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Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

finance.yahoo.com

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Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#171

Post by maxsilver »

rfwhXQ5H wrote: post #140
ameister14 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average hourly wage in the United States is $30, so 15 hours a week is $450 pre-tax. Live on that with a family.

If you don't think that there aren't people doing that already in this country, get out of your bubble. How much do you think farmers are making?

Farmers (i.e., Farmers, Ranchers, and Other Agricultural Managers) make a lot more than $450 a week. Average salary for these folks is $70k/yr.

A farm hand only makes like $15/hr on average, which puts it on par with a job at McDonalds or such.

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#172

Post by hackerlight »

onion2k wrote: post #26
methuselah_in wrote: post #9

I 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.

Welfare systems are nationalistic. The US will tax companies using robots and redistribute it to Americans while the people assembling widgets in developing countries will be out of a job. I'm still optimistic that the raw increase in economic productivity will somehow sort everyone out eventually, but it could be bumpy.

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#175

Post by zztop44 »

inglor_cz wrote: post #89
wolverine876 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Living on another planet is a hard problem but only one company is working on that. There's an organization called NASA working on it.

Does NASA have any planetary colonization program? They do plan the Artemis mission, but AFAIK that is about establishing a tiny scientific base on the Moon, probably with regular exchange of the crew. I don't think they proclaimed an ambition to settle massive amounts of people there. For me "living on another planet" is only really SpaceX's goal. Build a semi-independent nation on Mars, with a million or more peopl…

Proclaiming things is very easy.

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#176

Post by actuallyalys »

shrubble wrote: post #152

This is self-reported: remember the 1000 Indians that were watching people shop at the Amazon Go stores? Amazon told us it was all "sensors" because it fit their company narrative to do so. I am not saying that Amazon doesn't have 750k robots and hasn't laid off 100k people... but they usually have some seasonality, plus, the quoted number is from 2021, the height of at-home shopping. "The world's second-largest priv…

> the height of at-home shopping

I wondered that, too, but I did see that Amazon revenue has continued to grow since 2021. Of course, it’s possible AWS and other divisions are compensating for a decline in physical goods sold. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to find revenue numbers for specific divisions.

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#177

Post by starttoaster »

karaterobot wrote: post #93
ranger_danger wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the point.

Not by my reading of the original comment. Seems like they're saying that layoffs result in higher skilled jobs. And here's my basis for that conclusion: > The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs require by definition, a higher skill set. And what I'm saying is that there may not be new jobs, and if they are they may be lower skill jobs if history is any indication.

The robots replaced the frontline laborers, yes. But someone now needs to maintain, build, and engineer new robots. Hence they said the laborer's job was replaced with one that requires fewer people at a higher skill (and probably pay) level. Or at least that's what I picked out from their comment.

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#178

Post by zeroonetwothree »

ben_w wrote: post #99
air7 wrote: post #52

It's clear that technological development creates a shift in jobs, i.e some jobs are lost, but new ones are created as a result. Whether the total #jobs increases or decreases is debatable. The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs require by definition, a higher skill set. (You wouldn't displace 100 manual labor workers with a machine that requires 105 workers to maintain). So by definition, the…

The chain of logic is falsified by the Whitney cotton gin: it was a labour saving device, which saved enough labour to make cotton much more profitable, which led to the growth of the cotton plantations in southern USA, which led to increased slavery, and those slavers actively prevented their slaves from learning to read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-literacy_laws_in_th…

IQ is sort of useful to measure humans because we have roughly comparable skills. It’s not applicable to AI at all in terms of measuring job fitness.

If I need someone to move some furniture it might only need an IQ of 85 but that doesn’t mean AI is doing it any time soon.

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#179

Post by zztop44 »

bombcar wrote: post #121
ben_w wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced that animal husbandry is less skilled than working in cars. Different skill, and as I've never done it I can't be certain, but horses are wet and messy biology with brains that are terrified of anything they've never seen before. Production line work I did do as a summer holiday job during my A-levels aged 17 or 18, it wasn't skilled work but also that was HVAC production line not cars.

The specialization has certainly taken off - people are much more specialized in their jobs now whereas “farmer” was really a jack-of-all-trades with passing capabilities in many different skill sets.

Yes and it’s not at all obvious to me that being a jack-of-all-trades farmer (builder, mechanic, etc) requires less intelligence than learning Python.

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#180

Post by Animats »

As Amazon really using that humanoid robot in production? Or is that just a demo?

The first big breakthrough was when Amazon bought Kiva, which makes those little mobile platforms that move racks of goods around. Those are mechanically simple and cost-effective, and have been very successful. Amazon is now making about 1000 units a day of the current model.[1] This is about 10% of the human birth rate in the US.

Moving standardized totes around automatically is decades old. Picking things out of bins has been difficult, and gets better as computer vision gets better. Amazon is still struggling with that.

Amazon Prime Air drone delivery starts soon.[2]

[1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/amazon-robotics-...

[2] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/amazon-prime...

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