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Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores

businessinsider.com

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Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores

#311

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

mattlondon wrote: post #266
stephengillie wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's traditional to spend 45-180 seconds in the back room, staring at your phone or talking to a coworker, before returning to the sales floor to tell the customer that you're sold out. It's like the Hello World of stocking product.

In my experience about a 10-15 years ago when I worked in a super-market there was no "back room" really - it was just a staging-post for getting stuff off the truck, putting it onto trolleys, then taking it out onto the shop floor to put on the shelves as quickly as possible. I dunno if people expect there to be this huge warehouse of stock "out the back" of every supermarket with loads of shelves holding tins of be…

Ahh yes.... "Stealing turkeys out of fellow customers trolleys", the TRUE spirit of Christmas.

Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores

#312

Post by jzawodn »

irl_zebra wrote: post #10
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #8

You guys think there will be a backlash to this? Some sort of modern luddite movement? Whenever I shop I refuse to use the self-checkout, you think that sort of thing might spread?

Why do you refuse to use the self checkout?

I refuse to use it because they don't provide a discount for doing so. What's my incentive?

Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores

#313

Post by XR0CSWV3h3kZWg »

ilaksh wrote: post #275
notatoad wrote: post #167

The immediate take away i get from this is that it really isn't about taking over human jobs. humans don't do this job nearly as frequently as the robots would do it, because in a standard retail environment like wal-mart, it doesn't really matter all that much if the reported in-stock quantity is slightly off for an item. that is to say, it matters, but not so much that the big-box retail environments i've worked in…

It only checks inventory at this point because there are no robots that exist that are capable of doing the rest of it safely and effectively such as stocking the shelves in those uncontrolled dynamic environments. When they get more capable robots, they will replace more jobs.

Once robots can fix the shelving problems cheaper than humans then they will replace those jobs.

As it stands total cost to fix an individual shelving problem likely dropped. In this case it'd be surprising if Walmart employed more people to fix shelving problems, but in other contexts we may have seen induced demand for more employees because the ROI for employee time improved.

Not all increases in efficiency reduce the # of total jobs, we should expect to see the total # of jobs increase in some circumstances.

Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores

#314

Post by ilaksh »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #283
ilaksh wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really human vs mechanical in the teller example despite what they say. They are just keeping their long running habit rather than having to learn how to scan it on their phone which is work and risking that their money will disappear.

I think you could easily be wrong here. I can self-checkout, or at some supermarkets self-scan (using a handheld scanner), but I chose the human checkout operator. It's partly economic, the supermarket doesn't discount my shop if I do the checkout work myself, so I extract a modicum of their takings towards wages for a local person rather than have it go to shareholder profit. People here need jobs.

People do need jobs. I wasn't talking about grocery stores. It was specifically the behavior related to depositing checks.

Also there is a difference between a rationalization for a behavior and the actual behavior. Usually the rationale is actually created afterwards. Although certainly some people must have created a deliberate policy to support employment or simply out of preference for human interaction. But my supposition was just about the check depositing.

Regardless, keeping people in menial jobs is not optimal for them or for consumers and almost certainly not a policy that will generally persist when more capable AIs are available.

Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores

#315

Post by frgtpsswrdlame »

jdietrich wrote: post #102
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you feel a tinge of guilt when you walk in one day and now there's only two tellers instead of three? Maybe I'm just weird but I was at target yesterday and there were only three aisles open with lots of people going to self checkout. I said fuck it and waited in line for a person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

http://mattbruenig.com/2012/08/22/the-never-ending-libertari...

Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores

#316

Post by raisedbyninjas »

unabridged wrote: post #268
TeMPOraL wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Market pressures always lead to quality decay over time. Even with Google - it started with lightweight, quality, bullshit-free search. Look at it now.

Especially Google Maps, I'm waiting for a competitor to blow it out of the water. Satellite images are relatively cheap, you could have a map that shows a daily updated image of every street, and show timelapses. But their streetview would be very tough to displace.

Their mobile maps are bloated and their web maps have been better, but I'm not sure how Google or anybody else can get cheap daily streetview imagery. I've been waiting for somebody to partner with the postal service and slap cameras on every truck.

Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores

#317

Post by kicarus »

XR0CSWV3h3kZWg wrote: post #313
ilaksh wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only checks inventory at this point because there are no robots that exist that are capable of doing the rest of it safely and effectively such as stocking the shelves in those uncontrolled dynamic environments. When they get more capable robots, they will replace more jobs.

Once robots can fix the shelving problems cheaper than humans then they will replace those jobs. As it stands total cost to fix an individual shelving problem likely dropped. In this case it'd be surprising if Walmart employed more people to fix shelving problems, but in other contexts we may have seen induced demand for more employees because the ROI for employee time improved. Not all increases in efficiency reduce…

And the workers are now focusing more on processes that could be argued are more skilled, like restocking the shelves, fixing prices, etc., than they were doing before, like identifying issues.

Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores

#318

Post by posterboy »

timthelion wrote: post #251
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the past 200 years, capitalism has been the only economic institution in the world This is not true.

Ok, I'll admit that some remote tribes were not. But even the USSR was a market economy.

if market is your model of choice, sure, and if your model of russia is simple enough, too.

Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores

#319

Post by hk__2 »

raisedbyninjas wrote: post #316
unabridged wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially Google Maps, I'm waiting for a competitor to blow it out of the water. Satellite images are relatively cheap, you could have a map that shows a daily updated image of every street, and show timelapses. But their streetview would be very tough to displace.

Their mobile maps are bloated and their web maps have been better, but I'm not sure how Google or anybody else can get cheap daily streetview imagery. I've been waiting for somebody to partner with the postal service and slap cameras on every truck.

I think parent was refering to satellite imagery; not street view.

Re: Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores

#320

Post by krisoft »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #164
monk_e_boy wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does raise the question of what jobs are worth saving? So a robot takes someones job, but it was a crappy job that they hated anyway. But they needed the money. Tough.

That is a generic end-of-work question. Ideally, everyone would have jobs they liked, and all the dull stuff would be automated (Star Trek outcome). Pessimistically, the machines will become better than humans at everything and we will just become obsolete (Terminator outcome). If automation picks up, we will have to deal with these questions sooner rather than later, but it will happen eventually.

I hope for the Culture outcome. The machine minds gets better at everything, and they choose to keep us around as pets. (Well tending to all of our Mashlow levels, as a point of pride between themselves.)
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