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Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

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Re: Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

#171

Post by philipwhiuk »

AIoverlord wrote: post #41
philipwhiuk wrote: post #9

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.

I just watched a video of theirs and i have no clue at all if this is more efficient or not. Amazon uses a lot higher stacked spaces than Ocado does. Are there any real numbers you can reference than just stating that Ocados way is better?

I didn't say it was better, I said it was easier to design robots that don't have to work in an environment originally designed for humans.

Re: Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

#172

Post by vinceguidry »

hashiyakshmi wrote: post #157
vlovich123 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Henry Ford just wanted to be rich and said something that sounded good and inspired people to work for him. Bezos does similar things for his workers.

That may be true, but it certainly helped that he DID pay his workers enough for them to be able to afford the cars they were making.

Not enough to offset losing their fingers left and right.

Re: Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

#173

Post by claudiulodro »

hashiyakshmi wrote: post #157
vlovich123 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Henry Ford just wanted to be rich and said something that sounded good and inspired people to work for him. Bezos does similar things for his workers.

That may be true, but it certainly helped that he DID pay his workers enough for them to be able to afford the cars they were making.

It might be apocryphal, but my understanding is that he did this less out of a sense of civic duty and more because the skilled tradespeople liked their existing lifestyle and did not want to work in factories much, so they needed a big raise to be convinced.

Re: Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

#174

Post by tombert »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #132
tombert wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your argument begins with "people should just..." then generally you've already lost the argument. The fact is that people aren't doing whatever you're suggesting, for whatever reason, and no amount of righteous indignation is going to suddenly make people change that. I guess you can sit there smug and feel good about yourself, and that's worth something, but you can't expect people to give a shit about that. In…

sounds like you are saying that "people should just" stop making that argument and that "people should just" pass legislation. Most of what you said can be applied reflexively. Humans will and agency is the foundation of society. It is required to pass legislation or taxes as well.

Well, no, when I say "people should just" arguments, I'm referring to arguments that talk about society at large. I think those are bad arguments. I didn't say "people should stop", I just think it's a bad argument, they're obviously free to make bad arguments. I wouldn't take that right away from them even if I could.

"People should just" pass legislation would be specific to congress, so not quite the same thing, or at least not the kind of argument that I was referring to. You're free to think it's a dumb argument but there's a slight pedantic difference.

Re: Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

#175

Post by tombert »

bluGill wrote: post #109
markisus wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We do for sure need to get people to realize their jobs are obsolete and train them on something more useful. Old people (often anyone over 25) are far too resistant to change.

For better or worse, my parents always instilled in me that no job is guaranteed forever, and that's why you need to keep up with as much new technology as you can. My dad's uncle was a victim of automation in his 40's, and I think he was always annoyed that instead of learning something new he would sit and complain all day that there's no jobs for him.

In hindsight, I think they were completely right and I feel kind of lucky that they drilled that in so much, because even into my mid 30's I don't have a ton of trouble or resistance to picking up new things. Sometimes I don't love the way new tech is going [1], but I still try my best to keep up with what's in demand in the industry (generally looking at job boards and looking at their keywords and making sure I have at least a cursory understanding of the stuff they're talking about). I will admit I don't completely love that AI is being used instead of junior engineers in some cases, largely because a lot of AI code is shit or flatout wrong in non-obvious ways, but I still have tried my best to utilize it and learn from it because it's clearly the way that things are going. [2]

I've been hired and lost/quit more desk jobs than anyone I know, and I attribute my ability to find work quickly to this characteristic.

[1] e.g. treating memory like it's infinite, disregarding CPU performance as a means of "getting more shit done", making configurations (arguably) needlessly complicated like Kubernetes, etc.

[2] For example, my latest project has been building an HLS and Icecast "infinite radio station" which picks a random song from my collection, feeds a prompt to OpenAI for DJ chatter in between songs,

Re: Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

#176

Post by tombert »

yurishimo wrote: post #122
tombert wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walmart isn't considered a super high-tech company, but I took a tour of one of their warehouses in Bentonville and even that was quite cool. There were tons of conveyor belts everywhere, it kind of felt like something you'd see in Satisfactory.

I would argue Walmart is quite high tech! They’ve been approaching their business goals from lots of different angles. Tech, finance, logistics, etc are all a huge part of their business operations. It’s a shame that the problems being solved are embedded within a business that embodies throwing things away at the first sign of weakness. I’m still upset they bought what seemed on track to be a nice successor to Simpl…

Oh it wasn't trying to diss Walmart in this case. I used to work there (Jet.com -> Walmart Labs -> Walmart Global Tech), and I generally liked it. Some of the smartest humans I have ever known came from Jet and Walmart Labs.

Re: Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

#177

Post by robertlagrant »

hattmall wrote: post #168
iamtheworstdev wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but ads exist to convince people to buy things. if people can't afford to buy things, why would you need ads?

Products will become advertisements themselves. It could be cheaper and more effective to send everyone a box of Tesla Tasty-Electrons cereal than TV or Social media and slots. Casinos provide free drinks, cartels offer free prostitutes, it's not unprecedented.

> Casinos provide free drinks

Because people will spend money. The premise here is no-one has money, but somehow adverts exist.

Re: Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

#178

Post by bluGill »

usrusr wrote: post #121
bluGill wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What skilled worker? This is a low skill worker they are replacing.

Skilled. Not pedigree-filtered and trained and certified into a scarcity that may or may not actually be natural. Chances are most doctors or lawyers or software engineers would perform rather sub-par picking and putting in a warehouse.

Day one yes. put us in the warehouse for a few months and we would be as good as everyone. I'm guessing the woule only give a few days of training before setting us loose.

Several months of me as a doctor and I'd still be incompetent.

Re: Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

#179

Post by vishalontheline »

vlovich123 wrote: post #149
thisisnotauser wrote: post #138

Henry Ford famously wanted his workers to be able to afford his cars. When Bezos replaces everyone with robots, who will be left to buy his junk?

Henry Ford just wanted to be rich and said something that sounded good and inspired people to work for him. Bezos does similar things for his workers.

Didn't he pay more than his competitors and get sued by his competitors for not acting in the the best interest of his shareholders (by wanting to pay his workers even more)?

Re: Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

#180

Post by vlovich123 »

havblue wrote: post #89
oxqbldpxo wrote: post #76

Is there a future where we stop buying so much garbage?

If we can promote right to repair a bit more, we could actually talk about this.

People who advocate for right to repair (which I'm in favor of by the way) sometimes ignore the economic realities.

For example, my dad was an electrical engineer who could fix any radio or TV. Reality: radios & TVs were relatively expensive AND the circuits within them were relatively large (observable with the naked eye or at least a magnifying glass). Today "repair" means at most replacing a capacitor although it's often cheaper & more efficient to just swap out a board. That of course assumes the board is still being manufactured and there are costs for companies to continue doing that, especially how fast technology moves forward.

Of course there are reasonable rights to repair we should have like being able to replace the software with software of our choosing, being able to modify parts within things we own, etc. But it won't be like it was prior to the 2000s where you could actually meaningfully enact repairs on electronic components by swapping out small easily available generic parts.

There are also secondary considerations like security that we haven't figured out technical answers to for right to repair (i.e. right to repair today also often means right to inject security vulnerabilities).

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