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

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

#231

Post by sanxiyn »

nerdponx wrote: post #185
tdb7893 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't this mainly just be a problem if there wasn't much competition in the market? If cost savings aren't being passed on to the consumers I would blame lack of competition before I consided blaming automation

It's not just about passing the savings onto consumers. Even if you deduct 10-15% for tax evasion, most of that money will end up recirculating into the economy. The point I was clumsily trying to make is that it doesn't really matter. There are forces in the US economy that lead to strong feedback loops of negative welfare for individuals and the families of individuals who come on economic hard times. So while your…

I think what you are saying is automation is harmful when there is no safety net. I tend to agree. I think the right solution is to set up safety net. In particular, I don't think stopping automation is the right solution.

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

#232

Post by lovich »

mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #153
petra wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

high skill jobs are at risk too. It's reasonable to assume, given recent tech developments(AI, low code for software, generative design for graphic design/engineering and architecture, blockchain for professions working on trust in transaction like accounting, some automation in the legal field, automation in insurance) that many high-skill professions will suffer unemployment too. And can someone with high-skill job…

The jobs you listed have largely been augmented rather than replaced. You’re also not accounting for new jobs we can’t even imagine yet. Ten years ago no one would think YouTuber or Instragram model would be viable jobs for some people. Social media directors at companies large and small have to find unique ways to engage with other humans. The guy that fixes cracked screens on smartphones couldn’t have done that in…

Augmenting is enough to massively disrupt industries. Look at law which used to be a safe middle class job and is now in a bimodal distribution of super high paid and low wage work. All that came from just having cheap OCR which let firms replace legions of well educated law grads searching through paper documents with "Ctrl+f" for the lawyers actually running the case.

Automation like this has led to new jobs everytime there's been a major change in the past and has been better for humanity. The problem is that this sometimes takes years or decades and the old workers are told to eat shit in the meantime while the capital owners collect all the newfound wealth.

Are you willing to live in abject poverty while your bosses get increasingly wealthy just because it'll be better for people in some distant future? That's a question that's usually answered with "No" and that societies don't want to even have asked if they wish to remain stable

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

#233

Post by latchkey »

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…

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/uniqlo-announced-bring-rfid-l...

https://www.fastretailing.com/eng/sustainability/report/pdf/...

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

#234

Post by ALittleLight »

lovich wrote: post #229
EpicEng wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Will prices go down as a result of this automation? Can you name a single instance where prices did _not_ go down due to automation? You're saying process won't go down tomorrow, but of course that's not how any of this works.

Prices don't go down unless there is competition. If a company figures our a way to make massive cost savings while their competition does not, they pocket that margin and use it to either invest in more productive capacity or give back to shareholders. They don't feel some ethical need to lower prices just because they can Automation is correlated with cost savings for consumers because usually the competition can f…

>Prices don't go down unless there is competition

Prices also go down if it will lead to more profit. If you can sell 2.1 times as many widgets selling at half the profit then of course you will.

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

#235

Post by TangoTrotFox »

afuchs wrote: post #191
stale2002 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you have noticed, but unemployment is at a multi decade low. We are not seeing pervasive unemployment, we are seeing the opposite. A situation where there are too many jobs, and not enough workers to fill them So econ 201 would say that there isn't any societial problem right now.

Off the top of my head, I can think of the "disappearing middle class." The trend seems to be that anyone that would have previously found themselves with a place in life, that placed them below the upper middle class rich but above the working poor, are either becoming significantly richer or significantly poorer. For perspective, a lot of households have seen a large increase in their wealth. Comparatively, the vas…

The 'disappearing middle class' is not what you think it is. I try to actively research the things I talk about in in searching for information on the widely reported chiseling out of the middle class I came upon this [1] paper. And that paper does describe that. In 1979 the middle class controlled 46% of all income, and the upper/rich classes controlled 30%. Today (well at least today as of 2014) the rich and upper class control 63% with the middle class left with 26%. The middle class has also shrunk, going from 38.8% of society to 32%. And that's where most media reports on this generally stop, but it's incredibly misleading.

That paper also gets into exactly how the size of the various socioeconomic groups are changing. This is their change in size from 1979 to 2014, as a percent of the total population:

- Rich: 0.1% -> 1.8%

- Upper Middle Class: 12.9% -> 29.4%

- Middle Class: 38.8% -> 32%

- Lower Middle Class: 23.9% -> 17.1%

- Poor or Near-Poor: 24.3% -> 19.8%

Statistics like this are certainly subject to biased interpretation and 'massaging'. If one is curious about the source, wiki has a section on the political stance of the Urban Institute [2]. Though the paper itself is very transparent in their methodology and extremely readable. I found it all eye opening to the point that it literally changed my worldview. Everybody is moving up at an incredibly rapid pace. I mean keep in mind this is only over 35 years! We are doing something very right from an economic point of view.

[1] - https://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Institute#Political_stan...

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

#236

Post by jedharris »

pjmorris wrote: post #53
mikepurvis wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on this? I don't understand which populations you're referring to as having become decoupled from force projection? In the US at least, there's 1+ gun for every man, woman, and child. Even if the elite class is backed by the entire US military, there's something to be said for overwhelming force of numbers.

Even without guns, it's much easier to break a robot than it is to operate one. I think the economics of the physical economy favor the physical masses over the paper wealthy.

Is it easier to break a tank than operate one? Then why a robot?

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

#237

Post by nopinsight »

There will be a great deal more demand in the healthcare sector all over the developed world in the coming decades. Japan is leading the way with the oldest demographics among large economies. Its demographics leads Western Europe by a decade or so and perhaps a couple more for the US.

We should start training people for jobs like homecare assistance, nursing home care, etc and developing institutions and solutions for funding them. An apprenticeship program complemented by some classes might work better than college for these jobs.

The jobs do require some skills but they are skills most people can acquire with good training. The latent demand is enormous and the work is potentially more fulfilling than moving stuff around a warehouse.

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

#238

Post by new_guy »

nopinsight wrote: post #237

There will be a great deal more demand in the healthcare sector all over the developed world in the coming decades. Japan is leading the way with the oldest demographics among large economies. Its demographics leads Western Europe by a decade or so and perhaps a couple more for the US. We should start training people for jobs like homecare assistance, nursing home care, etc and developing institutions and solutions f…

By the time they're trained up the robots will have taken their jobs too.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/06/japan-robots-w... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5014079/15-000-ro...

I love technology, but honestly I find this terrifying. People aren't just going to be unemployed, they're going to be unemployable.

This how workers must have felt during the first industrial revolution, I'd say we're in the second one now.

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

#239

Post by chimeracoder »

briandear wrote: post #139
chimeracoder wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you found a cheaper supplier of milk, would you feel obligated to reimburse your milk man? According to the TWU, yes - the MTA is required to pay the TWU $450,000 whenever it uses a machine to bore tunnels, because forty years ago, that job would have been performed by a human instead.

Well that's just dumb. Taxpayers are subsidizing TWU -- actually paying for absolutely nothing in return.

> Well that's just dumb. Taxpayers are subsidizing TWU -- actually paying for absolutely nothing in return.

I agree that it is a terrible idea. Unfortunately, NY government (and the elections) are so corrupt that there's literally nothing we can do about it.

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

#240

Post by nopinsight »

new_guy wrote: post #238
nopinsight wrote: post #237

There will be a great deal more demand in the healthcare sector all over the developed world in the coming decades. Japan is leading the way with the oldest demographics among large economies. Its demographics leads Western Europe by a decade or so and perhaps a couple more for the US. We should start training people for jobs like homecare assistance, nursing home care, etc and developing institutions and solutions f…

By the time they're trained up the robots will have taken their jobs too. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/06/japan-robots-w... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5014079/15-000-ro... I love technology, but honestly I find this terrifying. People aren't just going to be unemployed, they're going to be unemployable. This how workers must have felt during the first industrial revolution, I'd say we're…

Home assistance and nursing assistant jobs require competence in a large number of highly varied tasks and many require human-style intelligence which is among the hardest to automate from our experience with AI research. (See Moravec’s Paradox.)

It will be at least a couple decades, likely longer, until we can really automate those jobs cost effectively, which gives us time to reconfigure socio-economic systems to suit the burgeoning new industrial revolution.

Check out the following predictions by a noted roboticist and former director of MIT’s CSAIL

https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/

Example from the page:

Dexterous robot hands generally available. NET (Not Earlier Than) 2030

It will take at least a decade and often longer for a hardware product to become affordable to the masses. So we are talking about 2040 or later when most of home caring jobs will be at risk.

Even then, the need for human interaction will still be there so it is unclear if most elderly would not want human services if it is accessible to them.

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