefits of capitalism go to very few people while huge swaths of people are made "redundant".
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  Is that a failure of capitalism or of our education systems or simply an oversupply of humans?
  - TeaDrunk 6y ago
    An oversupply of humans?
    - ci5er 6y ago
      Well, we do replicate. Maybe not as much as rabbits. And, recently, we die less in childbirth and infant-hood. So - even with falling childbirth rates, we still tend to multiply a bit. But given that absolute and relative global poverty rates and starvation rates and disease mortality rates have plummeted and population grows dramatically - it becomes a resource allocation problem. Germany (for example) needs more laborers because of plummeting domestic birth rates. The retired community's social net requires young tax-payers to pick up the burden. Demographics are screwing with this math. Somalia or Syria (for example) have a lot of folks that need to escape. Problem: Once Turks or Arabs or Persians or Somalians or Syrians or Northern Africans get to Germany - they may or may not want to learn the language - but as refugees, they get full public benefit. And are not willing to learn or work to support retired Germans (this is an isolated example). Maybe we have an exploding population in all the wrong places? (I am not recommending genocide - just: It is a wicked problem)
qppo 6y ago
> It's an utterly mindless job I worked as a picker/packer one summer. This is an understatement, even before the robots did the walking for you. It's interesting that the only thing left is to make a robot that can handle the objects to be placed, currently they cost more than minimum wage human labor unless the thing being picked is designed to be handled by a machine. Ultimately that's what I think will happen, the packaging will be designed for picking by machine and the job can be fully automated.
- 8note 6y ago
  That's essentially what's happened with shipping containers
  - gowld 6y ago
    Jeff Bezos has a speech he gives, a about how shipping containers are interfaces and Amazon's primary value proposition is to metaphorically apply the shipping container "interface" concept to the retail industry.
- amelius 6y ago
  The question is whether the solution will be heavily patented, or that it will be a generic machine-learning application (like classifying images). So either Amazon will own it, or we all own it and distribution centers can become like public utilities.
  - Animats 6y ago
    Alibaba already has warehouses using robots that work just like the Kiva robots.[1] [1] https://youtu.be/FBl4Y55V2Z4 https://youtu.be/FBl4Y55V2Z4
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- hinkley 6y ago
  Amazon is getting big enough that it's only a matter of time before they start trying to dictate packaging on products, to make it easier for robots to pick them up. Walmart has been flirting in the same space to automate inventory management.
programd 6y ago
THe Kiva video is not state-of-the-art I think. Check out this automated grocery warehouse, something right out of Factorio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKrcpa8Z_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKrcpa8Z_E Humans would just get in the way and get mangled.
- tpmx 6y ago
  That's a rendered video of the Ocado warehouse system, which I think is a ripoff of the Swisslog Autostore system. There was a lawsuit. Then Ocado hired Swisslog... Btw: This Autostore system is becoming the standard automated warehouse system for Swedish e-retailers, as they prepare for Amazon entering the Swedish market in a month or two. I think there are at least like 10 very large Autostore installations in Sweden for various niche online e-retailers. And like 20 "large" installations.
  - Animats 6y ago
    I'm amazed that Swisslog system works reliably. All that precision track and rack. All those moving parts. There have been big automated storage and retrieval systems for decades, but they're often a maintenance headache. The Kiva system just needs is a flat floor. The robots are mechanically simple and totally interchangeable. On-site maintenance is limited to replacing batteries and wheels; for anything else it goes back to a repair center.
    - tpmx 6y ago
      I think the major design philosophy differences between the two systems are: - Kiva robots are designed to work along with cheap labor - Swisslog Autostore is designed to minimise labor, because labor is expensive in Europe (it does more of the work). Here's a four year old video of an Autostore at komplett.no/komplett.se: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWK5xL_o3f4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWK5xL_o3f4
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    Amazing. Now imagine that combined with something like [1] http://www.cargocap.com/ http://www.cargocap.com/ or [2] https://www.smartcityloop.de/ https://www.smartcityloop.de/ or [3] https://www.cst.ch/en/ https://www.cst.ch/en/ maybe even extended right into your condo via elevator! edit: Surprise, Surprise! [4] https://www.four-parx.com/en/four-parx-smart-city-loop-for-underground-city-logistics-hamburg/ https://www.four-parx.com/en/four-parx-smart-city-loop-for-u... in my hometown! Yay!

jedberg 6y ago

I'm curious as to what political issue you think they will face by replacing all their warehouse workers with robots? Do you think people would demand they pay more in tax? Wouldn't that be a political issue that all large companies face together?

ShimmyGuy 6y ago
The issue is the one that Andrew Yang built his platform around. If full automation outpaces the rate that people can retrain, you end up with a growing unemployed population. This in turn can drive political change to account for that fact (such as the institution of a UBI system, possibly funded in part by taxes on large automated companies).
d1zzy 6y ago
Depends on if those companies are negotiating lower local taxes when opening a local office with the argument of "hiring people". If so, that argument won't hold anymore.
- all_blue_chucks 6y ago
  Those tax negotiations regarded high pay white collar jobs. We are talking about warehouse work here.
Aperocky 6y ago
We've already seen the large tech hate, it's just going to be more intense after even the most menial jobs are automated out of existence. That and potential driverless trucks are going to create a potential jobless future of the less fortunate/educated, that is an enormous political issue - though the burden will not be completely on Amazon, it will be a huge part of that.
m-ee 6y ago
Local political perception of a company seems pretty divorced from the economic reality, just look at the Foxconn Wisconsin boondoggle
6y ago

palijer 6y ago

That's an item every 10 seconds without missing any. Not sure about the exact work, but damn, did a human even look at those numbers and try to do the job?