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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

#241

Post by hattmall »

actuallyalys wrote: post #176
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.

That's from inflation. Look at CVS revenue growth and that's with a declining customer volume. Fewer customers buying fewer items, but fairly massive revenue growth.

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

#242

Post by coderenegade »

echelon wrote: post #120
snowwrestler wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It’s not debatable; we have over 200 years of technological development to look back on and the trend is clear: the total number of jobs has increased at least as fast as human population growth over that time. In addition, the…

> It’s not debatable; we have over 200 years of technological development to look back on and the trend is clear: the total number of jobs has increased at least as fast as human population growth over that time. That isn't some immutable law of the universe. 200 years is a short sample size relative to geologic time. Once we have robots doing the cooking, cleaning, heavy work, etc., what becomes of the Waffle House…

In principle, they could probably just buy their own robots and start their own businesses. Locality is its own quality for SMEs. Whether or not that happens in practice is anyone's guess.

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

#243

Post by sillysaurusx »

Culonavirus wrote: post #239
jedberg wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article in particular was the one that was debunked. It was based on a false rumor.

[flagged]

No need to make this personal. This is about Amazon, not jedberg.

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

#244

Post by jedberg »

Culonavirus wrote: post #239
jedberg wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article in particular was the one that was debunked. It was based on a false rumor.

[flagged]

I'm certainly not defending Amazon, I'm defending AI. What they build was impressive and worked for the most part (I saw the behind the scenes). It was just really expensive because you needed high resolution full coverage of the entire store.

I just find it disingenuous for people to pull out this example as "why AI doesn't actually work" when it's not an example of it.

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

#245

Post by r00fus »

jedberg wrote: post #205
paxys wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are reports that 70% of the sales had to be manually reviewed by the team in India ( https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actual... ), so no, they weren't just training algorithms.

That article in particular was the one that was debunked. It was based on a false rumor.

Can you please produce any evidence that it was debunked? I can't find anything.

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

#246

Post by shrubble »

varenc wrote: post #197
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…

Agreed. These numbers are being cherry-picked. From Amazon quarterly filings[0][1], here's their employees count: - Q3 2019: 750,000 employees - Q4 2019: 798,000 employees - Q1 2020: 840,400 employees - Q2 2020: 876,800 employees - Q3 2020: 1,125,300 employees - Q4 2020: 1,298,000 employees - Q1 2021: 1,271,000 employees - Q2 2021: 1,335,000 employees - Q3 2021: 1,468,000 employees - Q4 2021: 1,608,000 employees - Q1…

Thank you for taking the time to break this out.

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

#247

Post by pjmlp »

ben_w wrote: post #94
pjmlp wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It turns out that for the time being robots don't complain to be handled like slaves. The real problem is when others follow Amazon in scale, leaving humans to survive in a new order.

> The real problem is when others follow Amazon in scale, leaving humans to survive in a new order. No, the problem is if humans in the set of those who have to work are able to keep ahead of the creation of new automation. UBI short-circuits the problem because then nobody would need to work. "Who pays for UBI?" you may well ask… well, Amazon can't ship anything when nobody has any money to buy stuff with. Separatel…

Only from the selected few allowed to work as druids on the AI tower, after the letcode trials, while remaining mankind struggles with what is left as jobs from a corporate managed government.

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

#248

Post by socketcluster »

The thing that's missed here is that it's not clear that robot purchase, maintenance cost and depreciation would be cheaper than paying 7.5 people a salary... Not to mention that the robots aren't going to be spending part of their salaries at Amazon as a worker might. Also, robots won't be eligible to vote in elections to support Amazon's political aspirations which give it access to billions of government contracts.

It seems we have gone to the opposite extreme since the days of Henry Ford where he wanted to pay his workers enough for them to be able to afford the cars they made.

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

#249

Post by chipdart »

jedberg wrote: post #244
Culonavirus wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I'm certainly not defending Amazon, I'm defending AI. What they build was impressive and worked for the most part (I saw the behind the scenes). It was just really expensive because you needed high resolution full coverage of the entire store. I just find it disingenuous for people to pull out this example as "why AI doesn't actually work" when it's not an example of it.

[flagged]

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

#250

Post by pvg »

jedberg wrote: post #244
Culonavirus wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I'm certainly not defending Amazon, I'm defending AI. What they build was impressive and worked for the most part (I saw the behind the scenes). It was just really expensive because you needed high resolution full coverage of the entire store. I just find it disingenuous for people to pull out this example as "why AI doesn't actually work" when it's not an example of it.

Why would it be disingenuous? They could be just misinformed or wrong.
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