I remember back in 2012 I was working for UPS as a package sorter. All along the aisle were leftover machines covered in dust and grease. They were all leftover

I remember back in 2012 I was working for UPS as a package sorter. All along the aisle were leftover machines covered in dust and grease. They were all leftover from a time when some bright spark tried to automate package sorting. The idea seems pretty easy at first. Read the label, send it to the correct area. But if you work at it for a few hours you realize how much skill it takes to do properly. Labels are obstructed, damaged, crossed out, and modified. I've seen boxes with 5-6 different labels all in various states and defaced in various ways. Then comes the part where you need to get the packages from the input belt onto the correct outputs. Every package was a different shape, size, and condition. A lot had broken open. Some were nothing but masking tape in the shape of a mushy bowling ball. We would then often have to buffer the packages while one belt went down. I would sometimes spend hours thinking about what it would take to automate my $15/hour job and just kept coming up with ridiculously complicated robotic projects with AI that is only possible now with extremely expensive computation. Even then it would need a ton of human supervision.