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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

#241
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?

It just made it more fun. There was a liquor store nearby so drive to it on the 30 minute break, pound a couple 100 proof 100ml bottles (99 Apples), back to it. That job was more fun than stow.

If you're curious can read the subreddit /r/amazonfc

They did recently start allowing you to buy their own approved headphones but before you'd get written up for being on your phone/having headphones in

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

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

The people were going to church and getting harmed and someone proposed a 5 cent wafer tax as a solution, a response that "no, people actually just need to stop going" is useful and insightful.

It points out that the tax doesn't solve the actual problem. It points out that any solution will require people not wanting to go to church. It is not a complete instructions set.

I think you are confusing use in normative statements (value judgments or opinions) with instructional statements (step by step how to).

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

#243

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.

I think the horses were pretty okay with not being bred into slavery.

But there's a very, very big difference between "automate dumb task with unimpressive efficiency that beats humans because humans have to pee, eat and sleep", and AI supplanting humans in society.

Robots isn't an important step in that path tbh. Intelligence is, and we still aren't close, even when throwing entire hyperscale datacenters at the problem...

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

#244

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.

Eh, this isn't a great theory especially for the poor.

As a higher income individual I conversely seem to have a lot of time to study and am not given a constant stream of work I must complete every moment. I also have the benefit of working from home and being able to spend a lot on training and upskilling.

When you are poorer you typically don't get this. The vast majority of your income is spent at the end of the week. Your job gives you zero time to explore and learn more. You likely commute and and may have a second job to make ends meet.

Just saying 'learn to code' here doesn't address the systematic issues.

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

#245
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

I actually work in the industrial repair industry. The thing to remember is not every company is insanely rich. Maybe top level companies but they are supported by a wide network of smaller companies. Those smaller companies don't have a ton of money to throw around. The manufacturers of the equipment have become quite greedy. The majority of them offer whole systems and then if anything breaks they want to charge an insane amount to send out a field engineer. And then if something is broke most of the time they either don't carry that part/panel/whatever in stock and will try and upsell you to the new model which is of course a massive investment.

So repair shops fill the gap for all these smaller companies and factories to get support higher than the on staff maintenance. Not everything is fixable though. They may use unique hardware signatures on drives or FPGA's or PAL's with security bit enabled. That has been true for a while though. Even in consolidation there is still plenty of business and repairs to be made.

Conversely the medically industry might be a good example. Anyone making medical equipment has to provide documentation on it. Which makes them far more repairable and easily diagnosable.

TV's especially are peak commodity. They are so cheap that the skilled labor cost to fix them isn't economically. They also are not easily transportable so repair and resell is a rough business for them. Things like laptops and phones though seems much more reasonable. Plenty of people do that professionally or even as a hobby. I like a large portion of repairs on those types of devices can be fairly economical and Chinese part makers provide plenty of affordable parts. It would cost OEM's extra to keep these parts in stock, but it's not a terrible hard task. Providing schematics also isn't a huge ask. Most are reverse engineered anyway.

When it comes to security I think this is fairly simple. Provide a blank security chip and create a secure method to connect and program it. Apple does this with its self repair when it comes to matching hardware UID's in the firmware so all the functionality is unlocked. Companies like Apple and Samsung can keep their Knox and Secure Enclave/exclave. Data can be seen as something that is not repairable in most cases. But they can provide the parts the secure a device again and leave it as a blank slate.

The biggest problem with Right to Repair is pricing. Right now Chinese makers can whip out parts for really cheap. Comparing to official parts from Apple or Google or Samsung when they did sell them and they are way higher and sometimes prohibitively so. Would be better to treat it like auto parts. Where you can get the OEM part or the third party part and both can work. Some things like security would need to be first party, but that would be a great deal. So it's doable, but would require a LOT of political will against tech companies. So it's just a really tough sell to get to that point.

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

#246
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not a question of luddites. Example, coal in the US became heavily automated - the workers did not all just find new jobs. Industry shifts don't mean the old workers become the new workers. People do get left behind, and potentially en masse.

I mean the great depression is a good example too. Stuff can fall apart much faster than you can retrain and that economies can find new work.

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

#247

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?

For example, people who work at Ford.

In exchange, in the long term they won't be able to afford the cars they produce anymore.

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

#248
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ultimate endgame is either a significant reduction in global population, or UBI. You can’t just keep automating every non-knowledge job away and just hope people find something else to do. All those jobs in Detroit that went away were replaced by…? As best I can tell they were replaced by poverty and crime.

Detroit is an odd example. You have the cornerstone industry up and leaving the area, followed by race riots which led to white flight and the middle class leaving the city. This led to a vacuum in support and jobs leaving the new majority black population and poor to fend for themselves. Two historically oppressed groups now yolked to a dying city. It's more an example of how racism and reliance on singular industry…

So ignore Detroit, pick a city that based their economy on literally any manufacturing industry that up and left. What was the replacement work that maintained middle class families at the same numbers?

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

#249
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of people who don’t work for Amazon already buy stuff from there. I guess I mostly see the jobs as exchanging labour for something that society values and so by automating, there is more labour available to do things society values and so society gets more of what it values. And if you think working for Amazon is bad for people then you should be happy if automation is decreasing the number of people suffering…

The ultimate endgame is either a significant reduction in global population, or UBI. You can’t just keep automating every non-knowledge job away and just hope people find something else to do. All those jobs in Detroit that went away were replaced by…? As best I can tell they were replaced by poverty and crime.

Judging from efforts in the US to make health care harder and harder to obtain, I'm betting on the former, especially if other countries follow suit. Slowly letting people die from untreated chronic diseases may be seen as more humane than outright mass slaughter.

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

#250
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I started drinking to get through it on my breaks That bad, huh?

It just made it more fun. There was a liquor store nearby so drive to it on the 30 minute break, pound a couple 100 proof 100ml bottles (99 Apples), back to it. That job was more fun than stow. If you're curious can read the subreddit /r/amazonfc They did recently start allowing you to buy their own approved headphones but before you'd get written up for being on your phone/having headphones in

> pound a couple 100 proof 100ml bottles, back to it. That job was more fun than stow.

WoW, you can hold your liquor :-)

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