Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans • Hacker News Board

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

#351

Post by AnthonyMouse » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 10:01 PM UTC

datadrivenangel wrote: post #310

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that they don't end up out of work. We have more automation right now than at pretty much any other point in history, and the unemployment rate is not high.

The point is that the unemployed end up using violence. So you need to create employment to keep them out of trouble.

You don't have to create anything. "There are no bad products, only bad prices." The demand for labor approaches infinity as its cost goes down.

Suppose that robots and AIs can't grow and distribute food, build housing, provide healthcare or produce and maintain robots. Then there will be necessary jobs for people.

Suppose that they can. Then all of those things will be near-free because they can be mass produced with no labor cost and you'll only have to make a trivial amount of money to have food, shelter and medicine. The low cost of living causes a living wage to be so easy to achieve that even extremely low value work pays more than that, creating jobs for anyone who wants one because so much work is viable at that price.

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

#352

Post by wordpad25 » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 10:36 PM UTC

rdedev wrote: post #305

wordpad25 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor countries have with little physical or financial infrastructure have high unemployment. You'd think there would be more jobs because there is a lot more opportunity to grow, but no, it's the opposite, there few jobs and they are bad jobs. Because there is little opportunity to create actual VALUE, in economic sense. Technology brings efficiency and brings jobs. Say entire tech sector, software developers and IT…

While I understand your point it seems to only focus on one side of things, a bit like trickle down economy. Let's say the IT sector is completely automated. What would all those devs do? Now keep automating medicine, legal and everything else and ask what would those people do? What's remaining are probably manual labor jobs for which we don't need so many people.

As with any productivity boost - if you need 100x fewer IT jobs, it doesn't mean you will cut your IT by 100x, you will instead increase just grow your IT department 100x or however much until you hit a growth bottleneck on the business side, then some jobs will shift there.

Just like my raw materials/energy cost example before, if you something becomes cheap - you don't consume less of it, you try to do more with it. Maybe, so much more that you can now do things which were completely impossible/unaffordable before!

It's very possible we will have MORE IT jobs due to new opportunities and efficiencies.

A decent software developer costs $40/hr. Let's say you can make your small iPhone app idea in 100 hours, that's $4,000. If developer with 100x as productive, now that costs only $40. That doesn't only mean more people can afford to build their ideas, but you could build BIGGER ideas, on a $4,000 budget you could now build $400,000 worth of an application! Think of all the opportunities for everyone!

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

#353

Post by AnthonyMouse » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 11:05 PM UTC

Ajedi32 wrote: post #315

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really a realistic view of the western economy. Or economics. Things like 'compensation' are fluid, fairly arbitrary and largely unrelated to the industrial complex. It's whatever we decide it is, pretty much. Automation is in full swing, has been for twenty years and is only accelerating. Ignore that at your peril. Everybody will continue to have toasters, computers, cars even when we've automated most of us out…

Perhaps you could link to some information on this "long history of thought on this subject" because to me everything you just wrote sounds like nonsense. The idea that we can just double people's compensation and thereby double our total economic output (because compensation is "whatever we decide it is") is so wrong headed I don't even know where to begin. Maybe that's a misunderstanding of your position, but I don…

Right now we have a lot of jobs that are extremely low efficiency, if not outright net negatives. These are the sorts of jobs that markets tend to eliminate, because the company that gets rid of them can charge lower prices than the one that doesn't. But that doesn't work when the job exists as a result of regulatory rules, or the company is a monopoly not subject to competitive pressure.

What does work is to improve the efficiency of the regulations. For the ones that are net negative you can just get rid of them. For the ones that are net positive but still poorly constructed, you can reduce their overhead.

This doesn't increase economic output, it reduces waste. Then you can work half as many hours for the same money, or the same number of hours for twice as much, not because anything more is being created but because people are spending half as much time on useless tasks. If they then spend that time doing something productive, output would increase, but that's a personal choice. If you could work 10 hours a week and that was enough to earn a living and own a home, would everybody still want to work 40 hours just so they could also own six cars and two boats? Some people would, which is fine, but some people wouldn't.

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

#354

Post by mtnGoat » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 11:12 PM UTC

Clent wrote: post #328

jkhanlar wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was from a video I watched a day or two ago, describing how with those uber and lyft and other order delivery services that consumers apparently are placing those orders wtih the services, picking up the items themselves and walking out, and then when the actual delivery person arrives, order is gone, reported as missing, the consumer also reports similarly, even though they picked up the orders themselves…

How many times can one's order be 'stolen' like this before a pattern emerges and the account is banned? This is also fraud and because it requires using the internet, it's going to lead to felony charges.

If memory serves me well, I think some guys in Florida found out how many times they could do it and got busted for fraud against the delivery companies.

System caught the anomaly, humans investigated, law enforcement made the arrests.

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

#355

Post by AnthonyMouse » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 11:21 PM UTC

easyThrowaway wrote: post #300

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> But lowering prices creates jobs. People pay less for a dress or a phone case and then spend the money on something else. New jobs are created doing the something else. Isn't this the principle supposedly behind trickle down economics just by another name?

There are a lot of economic theories that are correct under a particular set of constraints and completely invalid under a different set of constraints.

So for example, if you lower property taxes, theory says that rents should go down. At the existing rents it's now more profitable to own property because the ownership costs have gone down, so more buildings will be constructed as people take advantage of the opportunity, until the increase in supply brings rents down to account for the reduction in operating costs. This theory is invalid if you prohibit new construction because then supply can't increase so rents never go down and the existing landlords just pocket the money.

The problem isn't that theory doesn't work, it's that you have to satisfy its constraints. You have to get rid of monopolies and artificial scarcity or they capture the gains that were supposed to go to ordinary people.

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

#356

Post by ameister14 » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 11:23 PM UTC

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?

I think people are doing it and I think it sucks. If you are making $10 an hour in the US you aren't really making ends meet.

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

#357

Post by ameister14 » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 11:35 PM UTC

wordpad25 wrote: post #264

ameister14 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>yes, a growing economy requires higher-skilled work, but that's good because that work comes with higher pay. The problem, of course, is that wages stagnated from '99 to 2014 and the job participation rate has been decreasing since 2000 while cost of living and general production increased; so no, in a dynamic market work does not necessarily come with higher pay. It actually wouldn't really make sense for all new w…

wages stagnated, not total compensation which continued to grow employee preferred form of compensation has just shifted towards other benefits

Did that even keep pace with inflation? Looking at a generous measure of that in the form of ECI, I don't think it did.

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

#358

Post by refurb » Tue, Apr 23, 2024, 12:17 AM UTC

jmilkbal wrote: post #216

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The assumption here is that an AI with IQ 100 could do anything a human with an IQ of 100 could do, only cheaper. But that's just averages. Really it would do half the things better and half worse, and then people have jobs doing the things that it does worse. That would continue until it doesn't do anything worse, which may or may not ever happen, but if it did and we're all still alive then the result would be post…

The power structures will never allow it. The conditions for a society of leisure have theoretically existed for some time now. We will simply end up with a a planetary ruling class that lives opulently while the other 99% live in abject poverty.

You can live a life of leisure, as envisioned say 100 years ago right now* if you want.

Of course you'd need to be ok with 1920's level of housing (tiny farm house, no sewer or running water), education (stop at 8th grade) and healthcare (no effective antibiotics or cancer drugs).

You could replicate that sort of life today with a plot of cheap land ($3,000 per acre) and $5,000 per year (save $100,000 USD).

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

#359

Post by pfdietz » Tue, Apr 23, 2024, 1:35 AM UTC

thechao wrote: post #125

rdedev wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key point being it's created more jobs so far but we cannot extrapolate the same thing if AGI comes up tomorrow. Like let's say open ai comes up with a new LLM that is capable of replacing a human in let's say software development. What new jobs would it create? All technological advancement so far has created new jobs because you need someone to actually work on it, like a chip factory or doing devops. As far as…

I'm sorry, why would an AGI be interested in programming? My kids are AGI, and they're not interested. I think there's a real moral conundrum when we say "programmer AGI" because, I think, we're implicitly talking about terminating every non-programmer AGI, to meet our labor force whims. Replace "programmer" with intellectual task of your choice.

Presumably the interests of an AGI could be designed into it. It could be made to have programming be the center of its existence.

Even if it couldn't be designed in, then if we accept your analogy with people, we could simply generate AGIs until we found one that was interested in programming, then clone as many copies of it as we needed.

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

#360

Post by nyc_data_geek » Tue, Apr 23, 2024, 2:27 AM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #326

nyc_data_geek wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please provide evidence of your claim.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/17/24133029/amazon-just-walk...

From TFA: "While Amazon insists these reports are “erroneous,” it doesn’t deny that humans aren’t involved with the process at all. Instead, Amazon says its workers are tasked with annotating AI-generated and real shopping data to improve the Just Walk Out system — not run the whole thing. “This is no different than any other AI system that places a high value on accuracy, where human reviewers are common,” Dilip Kumar, the vice president of AWS Applications, writes in the post."

Don't see how this refutes any claim. If anything, Amazon is confirming they have human intelligence involved, they're just leaving the quantity/portion ambiguous, as behooves them. Do you have Amazon equity?