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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

#71

Post by tivert »

prepend wrote: post #67
tivert wrote: post #63

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. 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…

> 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.”

I don't think so, for a few good reasons:

1. Making the "everything will be fine" assumption discourages taking proactive steps (e.g. if buggy-whip making is going away, It'd be better to retrain the buggy-whip makers 5-10 years beforehand they become redundant, rather than letting their businesses fail and letting them die penniless and forgotten).

2. This time may be different. There's a lot of hype going on about AI, but if even a little of that is true, it's going to put insoluble squeeze on a lot of workers (e.g. their job gets automated away along with most of the other ones they were supposed to pivot into).

3. You talk about "humans" in the abstract, but what about the seven billion people who are actually out there? You abstraction is a rug that can hide a lot of actual damage. To give an extreme example: what if "humans figuring it out" means two million tech billionaires living in an automated paradise on top of seven billion skeletons of workers they no longer need? "Humans" made it through a lot of things, while lots of individual humans were immiserated an/or died.

> 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?

Yeah, happy endings like "the rust belt."

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

#72

Post by tivert »

prepend wrote: post #64
tivert wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

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

No, we don't. That's the hand-waving hope I'm talking about: expecting past performance to guarantee future success.

All of those previous waves of automation involved pretty limited technologies. AI has the potential to be quite different. For instance, if you have an AGI with average human intelligence, and robots doing manual labor, what jobs are all the average-intelligence humans supposed to do? Door-to-door sales to other door-to-door salesmen? If the technology lives up to the hype, their options may be "die homeless" to the more optimistic "be warehoused at minimum cost until natural death."

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

#73

Post by bluGill »

bhpm wrote: post #70
bluGill wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The question is robots (in general, maybe not theirs) only a few more developments away from ready for those things or not?

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

#74

Post by red-iron-pine »

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…

> only cost $125k to buy and maintain. That’s cheap enough that middle class people

do you actually know any middle class people? what do you think a middle class income is?

and given the current trend in robots, why do you think the middle class will continue to exist?

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

#75

Post by the_third_wave »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #20
TheCaptain4815 wrote: post #9

I wonder how the "Tesla Bot" would compete if ever finished. In theory Tesla has an advantage in both Ai and especially manufacturing.

Amazon is almost certainly far ahead of Tesla in robotics AI. They have been at the forefront of that field for >10 years.

The robot is not developed by Amazon, it comes from De a company named Agility Robotics which was an investment target for Amazon. The Tesla robot is actually designed and built by Tesla.

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

#76

Post by the_third_wave »

TheCaptain4815 wrote: post #9

I wonder how the "Tesla Bot" would compete if ever finished. In theory Tesla has an advantage in both Ai and especially manufacturing.

It is sad to see how the ...HN bots?... can not keep their personal dislike of Musk from clouding their reasoning. Will that Tesla bot succeed? Who knows, it might. Then again, it might not. One thing is clear: knee-jerk down-voting and childish remarks about spandex suits will not make any difference on whether it succeeds or not.

To those who are triggered by anything related to Musk the question why Bezos gets a free pass. Is it just because he is ideologically aligned and supports the current thing or do you actually think he is a better person and if so, why?

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

#77

Post by snapplebobapple »

karaterobot wrote: post #23
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…

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…

What did everyone else do when their job was made obsolete over the last 150 years? They seem to have mostlyade out ok from wealth effects causing more demand for labor in other fields, often at better wages.

Your argument has no historical precedent for and lots against so the likelihood of it coming true can only be estimated as very small and you honestly shouldnt be worrying about it too much. Its equivalent to arguing that you are going to win the lottery. Somebody will win eventually but the proba ility makes anything but assuming it wont be you irresponsibke

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

#79

Post by qingcharles »

baz00 wrote: post #29
deelowe wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This happened in the UK when some of the large industrial companies shut down. British Aerospace in Hatfield was a fine example. It destroyed the whole area for the best part of 20 years.

Car industry in Birmingham, coal industry up North...
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