11–20 of 95 posts
The american press would only write an article like this if such conditions disparately impacted minority race workers.
Pretty soon the british press will do the same.
It just gets worse and worse. I see no light at the end of the tunnel.
The citizens of america do not even ask the right questions.
From the article A handset told him what to collect and put on his trolley. It allotted him a set number of seconds to find each product and counted down. If he made a mistake the scanner beeped." "We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we're holding it, but we might as well be plugging it into ourselves", he said. Really reminded me of this : http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm Welcome to the future…
Goddamnit, why do the nasty predictions for the future have to arrive early while the nice ones are always late?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why are humans still doing this work? They are cheaper. And it keeps them occupied.
Cheaper I understand, however, it doesn't seem very healthy work. I worked with people doing it full time at that time (and apparently not much has changed); most of those had damaged hips from walking the same way behind the carts they pushed for 10-15 years. And I can see why this would mentally affect you, although I must say that most of them actually liked it. I was setting up a software business and was telling…
The short-term financial gain goes to Amazon (and to a smaller degree the pickers), but the long-term costs of an unhealthy job are paid for by the healthcare system. Therefore there is an incentive to create those jobs.
I worked as a picker for a few days in a large distribution facility in my home town when I was in high school; this was over 20 years ago. They had rails everywhere through the complex which seemed to do nothing; when I asked what that was, they explained that they, together with the biggest IT company in NL, made software and robots to do our work automatically. It would be put in production the next year. It hasn'…
"Why are humans still doing this work?" Given that Amazon is no stranger to technology I suspect the answer is that it simply doesn't make financial sense. I suspect the capex on a standard Amazon shipping center is probably pretty low (lease a warehouse, put in computer systems, hire a crowd of temp workers).
Many things that many people believe robots can do are in this category. The absolute state of the art is balancing (not walking) on 2 legs (which does allow you to move, but ...), and walking on 4 legs (it's not really walking like for example a cat does, but it's better than balancing)
But the control loop for grasping arbitrary 3d objects given a camera image of the object and the hand ... such a stupid thing is a completely unsolved problem, and it's we're not anywhere near solving it.
Here's how amazon sidesteps that problem : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KRjuuEVEZs&noredirect=1
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Goddamnit, why do the nasty predictions for the future have to arrive early while the nice ones are always late?
Salvation is always just around the corner, but we are walking around a rotating platform struggling to even just keep the corner in sight.
Average people get all upset about unions when they see them applied to jobs that don't seem too too demanding. But places like Walmart and Amazon are exactly why unions should exist, to counterbalance the inhumane over-optimization and maltreatment of people. Amazon could probably make work less toxic by hiring 10% more people, but that would make things cost a few cents more.
Yes people like Walmart and Amazon workers need protection form maltreatment. Definitely. This should be built into the law though, not into unions.
And no because the existing unions don't really protect people. If you look at RMT, Unison and NUT they regularly pop up just to cause trouble. From a perspective of people having to consume services offered by their staff regularly, they want masses of additional pay and do not improve standards along the way at all. They are simply allowing the incompetent to be propped up by the good staff. Also, the professional minority who agree that this is the case are forced to be dragged into union ballots and vote with other staff in favour of strike action regularly in fear of retaliation from their colleagues.
Also let us not forget a much greater threat of exploitation: being forced to work with no pay under the guise of "training". This is happening a lot in the UK a the moment as the Job Centre has been pushing for people to do this by threatening to cut their benefits if they don't do it. The result is people being forced to work for no compensation and having to pay for travel expenses out of their own (literally destitute) pocket. The employers don't have to pay the staff either. The result of this is a dangled carrot of "if you do this, after 6-12 months we'll give you a permanent paid position". This inevitably results in being laid off as not needed immediately when they agreed to take you on.
There are even posters going up in Job Centres telling people "try staff for free":
Edit: Also I've spoken to some business associates (the sort who worship the fully paid up Lord Fuckwit Sugar himself) and are applauding this as a great way of building their businesses. This is simply unethical. I've been pretty much excluded for mentioning the inevitable "abhorrent slavery" point, not that I care.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Why are humans still doing this work?" Given that Amazon is no stranger to technology I suspect the answer is that it simply doesn't make financial sense. I suspect the capex on a standard Amazon shipping center is probably pretty low (lease a warehouse, put in computer systems, hire a crowd of temp workers).
Take it from someone who's tried making it work : grasping is too fucking hard. It looks so simple, a baby could do it. A hand grasping objects. Many things that many people believe robots can do are in this category. The absolute state of the art is balancing (not walking) on 2 legs (which does allow you to move, but ...), and walking on 4 legs (it's not really walking like for example a cat does, but it's better th…
Average people get all upset about unions when they see them applied to jobs that don't seem too too demanding. But places like Walmart and Amazon are exactly why unions should exist, to counterbalance the inhumane over-optimization and maltreatment of people. Amazon could probably make work less toxic by hiring 10% more people, but that would make things cost a few cents more.
Average people get all upset about unions when they see them applied to jobs that don't seem too too demanding. But places like Walmart and Amazon are exactly why unions should exist, to counterbalance the inhumane over-optimization and maltreatment of people. Amazon could probably make work less toxic by hiring 10% more people, but that would make things cost a few cents more.
Hopefully this becomes more and more automated over time and eventually people won't have to do it at all.
From the article A handset told him what to collect and put on his trolley. It allotted him a set number of seconds to find each product and counted down. If he made a mistake the scanner beeped." "We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we're holding it, but we might as well be plugging it into ourselves", he said. Really reminded me of this : http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm Welcome to the future…
The 'Australia Project' part is fanciful sci-fi, but the point is clear - the work that all humans have put in for generations is being co-opted by the few in the ownership classes. Ordinary people find themselves treated more and more as replaceable machines then are finally optimised out of the process and disenfranchised entirely.
OTOH when you look at much of the non-western world, thinking about problems with concentrated ownership in a post-scarcity society seems a million miles away from the people who still need a clean water supply and a reliable source of food.