101–110 of 298 posts
This isn’t the factory of the future. The factory of the future will have only two employees, one human and one dog. - The human feeds the dog. - The dog makes sure no one touches the equipment. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/01/30/future-factory/
No need for a human to feed the dog, a robot will refill the dog feeder.
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Not sure why Ocado gets so much credit for the latter though, they just copied AutoStore which has a fascinating history! They purchased an AutoStore, then reverse engineered it, made a few changes, and claimed it as their own invention.
There was a big patent lawsuit related to this, which as I understand it Ocado won pretty comprehensively. ( https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/ocado-wins-... -- case in UK court concluded that AutoStore's patents were all invalid and in any case Ocado didn't infringe them; there were a bunch of related cases in other jurisdictions but https://www.ocadogroup.com/media/news/autostore-and-ocado-se... indi…
Ocado's initial patents as well were actually modifications of Autostore's robots, running on an Autostore grid, and Autostore manufactured the robots to Ocado's specification before Ocado decided to build the whole thing themselves.
So hard to argue that it wasn't a copy.
IMO I think the UK patent victory was a bit of a joke... Ocado's innovation of the robot above a single cell is both obvious, but also has it's own obvious downsides.
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There was a big patent lawsuit related to this, which as I understand it Ocado won pretty comprehensively. ( https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/ocado-wins-... -- case in UK court concluded that AutoStore's patents were all invalid and in any case Ocado didn't infringe them; there were a bunch of related cases in other jurisdictions but https://www.ocadogroup.com/media/news/autostore-and-ocado-se... indi…
> This seems difficult to square with your claim that Ocado "just copied AutoStore". I just looked at videos of the two technologies and it seems difficult to ignore the relationship. Perhaps this is a case of "technically correct", i.e. that they technically did not infringe the patents, but that in practice they leveraged as much as they could around the patent claims?
It's interesting how Amazon is embedding robots in human-designed warehouses whereas Ocado has humans overseeing a robotic warehouse. The later is a much easier problem.
The Ocado warehouse automation is pretty crazy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE
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Neat is very important for consistent performance. A restaurant can improve performance during the "lunch rush" by letting neat slip, but that carelessness is already costing them performance at the end of the lunch rush - this works because just as this catches up they get several hours in the afternoon to clean things up. Then supper crowd where they do it again - then they have the rest of the night to clean up fr…
Slow is fast is a saying for a reason. It is just as true for a human as it is for a robot.
Look at the above restaurant example, the system has a built in buffer to handle spikes so it can be cheaper or make other tradeoffs everywhere else compared to an equivalently performant system that can do 100% duty cycle.
A robot or human that can deal with messy inventory is facilitating positive tradeoffs elsewhere in the system.
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Not sure why Ocado gets so much credit for the latter though, they just copied AutoStore which has a fascinating history! They purchased an AutoStore, then reverse engineered it, made a few changes, and claimed it as their own invention.
There was a big patent lawsuit related to this, which as I understand it Ocado won pretty comprehensively. ( https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/ocado-wins-... -- case in UK court concluded that AutoStore's patents were all invalid and in any case Ocado didn't infringe them; there were a bunch of related cases in other jurisdictions but https://www.ocadogroup.com/media/news/autostore-and-ocado-se... indi…
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If we can promote right to repair a bit more, we could actually talk about this.
Consumerism can be avoided regardless of right to repair legislation. We just stop buying shit we don’t really need which is most of what people buy on Amazon I imagine.
In this case, legislation could help ameliorate this problem, and maybe taxing the actual cost of things (e.g. environmental impact) instead of just letting the future generations deal with it.
Why do we think this is a good thing without socialism? I am not a fan of socialism, but with the level of automation we are reaching, do we really want to be ruled by our incel tech-bro overlords, living out of UBI, in a permanently bi-strated society without even the illusion of social mobility and democracy we have nowadays?
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Luddites were asking that question long before socialism was a thing. However we now have more people than ever working, and standard of living is higher. I'm not worried.
During the transition to industrialization it’s conceivable that many people became worse off because they could not find a place in the new economy. Even if society is eventually better off, the our generation or the next may have to sacrifice our way of life.
Why do we think this is a good thing without socialism? I am not a fan of socialism, but with the level of automation we are reaching, do we really want to be ruled by our incel tech-bro overlords, living out of UBI, in a permanently bi-strated society without even the illusion of social mobility and democracy we have nowadays?
Luddites were asking that question long before socialism was a thing. However we now have more people than ever working, and standard of living is higher. I'm not worried.
Generally, though, I'm against the arguments of "automation is bad cuz less jobs". I think that might be true in the very short term, but we're never going to have a case where "all possible work is done", because that's a completely malformed premise. There's pretty much an infinite amount of potential work to do.