Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Uniqlo cut 90% of staff at one warehouse by replacing them with robots

qz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 314 posts

Re: Uniqlo cut 90% of staff at one warehouse by replacing them with robots

#171

Post by ed_balls »

mschuster91 wrote: post #99
tathougies wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One concrete step can be getting rid of the capital requirements (by regulation) to invest. The idea of 'qualified investors' is literally a way to keep poor people poor, and rich people rich, by cutting off poor or middle class people from the major vehicles of wealth creation. It is ridiculous that I cannot invest in the IPO of a company in my local neighborhood because, while I have enough money to satisfy the bus…

These capital requirements are regulations that have been introduced as a response to companies fleecing the poor-ish, the uneducated and those who had a bit of cash, but decided to put it into one (fraudulent) investment. Drop them and you'll see what already is happening in the cryptocoin scene: people getting exploited left and right. Point is, no sofa investor will be a shark and get rich, contrary to the ICO pro…

Allow people to invest 50% of the amount they paid in taxes in a given year. It can only be done via online platform that does basic due diligence. They can only raise half of the money from a regular user, the rest has to come from a professional investor.

Re: Uniqlo cut 90% of staff at one warehouse by replacing them with robots

#173

Post by starpilot »

excalibur wrote: post #5

How about instead of selling robots to companies to replace their laborers, we sell robots to the workers to do their jobs. You keep getting paid as long as you keep your robot running.

How about instead of giving them bullshit jobs, just give them money instead.

Re: Uniqlo cut 90% of staff at one warehouse by replacing them with robots

#174

Post by ryanwaggoner »

bootlooped wrote: post #82
lgessler wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software engineering seems safe, if that is what you are primarily thinking of in your question. Developing software at the same level of a skilled engineer is a problem we'd only be able to solve with general AI. Even if program synthesizers (things that take declarative high level requirements and produce code) worked (and they don't at the level required for an non-technical user to use), most engineers today must…

It's easy to see how lots of programmers could be replaced, just look at Zapier. Now imagine where something like that is going to be in a decade.

You’re completely right! I’ve thought this myself: Zapier and the ecosystem that enables it is such a good example of how something that used to take a programmer days or weeks can now be done in minutes.

I wonder if the end result of things like Zapier will ultimately be unemployment for devs. Perhaps, but maybe it’ll just free them up for something else. I mean, is the demand for programming really fixed? Or will more and more powerful force multiplier tools like Zapier just free up devs for new demands that we can’t predict now? Hard to say and I’m concerned like you, but it’ll definitely be interesting to watch.

So yeah, I agree with you and I think Zapier is a great example. I think we all just have to wait and see if that ends up replacing devs in the long run or just shifting what they do.

Re: Uniqlo cut 90% of staff at one warehouse by replacing them with robots

#175

Post by valeness »

adventured wrote: post #152
zjaffee wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true, most democrats do not support redistribution of wealth, where leftists who do support the redistribution of wealth are generally in favor of gun rights.

There's no chance that's close to true. The further left you go, the more ardently people are anti guns in the US. With few exceptions it's a dramatic difference between the center left and far left on gun rights. The far left is entirely anti gun, the center left occasionally panders to win votes out of necessity. The two most famous Socialists in the US right now are probably Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez. Both…

From my understanding classic Marxists are very pro-gun, as a necessity to protect the rights of workers from the ruling class.

"The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens’ militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed. [...] Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary." ~Karl Marx - Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League

Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-l...

Re: Uniqlo cut 90% of staff at one warehouse by replacing them with robots

#176

Post by antoinette_ »

ry_ry wrote: post #89
taneq wrote: post #4

It's OK, the staff will just find new jobs as electronics engineers and machine learning researchers. /s

Strictly playing devil's advocate, but is the lifelong employment of their staff uniqlo's problem? If you found a cheaper supplier of milk, would you feel obligated to reimburse your milk man? (may be a misplaced cultural reference, but in the UK 20+ years ago a chap delivering you milk to your door every morning on a rolling contract basis was the norm - generally they do other stuff now)

Companies as a group should be aware that they are just a polite fiction that exists only because actual people allow them to exist. If they continue down the path of externalizing all costs while internalizing all revenues, people may one day decide that they're tired of humouring the fiction. If we somehow got to a point where 90% of workers were laid off due to automation, with no adjustments to the social safety net, then I think we would be long past that point already. In that sense, Uniqlo is effectively freeloading off the fact that other companies haven't similarly automated, because if they had, Uniqlo would not be able to exist. Nobody would be able to afford its clothing, and there would be massive societal unrest to the point that people would probably not even respect the "right" of a company to do things like hold private property.

Re: Uniqlo cut 90% of staff at one warehouse by replacing them with robots

#177

Post by antoinette_ »

darkstar999 wrote: post #32
x220 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>move to another job And when that job gets automated?

We used to be 90%+ farmers. We'll find a way.

Young people can't afford to buy farmland anymore and we're losing topsoil at a concerning rate.

Re: Uniqlo cut 90% of staff at one warehouse by replacing them with robots

#178

Post by hrktb »

x220 wrote: post #25
hrktb wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see the /s, but these workers are well educated, as any average Japanese is, relatively speaking. It’s not that of an ordeal for them to move to another job.

>move to another job And when that job gets automated?

Then a ton of jobs will have been automated, and as a society we’ll take a hard look at the situation to find a solution. The only limit is what we accept as a compromise.

But otherwise we could take any of these workers and move them to a developping country, they would have a great impact. It just won’t happen as that’s not how most of them view their future.

Re: Uniqlo cut 90% of staff at one warehouse by replacing them with robots

#179

Post by bamboozled »

It would be good to see some actual figures here, how many staff were replaced? It says it’s a new warehouse, so why would there have been staff in the first place ? The trouble with percentages is they can easily be misinterpreted.

Having spent my fair share of time in Japan, I’d bet there are still plenty of people working st that warehouse and around the clock.

Re: Uniqlo cut 90% of staff at one warehouse by replacing them with robots

#180

Post by [deleted] »

dvcrn wrote: post #156

I love uniqlo doubling down on tech. One thing I found really interesting is that inside the labels are small rfid (I think?) chips. At the cashier, the person just folds them nicely, puts the pile of cloth on a metal pad and the system tells you how many items and how much it is. No manual code scanning!! The first time I noticed that I felt like a kid again discovering something magical. The next step was to have p…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN