Amazon’s humanoid warehouse robots will eventually cost only $3 per hour to operate. That won’t calm workers’ fears of being replaced.::The robot’s human-like shape is bound to reignite workers’ fears of being replaced, but Amazon says they’re designed to “work collaboratively.”
Workers were always going to be replaced and automated pretending otherwise is disingenuous and caters to the absolute most inept among us.
People need to start bitching about taxing these organizations and supporting UBI.
More than UBI we need to empower democratic ownership through things like worker and community lead cooperatives. As well as better systems of education and training for a quickly changing world.
If the only reason people get UBI is to placated them then when we can be ignored or surpressed instead we will be.
In isolation the automation of roles is a great thing, but the way society is currently run your entire quality of existence is tied to your job, and retraining and getting a new job is harder than ever and costs a lot.
If society made it easier for people to retrain and get better jobs and slowly replaced all those bad jobs with an automated workforce it would be better for everyone.
Can’t see it happening though…
I think it’s still possible for EU to regulate this and protect workers here. Not in US though.
Maybe but I don’t know how they can realistically do anything worthwhile. As forcing companies to keep staff on and not automate isn’t a good outcome and isn’t fixing the societal issues that make this a problematic scenario.
If a robot/ai/machine can do a job safer, more efficiently, quicker than a person, it should 1000000% be automated by the given thing. This has been happening for hundreds of years in all industries.
Well, I guess EU would simply come up with a plan for the automation that will not leave people without any protection. No idea what it would look like but they could for example come up with some legal definition of AI worker, establish mandatory staffing levels (for example 50% of employees must be human until 2040), tax ‘salaries’ of AI workers and use this revenue to retrain the workforce. We would still end up with automated jobs but it would happen in an organize manner.
People bitch about working conditions and the actual work in these warehouses yet don’t want to be replaced by a robot who doesn’t care about any of that? Yeah, no. I’m all for robots doing this kind of soul sucking work.
Yeah, I’m all for automating menial boring work as that will free up a ton of creative potential. I fear, however, this might just allow corporations to further their grip on our society unfettered. We need governing bodies immune to profit capture if we’re to utilize all that human creative potential.
Totally agree with you there. Corporations have way too much power in our culture.
They really do have far too much power and influence. Capitalism without ethics will always be a detriment to the people.
Without ethics in place it’s just everyone out for themselves trying to get paid while the rest just try to survive without losing it all.
Never fully understood how bad it can be until I saw my rural area get taken over. A decade or so ago it was just a town of poor folks and prices for housing, food etc. Reflected that. Then the rich folks, corporations etc discovered that money could be made here and that was it. All of the small businesses have been bought out and replaced with chain stores. Prices for everything have drastically increased to where a cheeseburger that sold for $5 a few years ago is now $25. Homes that were selling for $60k are now hundreds of thousands, a million in some cases. Almost all of the farmland was bought and sold to developers then turned into subdivisions who then marketed to “higher” class citizens who could afford to pay the asking price.
It was a small town where everyone knew each other. To date I’d estimate that 90% of those families have moved within a 10 year period. These are multigenerational families, many of which can date their family history here back to when their ancestors first migrated here.
Now it’s just a sea of opportunity for those into real estate and big business.
The common people never had a choice in the matter. These people just used their deep pockets to take everything over.
No one is complaining about working conditions for the sake of it. There’s literally nowhere else to go for them. You are not helping anyone but the rich fucks by having them replaced by robots.
I’m sure we’ll get there eventually, but robots still suck at doing stuff like this. Maybe when they marry robots up with AI, we’ll have robots that can figure out what to do when there’s the slightest deviation to the operating conditions, like a piece of trash shows up on the line, or they get twisted 30 degrees off from their station, or a part of the line gets moved 2 inches. For now though, robots are only great at following pre-programmed instructions EXACTLY the same way every time. Even then, they still manage to fuck that up some of the time. I worked with welding robots for years that only had one task and one task only, to apply welds to car seat parts, and they fucked up on us all the time, on a daily basis. The technology will get there one day, but I doubt we’re there.
Considering how each generation of Boston Dynamics robots becomes more and more graceful, I don’t see how the problems you suggested won’t be non-issues incredibly fast.
Also, unrelated to your comment, people are delusional if they don’t think this is the ultimate goal, right? Amazon’s reassurances are bunk - if they could eliminate people they would, they just can’t do without them yet.
Boston Dynamic’s robots are works of art - the pinnacle of engineering - but its all designed movement. By this I mean the control systems, their movement plans - it is built and designed by experts in their field. It’s not quite as simple as “go from A to B and do some parkour on the way”. There’s a very large gap between “what is mechanically possible to do” and “Just let the robot figure out how to do that”.
Mechanically we’re ahead of software for manipulation and kinodynamic planning.
Yep.
Just look at automotive manufacture robots. Saw my first one about 1980. Mind blowing at the time. That was a trivially simple one compared to what you see today.
Then saw a robot doing backup tape changes for a very large organization about 1995. The racks held thousands of tapes, they had adapted an automotive manufacture robot to the task. It was in place and running for a couple years when I saw it… Nearly 30 years ago now. Damn thing was fast.
I’m actually working on this problem right now for my master’s capstone project. I’m almost done with it; I can have it generating a series of steps to try and fetch me something based on simple objectives like “I’m thirsty”, and then in simulation fetching me a drink or looking through rooms that might have a fix, like contextually knowing the kitchen is a great spot to check.
There’s also a lot of research into using the latest advancements in reasoning and contextual awareness via LLMs to work towards better more complicated embodied AI. I wrote a blog post about a lot of the big advancements here.
Outside of this I’ve also worked at various robotics startups for the past five years, though primarily in writing data pipelines and control systems for fleets of them. So with that experience in mind, I’d say we are many years out from this being in a reasonable product, but maybe not ten years away. Maybe.
I don’t know why but that big red arrow pointing out the robot in the background is hilarious.
