But will the robots be given piss bottles?
Isn't this just a thing on delivery trucks? And it's pretty standard industry practice, not just Amazon? And in the scale of worker abuses, this is pretty low on the scale and more pragmatic than anything.
Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
221–230 of 400 posts
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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. The article and discussion are literally about machines moving stuff.
> The article and discussion are literally about machines moving stuff.
In a warehouse, not up the stairs to somebody's apartment...
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait a minute. Higher skill jobs? For at least a decade, the place jobs shifted to was Amazon. If you lost your job because Amazon put your company out of business, you could get a worse, more humiliating job working at an Amazon warehouse, or as an Amazon driver. It was not higher skill jobs the market shifted to, it was Nomadland jobs. Now that Amazon is switching to robots, where are those people Amazon is putting…
> For at least a decade, the place jobs shifted to was Amazon. It wasn't so much the jobs that shifted there as the customers, and the reason for that is that Amazon had better prices. Then people complained about the jobs they did offer because they're mechanistic and exhausting, so they automate them and then people complain about that. But that too should result in lower prices -- Amazon's retail operation doesn't…
I wish I could upvote this comment more than once.
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
>How do we teach them not math and science but the actual act of learning/adapting. This is literally what they're trying to do. People complain about the way things like math (concepts instead of rote memorization of facts) and spelling (stems and etymology instead of rote memorization) are taught. People complain that kids aren't learning cursive and other things like that. But schools are trying to teach critical…
I, personally think teaching kids critical thinking is great. Here in Eastern Europe they are only taught useless facts and not to think too much on their own, remnant of the past I guess...
Eh you require a lot of factual knowledge to know how to think. I mean humanity has been pretty smart for the last 10k years or so, but without understanding of scientific laws and a massive amount of world knowledge breakthroughs were very slow compared to the last 300 or so years. We need these facts + philosophy + critical thinking, but it seems like no one knows how to teach this.
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
That article in particular was the one that was debunked. It was based on a false rumor.
Debunked where? The only response is from Amazon (in the same article), who are disputing the number but still admitting that the team did intervene when needed.
And they did not give their own number, so even the dispute is very weak.
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#226It'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…
[deleted]
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#227Whether the article is accurate or not, that is the trend.
And we've seen it coming for a while now.
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole discussion around that headline has always been so confusing. It's honestly unclear. What I'd like to know is, what % of actual costumer checkouts required a human being vs what % was 100% automated. Some of the headlines and negative discussions make it sound like 100% of the checkouts required human approval. If that is true, then that's clearly terrible. If on the other hand it was anywhere below 5-10%,…
> Something like Waymo also has humans constantly monitoring and helping, but I don't see much discussion about that being "controlled by humans". Constantly doesn't really make sense, riders can call for support and get a near instant response, but it's pretty obvious from some of the mistakes that humans aren't watching every ride in real time. There's video from inside a Waymo which is stuck in a lot repeatedly lo…
Would it even be feasible to provide a taxi service with remote human drivers? I get the remote driver occasionally dealing with slow movement, but I think full time driving at speed would be impossible due to latency issues. It’s not a remote piloted drone that is in the air and so has much less of a chance of hitting something by accident.
Otherwise you think someone would have tried offering taxis driven by people in India or the Philippines already.
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That corporate taxation though hasn’t worked too well so far. What makes you think that having robots would change anything?
Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans
#230I 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?
Haha good one.