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Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans
- voidUpdate 1y agoWhat does "a genuine sense of touch" actually mean? Surely there have been robots in the past that can detect how much force they are apply to an object? Was that a "fake sense of touch"?
- bearjaws 1y ago"a genuine sense of touch" Means the stock is down $30 YTD and they gotta pump by pretending they've created something.
- Symmetry 1y agoI'd assume measuring the force exerted at the contact point rather than the motor current.
- markisus 1y agoI think this has also existed in the form of force sensors and more recently image-like pressure sensors.
- Symmetry 1y agoRight. A company I used to work for was selling force sensors over a decade ago and I'm sure they're older than that. https://blog.robotiq.com/bid/65024/TakkTile-Sensors-for-Industrial-Robotic-Grippers https://blog.robotiq.com/bid/65024/TakkTile-Sensors-for-Indu...
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- blitzar 1y ago> What does "a genuine sense of touch" actually mean? The technology has applications in the robot sex work industry.
- omneity 1y agoWarehouses is definitely not where I expected robots with retractable blades to first appear. The demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWXco05eK28 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWXco05eK28
- krapp 1y agoThat's still far slower than a human being, and those bins are far too neat.
- wielebny 1y agoSlower than a human making one operation. Not slower than human stocking items for a whole day.
- vntok 1y agoSurely the robot does not stop at the end of the day.
- nosrepa 1y agoThe article says they plan on it operating continuously for 20 hours at a time.
- CoastalCoder 1y agoUntil they unionize.
- ta1243 1y agoDo robots rely on being ionized? I'd have thought a robot which wasn't ionized would work just fine
- CoastalCoder 1y agoYou're thinking of "Onionized", when their exploits are covered by one of the world's best publications.
- danielovichdk 1y agoAnd yet some people think AI will take over jobs. I am amazed this robot was not in place 20 years ago. Really ?
- krapp 1y agoI don't understand why people still express doubt about this - AI already is and has been taking over jobs.
- varelse 1y ago[dead]
- lesuorac 1y agoIt's really about the hype that is the problem and that people often mean LLMs when they say AI. 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).
- conception 1y agoHuman labor is shockingly cheap.
- bayindirh 1y agoActually it's pretty expensive in the long run. They want raises, are finicky about their health, have pesky habits like going home, having life partners and something silly called work/life balance. Also, they sometimes organize and become collective bodies under something called a union. 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...
- maintainarmsx 1y ago
- philipwhiuk 1y agoIt's interesting how Amazon is embedding robots in human-designed warehouses whereas Ocado has humans overseeing a robotic warehouse. The later is a much easier problem.
- alsodumb 1y agoIt takes hundreds of millions to build a warehouse. Amazon has tons of them. Retrofitting things is capital intensive.
- sschueller 1y agoHumans are cheaper than robots too...
- thfuran 1y agoHow much cheaper? You can hardly get humans to work two shifts a day, let alone three.
- bluGill 1y agoOnly sometimes and costs change over time. The first robot is almost always more expensive than a human, but the second robot comes after the design is done and so it generally cheaper than the human (accountants will figure out how to amortize these costs and thus give us a better picture of costs.) 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.
- abricot 1y agoOnly if you don't need to pay them a living wage.
- econ 1y agoI've picked orders. If I have to touch your purchase for 20 seconds it is a very long time. There are 180 chunks of 20 seconds in an hour. If the pay is $45 per hour it would cost 25 cents. It is strange how this isn't obvious
- matthewfelgate 1y agoAre companies designing product packaging to be more compatible with robotic handling?
- AftHurrahWinch 1y agoAnecdotally, I know of 2 examples of friends who work in traditional manufacturing who have changed packaging graphics and colors because their previous designs were difficult for optics. Specifically, both of them had to stop using black-colored boxes and move graphics in from box boundaries.
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- mensetmanusman 1y agoAverage humans. Not stowing masters apparently.
- LeonB 1y agoThis isn’t the factory of the future. 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. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/01/30/future-factory/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/01/30/future-factory/
- masom 1y agohttps://www.amazon.com/Dokoo-Automatic-Vacuum-Sealed-Dispenser-Recorder/dp/B0CJRFC7Y4 https://www.amazon.com/Dokoo-Automatic-Vacuum-Sealed-Dispens... No need for a human to feed the dog, a robot will refill the dog feeder.
- Melonai 1y agoBut what if the dog gets sad? :( I think the solution might be multiple dogs.
- throwawaymb 1y ago[flagged]
- elzbardico 1y agoWhy do we think this is a good thing without socialism? I am not a fan of socialism, but with the level of automation we are reaching, do we really want to be ruled by our incel tech-bro overlords, living out of UBI, in a permanently bi-strated society without even the illusion of social mobility and democracy we have nowadays?
- bluGill 1y agoLuddites were asking that question long before socialism was a thing. However we now have more people than ever working, and standard of living is higher. I'm not worried.
- markisus 1y agoDuring the transition to industrialization it’s conceivable that many people became worse off because they could not find a place in the new economy. Even if society is eventually better off, the our generation or the next may have to sacrifice our way of life.
- bluGill 1y agoWe do for sure need to get people to realize their jobs are obsolete and train them on something more useful. Old people (often anyone over 25) are far too resistant to change.
- hackable_sand 1y agoWe could start by dismantling the oppressive systems that force labor.
- tombert 1y agoFor better or worse, my parents always instilled in me that no job is guaranteed forever, and that's why you need to keep up with as much new technology as you can. My dad's uncle was a victim of automation in his 40's, and I think he was always annoyed that instead of learning something new he would sit and complain all day that there's no jobs for him. 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,
- londons_explore 1y ago> 500,000 stows in operational warehouses 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.
- oxqbldpxo 1y agoIs there a future where we stop buying so much garbage?
- snek_case 1y agoThere are many futures where humanity stops.
- eddieroger 1y agoAll of them, really, if you're willing to wait long enough.
- sph 1y agoWe're moving towards a future where the entire earth and asteroid belt are mined by machines to build more machines.
- havblue 1y agoIf we can promote right to repair a bit more, we could actually talk about this.
- barbazoo 1y agoConsumerism can be avoided regardless of right to repair legislation. We just stop buying shit we don’t really need which is most of what people buy on Amazon I imagine.
- mapt 1y agoThis seems insane. We're trying to teach Longshoreman's Tetris to machines, instead of using the system of standard containerization that almost completely replaced longshoremen, despite lower packing densities.
- dialup_sounds 1y agoThe containerization is at a higher level: the rack of yellow bins is a four-sided tower that is robotically driven in and out of tightly packed uniform rows.
- dylan604 1y agoRight. Containers being a standard size is great so you don't have to care about what's inside the containers. At the AMZN warehouse, they absolutely care about what's in the containers, and what's in the container is no longer anywhere close to be standard size/shape/weight.
- mapt 1y agoThe container is the standardization. One container per unit of product. Containers ("bins") dimensioned in multiples of some standard unit that evenly divides a grid system on a rack. Stuffing looks like "a pallet of identical goods appears on one side of your workspace and 150 individual 100mm x 200mm x 400mm bins appear on the other side and the job is to put A into B". Storage operations look like they do now using the robot racks. Emptying looks like "Three bins of various sizes shows up on one side and a cardboard box appears on the other side". You divide the tasks up and have a different machine or human for each. The benefit is you always have a reliably identical picking and stuffing task per item, and there is never a bin of remainder items that has to be pushed back into the system. The cost is lowered storage efficiency. You don't even have to break a pallet at a DC, you can design for distribution of bins (at a higher transport cost).
- Dylan16807 1y agoIf Amazon had to load and unload entire warehouses as fast as possible, they wouldn't do this. The constraints they're operating under are completely different.
- orsu 1y ago[flagged]
- m3kw9 1y agoThis is good news actually, while you have less jobs, hopefully new ones are created, people in the future don't have the option to work slave like jobs.
- cogidub 1y agohopefully
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gruntbuggly 1y agoI see this thinking thrown around often, but I don't see how net new jobs would be created by efficiencies. Amazon wouldn't adopt robots if it created more employment overhead downstream. Sure, there will be robot maintainers, but not at a replacement level of the roles replaced. Companies adopt technologies because they reduce the net amount of human input (cost) required, right?
- marcellus23 1y agoWell, the industrial revolution has been a story of continuous efficiency gains and increasing automation, but somehow there's still enough jobs.
- gruntbuggly 1y agoCertainly, for 95% of americans that's been true recently, but ai seems more positioned as a qualitative than a quantitative shift. maybe my defining it in terms of efficiency is incorrect. Moreover these types of mundane tasks are a product of that industrialization. so i'm puzzled by the thinking of 'more efficiency to fix the pains brought on by efficiencies'
- paradox242 1y agoI'm sure the cows say the same to one another all the way up to the gates of the slaughterhouse.
- thisisnotauser 1y agoHenry Ford famously wanted his workers to be able to afford his cars. When Bezos replaces everyone with robots, who will be left to buy his junk?
- bdangubic 1y agoUBI FTW :)
- noisy_boy 1y agoThere is a crucial Basic in the middle.
- disambiguation 1y agoOnce Bezos replaces everyone with robots, why would he need anyone to buy his junk anymore?
- dh2022 1y agoThat is one of his ways of extracting value from society - by selling his junk.
- kajumix 1y agoOnce he replaces everyone with robots, and all the factories do the same, people will get stuff at home for watching ads.
- ge96 1y agoI worked as stow, that job is brutal man, you gotta last 2-3 hrs at a time 3x a day for a 10hr shift. They don't like you listening to music so you gotta just sit there in silence. Luckily I got to unload trucks and I started drinking to get through it on my breaks. Still it's tough to beat a place where you can walk in with no skills and start making $20/hr
- throwaway314155 1y ago> I started drinking to get through it on my breaks That bad, huh?
- ge96 1y agoIt just made it more fun. There was a liquor store nearby so drive to it on the 30 minute break, pound a couple 100 proof 100ml bottles (99 Apples), back to it. That job was more fun than stow. 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
- lr1970 1y ago> pound a couple 100 proof 100ml bottles, back to it. That job was more fun than stow. WoW, you can hold your liquor :-)
- ethbr1 1y agoI appreciate the irony of your optimizing your own experience as ruthlessly as Amazon optimize their operations. Hate the game, not the player.
- olelele 1y agoI’m always amazed at how easily ppl admit to drinking and driving..
- falleng0d 1y ago
- damion6 1y agoGreat they can stop killing people. Only place I ever worked where the ambulances came 1-5 times a day to save the old people they abuse
- banku_brougham 1y agoI dont understand why there is so little about this on social media -- my own bubble walls cant be that thick.
- greekanalyst 1y agoIt's clear we are near an event horizon moment.
- kylehotchkiss 1y agoDoes this have any potential to get costs down for customers though?
- rsyring 1y agoCosts are fine IMO. I'd rather see quality improve, even at a reasonable cost increase, and the disappearance of the alphabet soup brands and similar.