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Amazon hid its safety crisis

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Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#111

Post by angry_octet »

m-ee wrote: post #30
logicslave wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No interest in solving the problem? I work at Amazon, we are hiring all the top ML people to work on this problem. Legions of ML PhDs. Its not easy and you are just making stuff up

How many PhDs does it take to figure out that commingling stock results in people getting counterfeit products?

They know. It's a business decision.

Combining does reduce the number of constraints significantly, especially when you consider multiple warehouses. If you had a bin for every importer (or importer batch) it would get much harder.

I think ultimately they want to charge brands an authenticity fee and disrupt supply side middle men.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#112

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

sasaf5 wrote: post #107
qppo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's an utterly mindless job I worked as a picker/packer one summer. This is an understatement, even before the robots did the walking for you. It's interesting that the only thing left is to make a robot that can handle the objects to be placed, currently they cost more than minimum wage human labor unless the thing being picked is designed to be handled by a machine. Ultimately that's what I think will happen, th…

While I worked with robotic manipulators back in 2006 this was called the grasping problem (apparently still unsolved).

I'm not sure I understand; can you explain that to me?

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#113

Post by komali2 »

pfranz wrote: post #90
komali2 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These people still need jobs. I think this is a statement worth teasing apart a bit. Nobody "needs" a job, for most definitions of "job." Everyone needs food water shelter. Maslow's hierarchy makes this clear. In most places in the world, you justify your right to access food, water, and shelter by providing labor to earn capital (or you just have capital because your parents had capital) to give to someone else fo…

> just throw UBI money at them and warehouse them in apartments like cattle I think this is how the bottom portion of Maslow's hierarchy is often dismissed. What I think the parent is talking about is higher up in the hierarchy--esteem needs. In our current society, most people get fulfillment through their job or raising kids. You often hear about issues with empty nest or retirement because people have trouble losi…

That's quite the strawman of the argument. I mean, why bring up UBI? Communists also talk about the issues of capitalism, and it'd be kinda funny to hear them try to integrate "income" into their curtencyless philosophy.

> think history has a bunch of examples.

Which part of history has automation and post scarcity? This would be news to me!

> consuming media with no other purpose.

Far be it for me to judge what people do with their time. I hate running but there's these maniacs that run marathons.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#114

Post by amelius »

numpad0 wrote: post #91
qppo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's an utterly mindless job I worked as a picker/packer one summer. This is an understatement, even before the robots did the walking for you. It's interesting that the only thing left is to make a robot that can handle the objects to be placed, currently they cost more than minimum wage human labor unless the thing being picked is designed to be handled by a machine. Ultimately that's what I think will happen, th…

That only thing left is also one of ultimate problems in robotics. What’s brilliant(and inhuman) about Amazon is they don’t push it but just wait for the technology to mature while humans cheaply do it.

How is it different from Uber using real drivers and meanwhile developing driverless car technology?

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#115

Post by sasaf5 »

HeWhoLurksLate wrote: post #112
sasaf5 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I worked with robotic manipulators back in 2006 this was called the grasping problem (apparently still unsolved).

I'm not sure I understand; can you explain that to me?

Sorry if I sounded obvious. For me at that time it was very curious that, after solving complex control problems to move those robotic arms, something so mundane such as grasping an object would still be unsolved.

Turns out that it's a really difficult problem.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#116

Post by Animats »

hinkley wrote: post #89
thaumasiotes wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think it's cheaper, it's just that a solution has yet to exist. Once it start working, it will go out at breakneck pace. I don't think this is a single problem. There are several dimensions to it, and you can trivialize some at the expense of others. Stop storing things compactly in bins and you can make it a lot easier to grab those things with a robotic arm. Give everything very robust packaging and you n…

There still seems to be a degree of 2.5 dimensional thinking with the current robotics systems. If you occupy the entire volume of a warehouse, then the volume occupied per object becomes less of an issue than when you have huge air columns between the roof and robots, workers, or shelves. You could move most of the manual handling to the ingest side; having truck workers load product into what amounts to a fancy Pez…

You could move most of the manual handling to the ingest side; having truck workers load product into what amounts to a fancy Pez dispenser customized to each high volume product.

Now available in Germany.[1] Except the manual handling on the input side is done by robots.

General bin-picking is still hard. But bin-picking of roughly rectangular objects in a moderate size range works pretty well.

[1] https://youtu.be/B_a2YcstoN0

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#117

Post by Animats »

Klinky wrote: post #96
gowld wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full automation is always out of reach, but McDonald's is extremely automated.

Is that automation or scale? Doing things on a large scale can be more efficient and require less labor, but McDonald's is still hiring people to do effectively the same thing in the stores as they did 50 years ago. A lot of industrial food tech is not new or cutting edge, and has limits, like you can't freeze dry a fully-made hamburger for later consumption.

That problem was solved over 50 years ago, but it wasn't cost effective.[1]

[1] https://youtu.be/FmXLqImT1wE

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#118

Post by xmprt »

MattGaiser wrote: post #22
ColanR wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And yet Amazon has no real interest in solving its counterfeit problem I don't get this Amazon hate. Weren't they the ones who originally came up with the idea for putting purchaser reviews with the product, and the 5-star rating system? It seems like their solution was to 'crowdsource' the problem. Now people have learned to game the system, but I buy plenty of electronics from amazon and from ebay, and I'm carefu…

I routinely get offers to buy a review from me inside the actual Amazon product itself. The system is being gamed under the nose of Amazon.

How often are you buying stuff from Amazon that this happens? I probably buy something at least 1-3 times a month and have never gotten a counterfeit or review request. I almost want to get one just to see what it would look like to be honest.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#119

Post by pfranz »

komali2 wrote: post #113
pfranz wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just throw UBI money at them and warehouse them in apartments like cattle I think this is how the bottom portion of Maslow's hierarchy is often dismissed. What I think the parent is talking about is higher up in the hierarchy--esteem needs. In our current society, most people get fulfillment through their job or raising kids. You often hear about issues with empty nest or retirement because people have trouble losi…

That's quite the strawman of the argument. I mean, why bring up UBI? Communists also talk about the issues of capitalism, and it'd be kinda funny to hear them try to integrate "income" into their curtencyless philosophy. > think history has a bunch of examples. Which part of history has automation and post scarcity? This would be news to me! > consuming media with no other purpose. Far be it for me to judge what peop…

> That's quite the strawman of the argument.

I wasn't trying to make an argument or refute anything you said. I liked that you brought up Maslow and was hoping to steer the conversation back to what the parent was saying.

The UBI quote came directly from the parent post. UBI comes up a lot with liberals in the US as a response--often it's dismissed because (assuming it works) it only solves the base of the pyramid. (I honestly have never heard post-scarcity or automating away jobs brought up by conservatives in the US)

> Which part of history has automation and post scarcity?

Apologies, I felt like I was pretty clear when I was referring to portions of society and not society as a whole. Women only recently became part of the traditional workforce. Women would often marry and bare children rather young and affluent would send kids to boarding school. This gave them a lot of time outside of child rearing. A lot of history's scientists were independently wealthy.

> Far be it for me to judge what people do with their time.

I'm not intending to put words in the parent poster's mouth, but the implication of warehousing and forgetting low-skilled people I politely put as "consuming media with no other purpose." The fear is more like high suicide rates, high levels of depression, and addiction. You're certainly allowed to not judge--I'm not sure "judge" would be the word I'd use for how I would feel about those people, but the common discussion when this gets brought up is if and what could be done to address it, because UBI (assuming it was a workable solution) wouldn't.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#120

Post by solidasparagus »

gamblor956 wrote: post #29
logicslave wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No interest in solving the problem? I work at Amazon, we are hiring all the top ML people to work on this problem. Legions of ML PhDs. Its not easy and you are just making stuff up

It sounds exactly like Amazon has no interest in solving the problem, and would rather waste money on legions of ML PhDs to come up with yet another technology solution that doesn't work and would simply get gamed in a few weeks even if it did work, leading to an endless tech war cycle, than spend the money on QC/QA staff that could snuff the problem out in days or weeks even with relatively little training and in a…

> than spend the money on QC/QA staff that could snuff the problem out in days or weeks even with relatively little training and in a way that can't be easily gamed by counterfeiters.

This is the kind of "I don't know any details about the problem but I am certain it is simple and easy to solve" mindset that I hate. Do you seriously think that, if Amazon could snuff out the problem in days or weeks by hiring some people, they wouldn't do it? They absolutely would.

The problem is more complicated as some other commenters have pointed out. Amazon sees itself as a marketplace for third-parties sellers and they see solutions such as 'stop allowing third party sellers' to be as ridiculous as 'stop charging for your products'. They have built logistic networks around this third party seller idea (e.g. co-mingling) that are clearly failing right now, but these are real world systems that have been built up over decades and are not easy to change without several years of investment.

Do you even realize how much revenue Amazon has and how existential the counterfeit problem is? My guess would be that if you could actually solve the counterfeit problem given a budget of a $1B, Amazon would do it without a second thought.

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