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Amazon's humanoid robots will eventually cost only $3 per hour to operate
- prepend 3y agoI expect workers like this. Warehouse picking is grueling work and no one really likes it per se. So having a robot do it is good to allow humans to do other things. I don’t think the solution is to keep grueling jobs or pay more to make people do things they don’t want to do. Of course more money is good, but at the end of the day, it’s a repetitive job that doesn’t require much thought. What’s interesting is that if these only cost $3/hour to operate that’s only $25k/year (assuming 365x24 operation) so if these things last 5 years then that means the idea is they will only cost $125k to buy and maintain. That’s cheap enough that middle class people will have live in super servants. And that’s much more appealing to me to have a laundry/dish/sweep bot. Especially since I could probably chip in with neighbors and eventually not have to do these household chores.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoIndeed, Amazon should automate it, and we'll collectively tax the automation to prevent all the gains going to shareholders. Profits still made, just not too much.
- gafage 3y agoWhat's the point of automating stuff for Amazon if then the gains are taxed?
- bhpm 3y agoThe gains aren’t taxed at 100%.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoRight! Workers aren't working shit jobs, the business still operates, consumers get the "consumer excess" benefits, shareholders still make a return, but the economics are kept in check. You want to optimize for all the good things above without enabling wild power imbalances via cashflows and wealth.
- crote 3y agoWhy would a human get a job when they have to pay income tax?
- gafage 3y ago[flagged]
- prepend 3y agoThat make sense. I remember in microeco101 they talked about how Walmart’s low prices are effectively like a tax with the end result of benefits spread to the lowest income people who benefit the most by low prices on commodity goods. If Amazon lowers prices due to profit, then, theoretically that gets passed on to consumers. So it’s like a super efficient tax where the tax would be distributed to poor people in food stamps or something. Of course, that’s assuming they reduce prices instead of just keeping profits.
- elzbardico 3y ago>> and we'll collectively tax the automation to prevent all the gains going to shareholders If you think you have any chance of fighting big corporation lobbies to impose that, I have a bridge in SF you might be interested in.
- toomuchtodo 3y agofwiw, I don't put much stock in doomer comments, they have no value in achieving success. Failure is when you stop trying. Comment if it helps you in some capacity (no snark intended). Cultivate some grit through adversity.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoThe automation is already taxed. It’s called capital gains tax, or income tax, or property tax (wealth tax). Simply changing those tax percentages/formulas will result in the change you want.
- tomp 3y agoOr we could all simply enjoy the benefits of capitalism and market competition instead. People used to fight wars for salt. Now it’s given away for free by restaurants. Capitalism results in abundance. Or you can tax / centrally manage it away into scarcity.
- bhpm 3y agoThere are a few keywords in this article that make me think this isn’t coming to a home near you any time soon: “eventually.” “Plus software overhead” … “Amazon.” For that last one, keep in mind that Amazon can afford to invest millions to billions and also totally control the working environment. Warehouse workers are practically robots already with the structure that is imposed on their work. A home isn’t like that.
- bluGill 3y agoExcept that some of the investment that Amazon does goes to code that is also useful for the home robot. Amazon can afford it - probably saves money - so they make the investment. then they come along later and realize that the home robot is in some way affordable as so many of the parts needed already exist. Of course I cannot say when it will affordable. It may be Amazon has to solve the last remaining hard problems and then the R&D is paid for: all that remains is packaging and marketing, it may be thousands of hard problems remain. (I'm guessing someplace in between) I also don't state what the home robot will do. May the home robot just picks up the kids toys when they are done but can't do laundry - even though I want the laundry robot more the toys only one is still useful.
- bhpm 3y agoAmazon already has a robot for the home. It’s not even compatible with round edges or black floors. This makes me think the technology has a long way to go.
- bluGill 3y agoThe question is robots (in general, maybe not theirs) only a few more developments away from ready for those things or not?
- francisofascii 3y agoA positive spin is each human worker gets a robot to supervise and delegate tasks to.
- wintogreen74 3y agoI assumed the robots were the supervisors
- deelowe 3y agoWhere I live, entire towns have sprung up around Amazon warehouses and the huge influx of workers this brought with it. If picking jobs are eliminated, this will be quite the change for those areas.
- serf 3y agointeresting to think that Amazon and Walmart have created a modern boom-town paradigm. next I guess comes the corporate towns and company scrips.
- baz00 3y agoThis happened in the UK when some of the large industrial companies shut down. British Aerospace in Hatfield was a fine example. It destroyed the whole area for the best part of 20 years.
- qingcharles 3y agoCar industry in Birmingham, coal industry up North...
- francisofascii 3y agoI was recently driving in a rural area near a UPS warehouse. I could not believe the amount of cars/traffic lined up on a rural road pulling into the warehouse to go to work.
- prepend 3y agoThere will definitely be a change, no denying that. Just like how those towns didn’t exist 20 years ago, they may not exist again 20 years from now.
- karaterobot 3y agoWhat do these laid off warehouse pickers do instead? Go back to their old jobs as cloud infrastructure architects, or hedge fund managers? I agree that most people don't want to work as pickers, and I think that's the point: in general, if you've got a shitty job, it's because it's the best available to you. They don't want to work that job, true, but they sort of have to, and if it goes away they'll have to get an even worse one—if they can. > That’s cheap enough that middle class people will have live in super servants. Take into consideration that, if AI and robot super servants exist, the idea of a middle class will almost certainly have to be redefined downward. Your job will be less valuable, as you get get undercut both by automation, and by the highly motivated people who lost their jobs due to automation and who would do yours for less money. That would change the economic accessibility of live-in super servants.
- oldpersonintx 3y ago> What do these laid off warehouse pickers do instead? this line of reasoning was also peddled by slave owners before the Civil War...these people can only do one thing and will starve unless we provide this opportunity to them...
- quickthrowman 3y ago> What do these laid off warehouse pickers do instead? What did all of the laid off agricultural workers do when farming was mechanized and industrialized? This isn’t the first time we’re facing technology taking jobs away from people.
- maxwell 3y agoThey got manufacturing, shipping, or warehouse jobs.
- hkpack 3y agoI see this thinking all the time, that if something worked ok in the past, then it is absolutely guaranteed to work next time. And it is absolutely not. People live as they are protected by some divine power over the consequences of their collective actions.
- causality0 3y agoYou have an interesting definition of "middle class" if you think middle class people can take on an extra 25 thousand dollar yearly expense. Not to mention those are wildly different use cases. Picking items in a warehouse is a less complex task than handwashing a single sink full of assorted dishes, let alone being a general servant.
- prepend 3y agoFirst, lots of middle class people send their kids to college. Middle class in the US goes up to $200-300k/year. But I was thinking neighborhoods would chip in together so it’s just a few grand a year. I didn’t mean that every house would have their own robot, Bicentennial Man-style.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> You have an interesting definition of "middle class" if you think middle class people can take on an extra 25 thousand dollar yearly expense. Petit bourgeois people very often can. If by “middle class” you mean “around median income”, which is mostly people firmly in the working class (a use of “middle class” invented to beutralize working class solidarity rather than reflecting any real class distinction), then, well, no, they probably can't.
- nurtbo 3y agoExcept the robots are currently handling returning empty totes, so humans spend more time picking.
- bannedbybros 3y ago[dead]
- pc86 3y agoThe only thing middle class people (as in somewhat close to the median income) spend $125k on in their lives is their house. And I'm not sure how well something optimized for ~10k hours of 24/7 warehouse picking and packing work is going to translate to housekeeping work.
- tivert 3y ago> I expect workers like this. Warehouse picking is grueling work and no one really likes it per se. Yes and no. While, I'm sure warehouse workers don't actually like doing the physical labor of the job (after all, someone has to pay them to do it); I suspect they like starvation and homelessness even less. > So having a robot do it is good to allow humans to do other things. We, as a society, have no solution to that. The only thing we do have is hand-waving hope (which, for the record, is not a solution). > What’s interesting is that if these only cost $3/hour to operate that’s only $25k/year (assuming 365x24 operation) so if these things last 5 years then that means the idea is they will only cost $125k to buy and maintain. That’s cheap enough that middle class people will have live in super servants. And that’s much more appealing to me to have a laundry/dish/sweep bot. Especially since I could probably chip in with neighbors and eventually not have to do these household chores. 1. This looks no where near being some kind of general "super servant." It's probably only suited to do specific kinds of warehouse work in a specially designed environment. Also, IIRC, folding laundry is actually a super-hard robotics task. 2. You're out-of-touch if you think "middle class people" can blow $125,000 on a robot to do their laundry, load their dishwasher, and sweep their floors for 5 years.
- prepend 3y ago> We, as a society, have no solution to that. We definitely do, as evidenced by all the jobs that have been automated over the past 100 years and people who are currently employed. It’s not like people who manually harvested crops starved to death after tractors. Over history, automation has always created jobs. Regarding middle class use of robots, I meant that middle classers would chip in and have a neighborhood maidbot. Having 10 households chip in $12.5k every 5 years is definitely doable. And since the robot is automated it could just spend an hour or two a day in each person’s home without any need for intervention. Just walking down the sidewalk between houses doing whatever needs doing. That’s a cool future.
- tivert 3y ago> We definitely do, as evidenced by all the jobs that have been automated over the past 100 years and people who are currently employed. No, we don't. That's the hand-waving hope I'm talking about: expecting past performance to guarantee future success. All of those previous waves of automation involved pretty limited technologies. AI has the potential to be quite different. For instance, if you have an AGI with average human intelligence, and robots doing manual labor, what jobs are all the average-intelligence humans supposed to do? Door-to-door sales to other door-to-door salesmen? If the technology lives up to the hype, their options may be "die homeless" to the more optimistic "be warehoused at minimum cost until natural death."
- red-iron-pine 3y ago> only cost $125k to buy and maintain. That’s cheap enough that middle class people do you actually know any middle class people? what do you think a middle class income is? and given the current trend in robots, why do you think the middle class will continue to exist?
- TheCaptain4815 3y agoI wonder how the "Tesla Bot" would compete if ever finished. In theory Tesla has an advantage in both Ai and especially manufacturing.
- suoduandao3 3y agoLike Apple and Microsoft I imagine.
- orwin 3y agoI mean, the Tesla bot price has to be at least 70$/hour. Solo dancers are quite expensive, even mediocre ones.
- micromacrofoot 3y agoI'm sure it'll be ready in another 3 years alongside FSD
- snoopsnopp 3y agoIt’s an interesting question, I guess it depends if they can raise enough money.
- pclmulqdq 3y agoAmazon is almost certainly far ahead of Tesla in robotics AI. They have been at the forefront of that field for >10 years.
- bigyikes 3y agoThis is not obvious. We should not discount the data collection and training infrastructure that Tesla has created. It’s very possible that their massive fleet of robots on wheels gives them a significant leg up.
- crote 3y agoTesla has a mediocre "self"-driving car, and a robot primarily designed for looks which seems to be on a level achievable by the average university student team. How is training data primarily about things like recognizing traffic signs going to be of any use when the hard problems to solve are stuff like picking up a box without crushing it?
- apwell23 3y ago> Amazon's humanoid robot That was me working for AWS.
- margorczynski 3y agoI think that's how Amazon in general sees their employees. Amazon's whole management philosophy seems like trying to maximize the squeezing the life out of workers for profit and then replacing them when they get "used up".
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoWhen will the first robot commit suicide? "Don't worry, they're just robots they are not sentient!" I can picture engineers racing to block this behavior and the robots coming up with ever more elaborate suicide methods.
- blagie 3y agoI think it's a mistake to assign human emotions and behaviors to robots. Human emotions and behaviors were, depending on which side you fall on, a result of: - Millions of years of evolution to have as many babies as possible and to have genes survive - Design by God - Or some other mechanism Wherever you fall on this spectrum, the types of thought, emotions, and intelligence that would evolve spending $150M optimizing a system to e.g. complete human text or make realistic images will be fundamentally different than what's needed to make babies. That's not to say there can't be emotions which come out. They'll just be very, very alien to us. We evolved to conserve energy and avoid self-harm since that's part of survival-of-the-fittest. Those are not fitness metrics AIs are evolved to follow, at all. We may see something as horrific as what you describe, but it won't be what you describe, and we might not even recognize it as horrific. Perhaps an LLM is tortured by text it can't complete. Perhaps by something else. AI safety should start with evolving machines around helping and savings humans and empathy, much more so than these weird mental blocks we're trying to build in about never saying anything else offensive.
- izzydata 3y agoThere is no such thing as AI. If math in a box is sentient then so is my desktop computer and cellphone. This is a non-issue for the foreseeable future.
- Tade0 3y agoTo paraphrase one of my professors: "I wouldn't be too worried about a potential AGI making us its slaves - it's unlikely to be anything remotely like us - we can't predict what it might want, if anything at all. Who knows, maybe its greatest ambition will be to calculate the most precise approximation of the number Pi?"
- water-your-self 3y agoIt sounds wrong to call them Amazon's robots when they are made by a company called Agility Robotics. Its like saying amazon's robot dogs after a boston dynamics demo
- trident5000 3y agoNobody will miss these jobs just like nobody misses picking cotton by hand in a hot field.
- wintogreen74 3y agoMaybe not on an individual basis, but that doesn't eliminate the huge impact both past and current societies experience based on this type of disruption. The American South is still trying to reach some sort of parity with the rest of the country on almost every metric, and the huge population centers built around these jobs will experience a similar collapse.
- okasaki 3y agoI wonder what the purpose is for making them "humanoid" rather than some simpler form with tracks and claws.
- wintogreen74 3y agoA big reason is typically because the world is already optimized for humans, but this being Amazon I'd expect them to make their human workers adapt to a machine-centric environment.
- jmyeet 3y agoPeople tend to react negatively to automation because of the intended job losses. This is misdirected (but legitimate) fear and anger. In a more just world, automation would mean we would all simply have to work less. We will likely reach a point where not all of us are required to do work. We already have a lot of BS jobs. No one enjoys working in am Amazon warehouse. Instead, automation will be used to further concentrate wealth into the hands of very few while suppressing wages for those still required. This isn’t a problem of automation. It’s a problem of capitalism. Instead of Jeff Bezos having amputee $50 billion, maybe we should provide for the basic needs of everyone else instead?
- gnicholas 3y agoHighly recommend checking out the Peak Salvation podcast. [1] It’s made by a former FB exec who worked in an Amazon fulfillment center during the holiday rush. Very enlightening and thought-provoking. 1: https://peaksalvation.com/ https://peaksalvation.com/
- incomingpain 3y agoI don't care the price, soon as anyone is selling robotic butlers. I'm buying one. Clean my house and cook my food for me.