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Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

finance.yahoo.com

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Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#361

Post by _carbyau_ »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #351
datadrivenangel wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that the unemployed end up using violence. So you need to create employment to keep them out of trouble.

You don't have to create anything. "There are no bad products, only bad prices." The demand for labor approaches infinity as its cost goes down. Suppose that robots and AIs can't grow and distribute food, build housing, provide healthcare or produce and maintain robots. Then there will be necessary jobs for people. Suppose that they can. Then all of those things will be near-free because they can be mass produced wit…

> Suppose that they can. Then all of those things will be near-free because they can be mass produced with no labor cost

I take issue with this statement. The people who have the robots will be able to set whatever price they like. They could make things super cheap but that is not the inclination of the person in power.

As we've seen in so many "collusion" cases - some deliberately negotiated but many simply naturally settled into - the price of things is determined by "what the market will bear", which I see more cynically as "what the market can extract".

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#362

Post by trimethylpurine »

oblio wrote: post #319
trimethylpurine wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moat is definitely smaller when labor, your biggest cost, is smaller. You can finance a purchase that's much larger if you are able to make the monthly payment because you don't have high labor costs. Purchasing has an ROI, and labor doesn't. What am I missing?

The fact that warehouses are huge and need a lot of supporting infrastructure?

What infrastructure? Whatever it is you're talking about isn't cheaper when you add more labor.

I have a warehouse that's one aisle 4 shelves high. And another that's much bigger.

They come in all sizes and costs.

Labor is by far the greatest of those.

I think you're guessing about things...

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#363

Post by AnthonyMouse »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #361
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to create anything. "There are no bad products, only bad prices." The demand for labor approaches infinity as its cost goes down. Suppose that robots and AIs can't grow and distribute food, build housing, provide healthcare or produce and maintain robots. Then there will be necessary jobs for people. Suppose that they can. Then all of those things will be near-free because they can be mass produced wit…

> Suppose that they can. Then all of those things will be near-free because they can be mass produced with no labor cost I take issue with this statement. The people who have the robots will be able to set whatever price they like. They could make things super cheap but that is not the inclination of the person in power. As we've seen in so many "collusion" cases - some deliberately negotiated but many simply natural…

> The people who have the robots will be able to set whatever price they like.

If no one has a monopoly on robots, they will not, because customers will take the lowest price and all of the competing suppliers with robots won't want to lose market share.

If someone has a monopoly on robots, that is very bad, because then they can charge up to the cost of doing the work another way. But the other way is by having humans do it, which is the status quo. So they can't make it worse than the status quo or people would just go back to doing it that way -- the point of buying things made by robots was supposed to be that it would cost less, so why would you do it if it didn't?

> As we've seen in so many "collusion" cases - some deliberately negotiated but many simply naturally settled into - the price of things is determined by "what the market will bear", which I see more cynically as "what the market can extract".

Collusion is caused by market concentration. When an industry has only two or three companies, it's easy for them to collude with each other. When there are dozens or thousands, it isn't. So the most important thing in the world is to make sure there are at least dozens of companies in every industry.

The other major problem of the same nature is regulatory capture. This is the method used by landlords. They don't have a secret chamber where they agree to fix prices in dark of night, they just control the zoning board and prevent new housing from being built.

These things have nothing to do with automation. If you have market concentration and regulatory capture, they must be annihilated regardless of any robots or people will end up screwed and poor.

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#364

Post by beefnugs »

btbuildem wrote: post #316

It's difficult to hold the paradox evident in most of the commentary here: both the desire to free people from the unhealthy repetitive tedium they are bound to participate in daily, and the overarching need for "jobs". I'm much happier watching robots take over dangerous, mundane tasks, than seeing them edge into creative, intellectual, and decision-making work. Wasn't that the dream? That robots do all our work and…

I hate government authoritarianism, but in my mind the only answer is to force robot labor tied to individual humans instead of corporations. Some kind of coded link so one human operator must be living and healthy and somewhat more than homeless to control the edge cases of the robot messing things up. As the companies get bigger and more monopoly they at least have to support more humans at least somewhat.

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#365

Post by inglor_cz »

jfyi wrote: post #346
inglor_cz wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"SpaceX evaporates the moment the juicy billion dollar public contracts dry up." So, not in the foreseeable future, given the new Space Race with China. Ofc the government is an important customer for any launch provider (not just SpaceX), given that a lot of current space activity is military in nature. That just comes with the territory. Edgar Rice Borroughs died before the first man-made rocket reached the orbit.…

"So, not in the foreseeable future" I agree, but the point was they are tied to NASA and NASA's projects for the foreseeable future, not that they are going away tomorrow. "But I don't think that manned flight to Mars is wild and unattainable fantasy" It wasn't too long ago you were talking about colonization. So which is it? Colonization or a manned flight? Yeah I believe a manned flight is possible. If we were real…

"Mars is still a pipe dream."

Well, I reacted to this sentence, which is a bit ambiguous. But I don't think there is a big gap between manned flight and colonization in case of Mars. Mars is very far, which means that from the very beginning, the crews will have to maximize their independence from the Earth.

You can supply Moon bases by cargo from the Earth easily, but people on Mars, even if only dozens during the initial period, will have to optimize everything for self-sufficiency as much as possible.

And if you prioritize self-sufficiency, you need more people, more robots, more factories = in a word, colonization comes naturally from that.

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#366

Post by jnaina »

paxys wrote: post #207
jedberg wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article in particular was the one that was debunked. It was based on a false rumor.

Debunked where? The only response is from Amazon (in the same article), who are disputing the number but still admitting that the team did intervene when needed.

The 1000 Indians working to track all activities remotely was/is a false story.

See link below:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7186447...

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#367

Post by antiterra »

smnrchrds wrote: post #202
jedberg wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 1000 Indians story was completely incorrect though. They has 1000 people in India tagging the videos after the fact for improvements to the machine learning algorithms. They weren't watching in real time.

I have a question: was the customer billed based on whatever the machine learning algorithm determined, or based on what humans decided after the fact? In other words, was the humans' job to just provide training data for future versions of the machine learning algorithm, or to manually fix the algorithm's errors and prevent over-billing?

From my experience you just weren’t actually billed until they were done, it could be many hours after you left the store.

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#368

Post by Nevermark »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #323
xg15 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems a bit backwards. Most demand for automating existing jobs is driven by the specific goal to reduce workers and labour costs, so of course there will be fewer jobs afterwards than before - otherwise the automation didn't fulfill its goal from the companies' POV.

But, now that amazon is saving money on labor costs, where does that extra money go? Into the pockets of shareholders, who may then go out and use that to start other businesses which hire people, or increase their consumption of goods and services which also results in greater employment.

Amazon is still a growth company.

Meaning money will likely go to continued investments in automation, corporate acquisitions, capital investments (high & low tech) like real estate for logistics, etc.

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#369

Post by ben_w »

pjmlp wrote: post #247
ben_w wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real problem is when others follow Amazon in scale, leaving humans to survive in a new order. No, the problem is if humans in the set of those who have to work are able to keep ahead of the creation of new automation. UBI short-circuits the problem because then nobody would need to work. "Who pays for UBI?" you may well ask… well, Amazon can't ship anything when nobody has any money to buy stuff with. Separatel…

Only from the selected few allowed to work as druids on the AI tower, after the letcode trials, while remaining mankind struggles with what is left as jobs from a corporate managed government.

I can't even parse this sentence. If you're trying to deny a part of my previous comment, it would help if you indicated which bit you're trying to replace.

Re: Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans

#370

Post by ben_w »

tossandthrow wrote: post #86
pjmlp wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wishful thinking.

are you saying that employment is low now because of the automation we have seen over the past 100 years? are you saying that interest rates are not being lowered to allow kapital. investment for job creation?

I have no idea what @pjmlp is saying, but I myself would caution against using the past as too strong a guide to the future — we don't have pre-existing examples of tools that can out-think their owners.

(The closest historical examples to this description are feudal serfs and slaves, the latter is a much broader category than just the USA's example, and these are also bad examples from which to imagine the future for a variety of different reasons).

The early usage of the term "singularity" with regards to computers and automation was about the unpredictability of the future; even now, I cannot say with any confidence if we'll get a future more like that of The Terminator or more like that of The Culture, let alone smaller-scale and less dramatic dystopias and utopias.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture

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