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Amazon's humanoid robots will eventually cost only $3 per hour to operate

businessinsider.com

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Re: Amazon's humanoid robots will eventually cost only $3 per hour to operate

#61

Post by pc86 »

hkpack wrote: post #57
pc86 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is saying that it's a 100% certainty, but when this is exactly what has happened many many times throughout human history, the burden of proof that this time is different kind of falls on you, doesn't it? You could absolutely be right but I see zero evidence that this technological advancement will be any different than the countless before over the last thousand years.

We literally had world wars with millions dead because of the technological breakthroughs. You should be blind not to see how technological advancements driving the increasing gap between classes and put pressure on governments in developed countries all over the world. No one says that people will go extinct, but throughout the thousands of years you mentioned we had periods of very very bad times. It is very naive…

Were those wars caused by the technological breakthroughs, or did the breakthroughs just make them more devastating? Is it possible they would have been longer, and more deadly, without those breakthroughs to bring them to quicker ends?

You seem to be implying that these recent advances are somehow going to drive massive irrevocable unemployment and that that's somehow going to lead to some sort of - world war? Or at least "very very bad times?" Presumably at least one of those events is that none of these warehouse workers who stand to lose their jobs will be able to get work doing anything else, which seems extremely unlikely.

Re: Amazon's humanoid robots will eventually cost only $3 per hour to operate

#62

Post by tivert »

prepend wrote: post #2

I expect workers like this. Warehouse picking is grueling work and no one really likes it per se. So having a robot do it is good to allow humans to do other things. I don’t think the solution is to keep grueling jobs or pay more to make people do things they don’t want to do. Of course more money is good, but at the end of the day, it’s a repetitive job that doesn’t require much thought. What’s interesting is that i…

> I expect workers like this. Warehouse picking is grueling work and no one really likes it per se.

Yes and no. While, I'm sure warehouse workers don't actually like doing the physical labor of the job (after all, someone has to pay them to do it); I suspect they like starvation and homelessness even less.

> So having a robot do it is good to allow humans to do other things.

We, as a society, have no solution to that. The only thing we do have is hand-waving hope (which, for the record, is not a solution).

> What’s interesting is that if these only cost $3/hour to operate that’s only $25k/year (assuming 365x24 operation) so if these things last 5 years then that means the idea is they will only cost $125k to buy and maintain. That’s cheap enough that middle class people will have live in super servants. And that’s much more appealing to me to have a laundry/dish/sweep bot. Especially since I could probably chip in with neighbors and eventually not have to do these household chores.

1. This looks no where near being some kind of general "super servant." It's probably only suited to do specific kinds of warehouse work in a specially designed environment. Also, IIRC, folding laundry is actually a super-hard robotics task.

2. You're out-of-touch if you think "middle class people" can blow $125,000 on a robot to do their laundry, load their dishwasher, and sweep their floors for 5 years.

Re: Amazon's humanoid robots will eventually cost only $3 per hour to operate

#63

Post by tivert »

pc86 wrote: post #55
karaterobot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do these laid off warehouse pickers do instead? Go back to their old jobs as cloud infrastructure architects, or hedge fund managers? I agree that most people don't want to work as pickers, and I think that's the point: in general, if you've got a shitty job, it's because it's the best available to you. They don't want to work that job, true, but they sort of have to, and if it goes away they'll have to get an e…

They do something else, as has happened hundreds - thousands - of times throughout human history when some innovation has made entire classes of occupations obsolete. Nobody's making textiles on looms anymore but the mechanization of that work eliminated a lot of jobs, but it created jobs both higher in numbers and more economically valuable. Eliminating the need to humans to pick a box off of a shelf and put it into…

> They do something else, as has happened hundreds - thousands - of times throughout human history when some innovation has made entire classes of occupations obsolete.

Exactly! They'll stop being warehouse workers and do intellectual and creative work, for instance by becoming commercial artists!

Oh wait.

At some point, you really need to take "past performance is not a guarantee of future results" to heart.

Re: Amazon's humanoid robots will eventually cost only $3 per hour to operate

#64

Post by prepend »

tivert wrote: post #62
prepend wrote: post #2

I expect workers like this. Warehouse picking is grueling work and no one really likes it per se. So having a robot do it is good to allow humans to do other things. I don’t think the solution is to keep grueling jobs or pay more to make people do things they don’t want to do. Of course more money is good, but at the end of the day, it’s a repetitive job that doesn’t require much thought. What’s interesting is that i…

> I expect workers like this. Warehouse picking is grueling work and no one really likes it per se. Yes and no. While, I'm sure warehouse workers don't actually like doing the physical labor of the job (after all, someone has to pay them to do it); I suspect they like starvation and homelessness even less . > So having a robot do it is good to allow humans to do other things. We, as a society, have no solution to tha…

> We, as a society, have no solution to that.

We definitely do, as evidenced by all the jobs that have been automated over the past 100 years and people who are currently employed.

It’s not like people who manually harvested crops starved to death after tractors. Over history, automation has always created jobs.

Regarding middle class use of robots, I meant that middle classers would chip in and have a neighborhood maidbot. Having 10 households chip in $12.5k every 5 years is definitely doable. And since the robot is automated it could just spend an hour or two a day in each person’s home without any need for intervention. Just walking down the sidewalk between houses doing whatever needs doing. That’s a cool future.

Re: Amazon's humanoid robots will eventually cost only $3 per hour to operate

#65

Post by prepend »

deelowe wrote: post #22
prepend wrote: post #2

I expect workers like this. Warehouse picking is grueling work and no one really likes it per se. So having a robot do it is good to allow humans to do other things. I don’t think the solution is to keep grueling jobs or pay more to make people do things they don’t want to do. Of course more money is good, but at the end of the day, it’s a repetitive job that doesn’t require much thought. What’s interesting is that i…

Where I live, entire towns have sprung up around Amazon warehouses and the huge influx of workers this brought with it. If picking jobs are eliminated, this will be quite the change for those areas.

There will definitely be a change, no denying that.

Just like how those towns didn’t exist 20 years ago, they may not exist again 20 years from now.

Re: Amazon's humanoid robots will eventually cost only $3 per hour to operate

#66

Post by prepend »

jrumbut wrote: post #50
Tade0 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do these laid off warehouse pickers do instead? Whatever they eventually go on doing anyway, considering Amazon reportedly has a crazy turnover rate of 150% per year: https://www.forbes.com/sites/edwardsegal/2022/10/24/amazon-r... What value is a job you can't really hold on to for even a year because it's so gruelling?

A sudden rush of so many similarly situated workers is going to be a very difficult situation. The robots may be good but the cost of the social upheaval should be factored in to the cost of their operation. Otherwise the rest of us are paying for the externalities of these devices and incentivizing the displacement of workers.

Will it be sudden? I expect it will happen over many years with the robot:human ratio starting at 5% and taking a while to get to 95% or whatever the optimal ratio is.

I’m not sure why you think all humans would be fired immediately and replaced.

Most likely is that humans will stay and robots will be mixed in to increase capacity.

Re: Amazon's humanoid robots will eventually cost only $3 per hour to operate

#67

Post by prepend »

tivert wrote: post #63
pc86 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do something else, as has happened hundreds - thousands - of times throughout human history when some innovation has made entire classes of occupations obsolete. Nobody's making textiles on looms anymore but the mechanization of that work eliminated a lot of jobs, but it created jobs both higher in numbers and more economically valuable. Eliminating the need to humans to pick a box off of a shelf and put it into…

> They do something else, as has happened hundreds - thousands - of times throughout human history when some innovation has made entire classes of occupations obsolete. Exactly! They'll stop being warehouse workers and do intellectual and creative work, for instance by becoming commercial artists! Oh wait. At some point, you really need to take "past performance is not a guarantee of future results" to heart.

> At some point, you really need to take "past performance is not a guarantee of future results" to heart.

While this is true, I think it’s a better assumption than “this time, we’re just too stupid to change and sit here and starve to death.”

Evidence shows humans as creative problem solvers and I think the trend of people doing more productive things to survive will continue.

There’s a million examples of this. And just look at fast food restaurants and cashiers being replaced by kiosks. Did all the cashiers get fired or starve to death?

Re: Amazon's humanoid robots will eventually cost only $3 per hour to operate

#68

Post by prepend »

causality0 wrote: post #30
prepend wrote: post #2

I expect workers like this. Warehouse picking is grueling work and no one really likes it per se. So having a robot do it is good to allow humans to do other things. I don’t think the solution is to keep grueling jobs or pay more to make people do things they don’t want to do. Of course more money is good, but at the end of the day, it’s a repetitive job that doesn’t require much thought. What’s interesting is that i…

You have an interesting definition of "middle class" if you think middle class people can take on an extra 25 thousand dollar yearly expense. Not to mention those are wildly different use cases. Picking items in a warehouse is a less complex task than handwashing a single sink full of assorted dishes, let alone being a general servant.

First, lots of middle class people send their kids to college. Middle class in the US goes up to $200-300k/year.

But I was thinking neighborhoods would chip in together so it’s just a few grand a year. I didn’t mean that every house would have their own robot, Bicentennial Man-style.

Re: Amazon's humanoid robots will eventually cost only $3 per hour to operate

#69

Post by dragonwriter »

causality0 wrote: post #30
prepend wrote: post #2

I expect workers like this. Warehouse picking is grueling work and no one really likes it per se. So having a robot do it is good to allow humans to do other things. I don’t think the solution is to keep grueling jobs or pay more to make people do things they don’t want to do. Of course more money is good, but at the end of the day, it’s a repetitive job that doesn’t require much thought. What’s interesting is that i…

You have an interesting definition of "middle class" if you think middle class people can take on an extra 25 thousand dollar yearly expense. Not to mention those are wildly different use cases. Picking items in a warehouse is a less complex task than handwashing a single sink full of assorted dishes, let alone being a general servant.

> You have an interesting definition of "middle class" if you think middle class people can take on an extra 25 thousand dollar yearly expense.

Petit bourgeois people very often can.

If by “middle class” you mean “around median income”, which is mostly people firmly in the working class (a use of “middle class” invented to beutralize working class solidarity rather than reflecting any real class distinction), then, well, no, they probably can't.

Re: Amazon's humanoid robots will eventually cost only $3 per hour to operate

#70

Post by bhpm »

bluGill wrote: post #52
bhpm wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a few keywords in this article that make me think this isn’t coming to a home near you any time soon: “eventually.” “Plus software overhead” … “Amazon.” For that last one, keep in mind that Amazon can afford to invest millions to billions and also totally control the working environment. Warehouse workers are practically robots already with the structure that is imposed on their work. A home isn’t like that…

Except that some of the investment that Amazon does goes to code that is also useful for the home robot. Amazon can afford it - probably saves money - so they make the investment. then they come along later and realize that the home robot is in some way affordable as so many of the parts needed already exist. Of course I cannot say when it will affordable. It may be Amazon has to solve the last remaining hard problem…

Amazon already has a robot for the home. It’s not even compatible with round edges or black floors. This makes me think the technology has a long way to go.
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