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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

#221

Post by HighGoldstein »

ajmurmann wrote: post #165
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?

If someone else replaces all workers with robots first instead, what will Bezos do then? What you are describing is a political problem, not one for entrepreneurs. IMO the solution would be a form of UBI that we can smoothly increase as automation in fact removes jobs or lowers wages. I'd like to see that start ASAP, but OTOH we are still close to record-low unemployment and the last years saw the largest wage increa…

> What you are describing is a political problem, not one for entrepreneurs. IMO the solution would be a form of UBI that we can smoothly increase as automation in fact removes jobs or lowers wages.

The most successful entrepreneurs like Bezos are also the biggest political influencers, and instead of UBI they are advocating for less tax for themselves.

>I'd like to see that start ASAP, but OTOH we are still close to record-low unemployment and the last years saw the largest wage increases at the lower end in decades.

The last years also saw the highest rates of inflation in decades. Even basic necessities are the least affordable they've been in a long time, let alone something like housing.

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

#222

Post by throwaway314155 »

ge96 wrote: post #192

I worked as stow, that job is brutal man, you gotta last 2-3 hrs at a time 3x a day for a 10hr shift. They don't like you listening to music so you gotta just sit there in silence. Luckily I got to unload trucks and I started drinking to get through it on my breaks. Still it's tough to beat a place where you can walk in with no skills and start making $20/hr

> I started drinking to get through it on my breaks

That bad, huh?

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

#223

Post by econ »

abricot wrote: post #71
sschueller wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are cheaper than robots too...

Only if you don't need to pay them a living wage.

I've picked orders. If I have to touch your purchase for 20 seconds it is a very long time. There are 180 chunks of 20 seconds in an hour. If the pay is $45 per hour it would cost 25 cents.

It is strange how this isn't obvious

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

#224

Post by burnerthrow008 »

claudiulodro wrote: post #173
hashiyakshmi wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it's even simpler than that: To run an assembly line, you need all stations staffed at the same time. You can't run the line if you're missing staff for just one station, but you still have to pay all the people who did show up.

So the easy solution is just to pay a lot and threaten to fire (and possibly blacklist) anyone who no-shows. Since the pay is much higher than they can get elsewhere, the people are much more likely to show up.

The high pay probably also helped find people who would tolerate the extremely intrusive practices of Ford's "morality police" (my term), who would inspect worker's homes to ensure they were living "the right way".

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

#225

Post by tombert »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #207
tombert wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, o…

>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. Isn't that even worse? In that case it's entirely externalizing the problem. I think I take the opposite position to you. I think that arguments (or discussions) about society at large are the most important and critical. I think there is a common trend to ign…

I think religion is stupid. I think it’s harmful. If I said “people should just stop being religious” and acted like that in itself was in any way insightful, you would consider that a dumb argument.

To be clear, this isn’t to say community outreach is bad or a waste of time. I think getting the larger populous onboard with the narrative that you think is going to make the world best is a good thing, please don’t let me stop you.

I have mostly seen these arguments pop up with giving teenagers access to birth control, with conservatives saying stuff like “people should just stop having sex out of wedlock” or something to that effect, and act that argument along is an insightful or useful comment.

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

#226

Post by guhidalg »

myself248 wrote: post #218
guhidalg wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the latter view is usually held by people who know they won't experience productivity gains from automation. Say someone who is has driven a taxi all their life or driven a forklift. They can appreciate how adding air-conditioning to their vehicle allows them to drive in hotter days, therefore they can do more work. But automating their whole job away with autonomous vehicles doesn't benefit them, so they don…

Pray tell, what jobs can't be automated soon?

The ones where human interaction is the point. Education, bar tenders, nursing, tourism, for example.

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

#227

Post by bigstrat2003 »

seadan83 wrote: post #163
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that might be true in the very short term... The short term matters . It's zero comfort to a factory worker who has lost his job if there will be another, better job for him in a year or two. He still needs to eat between now and then, and he can't buy food with pie in the sky promises of future employment.

AFAIK it would be more fitting to say it is of little comfort to a factory worker who lost their job, that there are now 1.5 more jobs, better jobs, now available to other people. The reason for AFAIK, my understanding is it is more common for people to be left behind than to transition entirely to a new industry. (That is my memory of seeing some data around that, not saying I'm correct, but that I find it just as p…

That's true as well. Also, the timeframe for those new jobs probably won't be just 1-2 years. But I was trying to use the most favorable scenario for tombert's argument to show that, even in that case, it still isn't enough.

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

#228

Post by mschuster91 »

guhidalg wrote: post #226
myself248 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pray tell, what jobs can't be automated soon?

The ones where human interaction is the point. Education, bar tenders, nursing, tourism, for example.

Japan is moving fast on a few of these, particularly as their population is rapidly aging.

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

#229

Post by MangoCoffee »

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?

New types of jobs are created every year. When I was young, there was no such thing as streaming video games and getting paid for it. Now, young kids and adults are making bank by playing video games and letting the whole world watch

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

#230

Post by exe34 »

allturtles wrote: post #216
arghwhat wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point wasn't really that workers should be the primary clientele, just that the average worker should be able to afford it, and if that wasn't the case the price of the goods should be lowered, or a trend started for higher worker compensation. Robotic workers lower operational costs and can make goods more accessible, and it's common for various manual labour jobs to be lost when industries change - the labour s…

I think the point is that once robots can do everything human bodies do and AIs can do everything human minds do, there is nowhere left for humans to go. Just like horses didn't find new employment when internal combustion engines reached the point where they could do everything a horse does but better and cheaper.

Poor people will go the way of the horse.
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