But will the robots be given piss bottles?
No, but they have free healthcare and time off to recharge their batteries
Having an in-place battery swap is the equivalent of having to eat lunch at your workstation.
Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
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Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't forget all the robots reading it. It seems the end goal of the advertising industry -- robots doing, robots writing, robots reading. Like cockroaches and twinkies, one of the few things to survive nuclear war.
But will robots survive a nuclear war's EMP?
Military drones have to be covered in a Farraday cage layer to prevent jamming, so that would double as nuclear EMP protection. Finding a place to charge afterwards might be tricky though...
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#23I don't know for aging economics this is somewhat good. But for developing countries it's horrible. Where humans has to search work each day to find food for night
If we also sufficiently automated food production, there ought to be enough calories to feed everyone, right? Right?
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#24About 20 years ago I was a programmer at a manufacturing company. I worked on a project to automate part of materials requirements planning. The woman who was in charge of it was spending about 20 hours per week wrangling Excel spreadsheets to figure out what materials they needed. It was all based on data we had: inventory, orders, etc. A few weeks later, and with a fair amount of her help, I'd automated the whole t…
There's plenty of stuff in the middle it's just been moved overseas and the output is sent back to the US on a shipping container.
Chinese and Mexican factory workers != robots. It sounds obvious but the establishment, media, and economists do like to blur the distinction.
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#25I wish I could believe that all this automation would lead to more leisure time for all of humanity, but it certainly won’t happen on its own out of generosity from the robot owners.
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#26I don't know for aging economics this is somewhat good. But for developing countries it's horrible. Where humans has to search work each day to find food for night
Is humanity really at a point where we can't think of anything more useful than "carry things about" and "put things in a box" for those people to do? If that's really the state we're in then a bunch of robots doing it instead is the least of our problems.
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#27About 20 years ago I was a programmer at a manufacturing company. I worked on a project to automate part of materials requirements planning. The woman who was in charge of it was spending about 20 hours per week wrangling Excel spreadsheets to figure out what materials they needed. It was all based on data we had: inventory, orders, etc. A few weeks later, and with a fair amount of her help, I'd automated the whole t…
> drove horses out of our economy
A graph of the process is in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39604784
(it also includes a bifurcation: between draft and sport/companion horses)
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#28I assume this is being upvoted because HN thinks this is good? At least that's what I hear in AI threads... AI just allows humans to work more efficiently right? The few fulfilment center workers left are probably now 100x fulfilment workers now that they can manage a fleet of robotic workers instead of human ones. As HN says, these types of innovations historically only create new job opportunities so there's probab…
Amazon's role in society is not to provide menial jobs to keep people busy though. If anything, the automation provides good, innovative jobs in robotics. Those are the sorts of jobs I think everyone should have. Leave fetching and carrying to robots, and educate people to be useful in more meaningful, fulfilling, and impactful ways.
Suggesting that robots are bad because they take jobs from people doing horrible, boring jobs just says that you want people to carry on doing that work. That's not a good look.
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#29I don't know for aging economics this is somewhat good. But for developing countries it's horrible. Where humans has to search work each day to find food for night
If we also sufficiently automated food production, there ought to be enough calories to feed everyone, right? Right?
Industrialized agriculture already produces enough food to feed the world. The remaining problem is a question of distribution.
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#30I wish I could believe that all this automation would lead to more leisure time for all of humanity, but it certainly won’t happen on its own out of generosity from the robot owners.
Why does the Ampère–Maxwell law, the largest of Maxwell's equations, not simply eat the other 3?