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Boston Dynamics Unveils New Robot for Warehouse Automation

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Re: Boston Dynamics Unveils New Robot for Warehouse Automation

#61
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we'll always need shitty job to keep people busy. That's a pretty darned condescending attitude to harbor there. I know a lot of people who have what you'd call s#### jobs, and they're happy, fulfilled, and proud of the work they do.

Are they ? Amazon warehouse workers ? People working in slaughterhouses ? Starbucks "baristas" working 3 jobs at once while they're execs use every trick in the book to avoid taxes and make literal billions in profit ? Min wage people working insane hours to barely afford life ? I'm the condescending condescending one ? They're being shat on by capitalism. I wish only one thing, for their lives to get better. I'm not…

The sheer degree of superiority in your comment is stunning.

I worked lots of jobs before my career in coding. Manual, sometime menial work. The fact that you deem me to be a “proud slave”, too stupid to even see my shackles might be the most stunning condescension I’ve heard, and there’s no shortage of it on the internet.

There is a fulfillment I still miss in that work. I could see the effect of my work immediately, as it was grounded in the physical world. I could leave and the work wouldn’t follow me.

Re: Boston Dynamics Unveils New Robot for Warehouse Automation

#62
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we'll always need shitty job to keep people busy. That's a pretty darned condescending attitude to harbor there. I know a lot of people who have what you'd call s#### jobs, and they're happy, fulfilled, and proud of the work they do.

Are they ? Amazon warehouse workers ? People working in slaughterhouses ? Starbucks "baristas" working 3 jobs at once while they're execs use every trick in the book to avoid taxes and make literal billions in profit ? Min wage people working insane hours to barely afford life ? I'm the condescending condescending one ? They're being shat on by capitalism. I wish only one thing, for their lives to get better. I'm not…

People need to have skills that fit the job market. You can't simply lift people out of poverty, it happens from the inside (with help).

Re: Boston Dynamics Unveils New Robot for Warehouse Automation

#63
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Harder to imagine a society in which we have no need for jobs though Unless we get something like UBI we'll always need shitty job to keep people busy. Automation for the sake of automation doesn't bring much if 70% of the population is still working 8 hours a day 5 days a week on more and more useless tasks. This isn't even talking about the fact that we're increasing productivity per unit of time but never reducing…

Guaranteeing employment by creating bullshit jobs is one of the big mistakes made by the late USSR. Doing so represented a fundamental shift in ideals from the egalitarian "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" to the puritanical "the who does not work, neither shall he eat". I keep thinking recently that the US looks more and more like the old jokes about the USSR. There is no fundament…

Dont worry we will all eventually just be working for the military-industrial complex in some form eventually, directly or indirectly. That’s basically the end state.

Re: Boston Dynamics Unveils New Robot for Warehouse Automation

#64
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Harder to imagine a society in which we have no need for jobs though Unless we get something like UBI we'll always need shitty job to keep people busy. Automation for the sake of automation doesn't bring much if 70% of the population is still working 8 hours a day 5 days a week on more and more useless tasks. This isn't even talking about the fact that we're increasing productivity per unit of time but never reducing…

> Unless we get something like UBI we'll always need shitty job to keep people busy I find myself often making this assumption too, but I wonder if it's warranted? A "shit" job is often shorthand for a job you can grab someone off the street and more or less have them start working, an "unskilled" job. But the fact that pretty much anyone can do a job isn't the same as saying that someone doing a "shit" job is only c…

> what exactly is the barrier to taking all the humans previously doing those jobs and leveling them up to do jobs machines can't do as well?

Suppose the cool jobs require knowledge of physics, linear algebra, coding, genetics - most people will be unable to do these jobs or unwilling. There are going to be human-in-the-loop kind of jobs for monitoring AI models though.

And there are going to be new applications that will keep us busy, whenever we gain new abilities we also expand our ambitions - like the car industry, which killed the horse and buggy industry but created a huge number of new jobs.

Re: Boston Dynamics Unveils New Robot for Warehouse Automation

#65
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, Tesla's Autopilot is using deep learning to detect roads, cars, objects and people.

And still doing a poor job of it.

You can reverse the reasoning: if you can't safely manuoever a car through a street with people, then how do you expect to do the same with a legged robot?

Re: Boston Dynamics Unveils New Robot for Warehouse Automation

#66
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we'll always need shitty job to keep people busy People have been worried we'll run out of jobs ever since farming started to decline from being 90% of jobs. People will always want better things, whether cell phones or TV shows. There are ALWAYS jobs to produce those better things. There's no need to "keep people busy". People just always want better things and will work for them.

Is this the end game of humanity though ? Let's create more bs jobs so that people can continue to afford new shiny gadgets ? > ALWAYS Earth is a finite environment, with finite resources, at some point it won't scale anymore, especially with today's ecological concerns. The world isn't going to run on cells phones and TV shows indefinitely, and even if, I think we should strive for more than that > People just alway…

> Earth is a finite environment, with finite resources, at some point it won't scale anymore, especially with today's ecological concerns.

Fortunately we have an entire solar system. That should last us a shocking amount of time.

Re: Boston Dynamics Unveils New Robot for Warehouse Automation

#67
It's a mobile palletizing robot. Palletizing robots have been around for years, but not, usually, on a mobile base.[1][2]. Fanuc (Japan) sells large numbers of robots for this. Handling uniform cardboard boxes is routine. Systems which handle a larger variety of items are rarer, but do exist.

Automated truck loading and unloading robots are already available. It's neat that Boston Dynamics made a mobile one, but they are not the first to do that.[3]

The real frontier in this area is fully automated order picking of miscellaneous objects in fulfillment centers. Nobody has that in volume use yet, although there are many demos.

[1] https://youtu.be/QfbdVboVNUM

[2] https://youtu.be/HtXneHWMg3c

[3] https://youtu.be/UeEB-nmMrBw

Re: Boston Dynamics Unveils New Robot for Warehouse Automation

#68
post #6

It's not difficult to imagine ultra-efficient warehouses that have no need for physical human labor, within our lifetime. Exciting stuff. But I have to ask: Can this thing fight queen xenomorphs? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWJDtVmGenc

I don’t know. This doesn’t seem dramatically better than the Unimate industrial robot, which is over half a century old. It even used the same kind of suction tool: https://youtu.be/VdolSBpyCaU

I mean, Boston Dynamics’ new robot is on (Mecanum?) wheels and it has some basic machine vision capability, but it really doesn’t seem like a dramatic, exponential departure from the 60 year old Unimate robot.

(Boston Dynamics’ other robots are much more impressive from a technical standpoint, but I’m not terribly surprised a company that has been struggling to get profitable is turning to more mundane but practical robotics applications.)

Which doesn’t mean I don’t think something like this isn’t practical. It just goes to show there’s still a ton of fairly virgin ground out there for increased automation and productivity growth just deploying technology from half a century ago and adding some minor tweaks. And I think part of the reason we HADN’T deployed this kind of automation tech earlier is because wages have just been too low, with wage growth fairly stagnant after the 1960s.

Every day I’m less and less worried that automation will get rid of all our jobs and more and more frustrated at the slow uptake of productivity improvements we have just sitting in front of us, perhaps because companies don’t compensate their employees enough for it to be worthwhile.

Re: Boston Dynamics Unveils New Robot for Warehouse Automation

#69
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And still doing a poor job of it.

You can reverse the reasoning: if you can't safely manuoever a car through a street with people, then how do you expect to do the same with a legged robot?

It's slow enough to avoid by walking around it, and you can make it small and light enough to not harm someone it might bump into.

Re: Boston Dynamics Unveils New Robot for Warehouse Automation

#70
post #53

We are rapidly approaching the automation of most repetitive human labor. Warehouse workers, truck/uber/cab drivers. Fast food workers, etc. What happens when these jobs go away? Historically technology has always provided a means of replacing those lost jobs but I think we are reaching an event horizon now where all of that changes. What happens to all of the people whose positions are replaced? I think we are teete…

This is how technology always works. 200 years ago, most of us worked on farms. 100 years ago, most worked as domestic workers or in factories. Now most are white-collar or service workers. As technology evolves, so too do our jobs.

The problem: it's true that productivity per person has steadily gone up through technology, but there are still a fuckton of workers in farms, mines, and factories to make commodities for the developed world to consume voraciously. It's only that these factories are mainly in the third world, and most people in Western societies can't see this. Even with the purpoted advancement of technology, miners in Congo are still mining cobalt with shovels (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPIB17PE2vM), Columbian farmers are still picking coffee fruits by hand (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNJ2hU3dr8o), and Chinese workers are assembling iPhones by hand (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmLsV9cSk0o). These kinds of work, even though you may find "primitive" and "solvable by technology", will take a long time to disappear off the face of the earth. This deterministic "evolutionary" thinking of jobs is really an incredibly narrow take on the world economy of jobs as a whole.

As most of us here are in the technological sector we are often blinded by the idea of unending linear progress, but we really have to respect how hard robotics actually is. The current manual labor tasks that have to be automated are optimized are actually not that 'repetitive' in the scientific sense, they actually require a lot of elaborate limb movements, split-second decision makings, and handling of countless edge cases for even just the simple task of moving objects from point A to B. It's easy to manage this when you're in a warehouse that has been purposefully designed for robots to do things easily (with entirely flat floors and standardized box sizes). But as soon these robots meet environments where humans live, come and go, with all the irregularities and edge cases it has, it will fail miserably. Too much of our surrounding infrastructure are designed for humans and not for robots, that's why there is immense value in creating robotic systems mimicking natural systems. But robotics researchers are still having an incredibly hard time replicating the delicate movements of human limbs and hands (both in terms of hardware and software), and rightly so; the human body is an incredibly elaborate system of muscles, bones, and neural pathways that almost seems like a miracle of nature (how the fuck did evolution really create this insane complicated system that can do all sorts of weird movements???) And even if we know how the whole system works, it's not a easy task to replicate this in mechanical terms. Note that we haven't begin talking about mass production of these complicated robots, there's always a question of whether it will scale (and would it be more competitive to humans, especially in the developing world?). I think robotics will still have quite some progress in the 21st century but a bit pessimistic that it will seriously begin to replace traditional manual labor in my lifetime.

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