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How Amazon Triggered a Robot Arms Race

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Re: How Amazon Triggered a Robot Arms Race

#41

Post by penguinduck »

sgift wrote: post #21
tuna-piano wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know many college graduates in their mid/late twenties doing various "knowledge" jobs. Many of them consider their jobs soul crushing. Most people don't like their work. Most people don't like waking up on someone else's schedule and do work that their told to do. That's why businesses pay them, after all.

And I always thought businesses pay you because you do something which they value, and that this is sometimes soul crushing is just a coincidence.

The more a person wants to do a job, the less compensation they will demand because the emotional satisfaction they get substitutes for a part (or sometimes all) of the compensation. When there are a lot of people who have a strong preference for doing a job in a particular industry, they collectively drive down the price of their own labor into the ground.

Companies will only pay what they have to.

Some examples of industries where tons of people work for shit money (less than a person of their abilities could earn in other industries) or even sometimes for free because of an emotional attachment to that industry are showbusiness, art and academia.

Then you have the opposite examples, like working on an oil platform - most of those people would earn less money if they had picked a different industry, because they have to be paid more to agree to live on an oil platform and do a shitty and dangerous job.

Re: How Amazon Triggered a Robot Arms Race

#42

Post by brc »

timv wrote: post #17
peterkshultz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair. But a soul-crushing job is better than no job, and the question remains as to whether or not mobility into a job of equal requisite skill exists.

> a soul-crushing job is better than no job Really? Do you mean: "Being paid to do soul-crushing work is better than not being paid" ? Or: "Doing soul-crushing work is better than having nothing to do" ? The first is an issue of income and the distribution of product (in the GDP sense of product). There is no axiomatic rule that says "you have to have a job to get paid", it's just how our current economy operates. If…

You can't use terms like 'useful' when measuring jobs or output. It's in the eye of the observer.

Apparently nail painting businesses are a viable industry, in my eyes they are totally useless.

Most of the businesses we recognise today would have been hilarious to our ancestors. Paying good money for a personal trainer? Paying someone to wash your car?

This is an age-old problem which keeps solving itself.

Re: How Amazon Triggered a Robot Arms Race

#43

Post by lhopki01 »

brc wrote: post #39
kuschku wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is horrible for the market. A company gaining a huge advantage by getting a total monopoly over another market, which they can enforce due to having patents. That’s not what patents were supposed to create, and what Antitrust regulations were supposed to prevent. If this is the future, it’s quite a dystopia: Monopolies everywhere. Sure, I get that the Silicon Valley business model is to destroy regulation, g…

A monopoly is a specific thing, not just an insult to a company you don't like. Most monopolies can only be sustained through state intervention, which is why large government is more of a problem than large companies like Amazon. This situation is fantastic for the consumer - companies competing to lower prices and increase service. As the story says the market has responded quickly and the industry is growing, prec…

Monopoly is the natural end state of capitalism. Once a company is big enough it's easy to destroy or buy out all competition. It's only regulation that prevents all industries becoming monopolies over time.

You're confusing monopolies coopting government to maintain control with large government causing and maintaining monopolies.

Re: How Amazon Triggered a Robot Arms Race

#44

Post by adrianN »

lmm wrote: post #29
zorked wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these effects really negative then?

For a fixed level of technology, a competitive industry is better for customers than a monopoly industry. But an innovative monopoly may be better than a stagnant competitive industry, and the prospect of monopoly rents encourages innovation. The patent system is supposed to be the compromise here: if you innovate you get 20 years of monopoly, after that your innovation is commoditised.

It's not really a competition if the companies don't try to innovate.

Re: How Amazon Triggered a Robot Arms Race

#45

Post by petra »

lmm wrote: post #29
zorked wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these effects really negative then?

For a fixed level of technology, a competitive industry is better for customers than a monopoly industry. But an innovative monopoly may be better than a stagnant competitive industry, and the prospect of monopoly rents encourages innovation. The patent system is supposed to be the compromise here: if you innovate you get 20 years of monopoly, after that your innovation is commoditised.

But even when with regards to innovative monopolies, the monopoly can lead in the wrong direction. On example is that today because Google monopolizes search, you cannot find a decent forum search engine, which seems terrible from the Democratic perspective.

Re: How Amazon Triggered a Robot Arms Race

#46

Post by eva1984 »

deegles wrote: post #4

Personally, I think it's a net benefit that the picking jobs are on their way out. I don't believe most people do it for fun! On the other hand, there's going to be short term turmoil as people scramble to find new jobs in an increasingly automated world.

But those jobs are already shitty. I visited Amazon warehouse once, the workers there aren't happy. Guess no one will if your daily work is about following instructions on the screen to move stuff from A to B. The warehouse is noisy, and the process is optimized in a way that there is very little human interaction. Those kinds of jobs are the one that need to be automated.

Re: How Amazon Triggered a Robot Arms Race

#47

Post by petra »

codeonfire wrote: post #32
jpeg_hero wrote: post #19

I thought Amazon was pulling back on Kiva. I thought I read somewhere that new warehouses were not using the Kiva systems.

They can't be used for large item warehouses and are probably not worth it for smaller warehouses. Also existing warehouses that are multilevel with plywood flooring probably can't be retrofitted easily. Since their focus seems to be on same day, one hour delivery from small urban warehouses, the majority of their new warehouses are probably not going to use kiva.

I don't think 1-day will be that important, 2-day is fine for most orders. But the warehouses help them save a lot of money on shipping.But surely the saving on opex in a small robotic warehouse is less than a big robotic warehouse.

Re: How Amazon Triggered a Robot Arms Race

#48

Post by icebraining »

peterkshultz wrote: post #2

Amazon's acquisition of Kiva is one of the best examples of vertical integration in the e-commerce industry. The article reminded me of acquisitions in the Gilded Age. Perhaps one could compare Bezos to Rockefeller, presuming Bezos was the one who pushed for such purchases.

Bezos is no Rockefeller: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Rockefeller#Philanthro...

Re: How Amazon Triggered a Robot Arms Race

#49

Post by ZeroGravitas »

lmm wrote: post #29
zorked wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these effects really negative then?

For a fixed level of technology, a competitive industry is better for customers than a monopoly industry. But an innovative monopoly may be better than a stagnant competitive industry, and the prospect of monopoly rents encourages innovation. The patent system is supposed to be the compromise here: if you innovate you get 20 years of monopoly, after that your innovation is commoditised.

Of course in reality, patents are filed in large numbers by monopolies, and potential competitors are threatened with nuisance lawsuits, into either avoiding competition with incumbents entirely, or paying fees to them. Another area where the US seems happy to let monopolies flourish at the expense of progress and competition.

Re: How Amazon Triggered a Robot Arms Race

#50

Post by icebraining »

lhopki01 wrote: post #43
brc wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A monopoly is a specific thing, not just an insult to a company you don't like. Most monopolies can only be sustained through state intervention, which is why large government is more of a problem than large companies like Amazon. This situation is fantastic for the consumer - companies competing to lower prices and increase service. As the story says the market has responded quickly and the industry is growing, prec…

Monopoly is the natural end state of capitalism. Once a company is big enough it's easy to destroy or buy out all competition. It's only regulation that prevents all industries becoming monopolies over time. You're confusing monopolies coopting government to maintain control with large government causing and maintaining monopolies.

Once a company is big enough it's easy to destroy or buy out all competition.

Can you provide one single example of this having happened? I'm willing to believe it, I just haven't found one. Typical examples provided fall short of that claim.

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