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Amazon hid its safety crisis

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Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#81

Post by all_blue_chucks »

d1zzy wrote: post #14
jedberg wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious as to what political issue you think they will face by replacing all their warehouse workers with robots? Do you think people would demand they pay more in tax? Wouldn't that be a political issue that all large companies face together?

Depends on if those companies are negotiating lower local taxes when opening a local office with the argument of "hiring people". If so, that argument won't hold anymore.

Those tax negotiations regarded high pay white collar jobs. We are talking about warehouse work here.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#82

Post by [deleted] »

reaperducer wrote: post #49
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I see capitalism eventually failing. On one hand, I think it's great that these mind-numbingly boring jobs can be automated away. On the other hand, the end result is that more profits go to Amazon, while many more people have fewer opportunities to participate in the economy. For the old predictable arguments of "Well, these people can do something else, do you expect buggy whip makers to still be around…

The response to this is usually, "Well, then people should be retrained." It's kind of an elitist, SV bubble trope at this point. There are millions of people who simply cannot be retrained. Yes, pick-and-pack is mind-numbingly boring for many people. But for others, it's good. Or even challenging. I've worked on an assembly line three times in my life. I found it tedious and pointless, and to keep my mind busy, I mo…

[deleted]

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#83

Post by Animats »

amelius wrote: post #65
qppo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's an utterly mindless job I worked as a picker/packer one summer. This is an understatement, even before the robots did the walking for you. It's interesting that the only thing left is to make a robot that can handle the objects to be placed, currently they cost more than minimum wage human labor unless the thing being picked is designed to be handled by a machine. Ultimately that's what I think will happen, th…

The question is whether the solution will be heavily patented, or that it will be a generic machine-learning application (like classifying images). So either Amazon will own it, or we all own it and distribution centers can become like public utilities.

Alibaba already has warehouses using robots that work just like the Kiva robots.[1]

[1] https://youtu.be/FBl4Y55V2Z4

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#84

Post by hinkley »

qppo wrote: post #39
Animats wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The robots were too efficient. They could bring items so quickly that the productivity expectations for workers more than doubled Here's an old Kiva Robotics video that shows how picking works.[1] It's an utterly mindless job. An automated laser pointer points to the bin from which to take an object. A lighted button shows which box to put it in. A new bin then moves into position, and this goes on. Training time req…

> It's an utterly mindless job I worked as a picker/packer one summer. This is an understatement, even before the robots did the walking for you. It's interesting that the only thing left is to make a robot that can handle the objects to be placed, currently they cost more than minimum wage human labor unless the thing being picked is designed to be handled by a machine. Ultimately that's what I think will happen, th…

Amazon is getting big enough that it's only a matter of time before they start trying to dictate packaging on products, to make it easier for robots to pick them up.

Walmart has been flirting in the same space to automate inventory management.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#85

Post by gowld »

8note wrote: post #45
qppo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's an utterly mindless job I worked as a picker/packer one summer. This is an understatement, even before the robots did the walking for you. It's interesting that the only thing left is to make a robot that can handle the objects to be placed, currently they cost more than minimum wage human labor unless the thing being picked is designed to be handled by a machine. Ultimately that's what I think will happen, th…

That's essentially what's happened with shipping containers

Jeff Bezos has a speech he gives, a about how shipping containers are interfaces and Amazon's primary value proposition is to metaphorically apply the shipping container "interface" concept to the retail industry.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#86

Post by gowld »

Klinky wrote: post #15
Animats wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The robots were too efficient. They could bring items so quickly that the productivity expectations for workers more than doubled Here's an old Kiva Robotics video that shows how picking works.[1] It's an utterly mindless job. An automated laser pointer points to the bin from which to take an object. A lighted button shows which box to put it in. A new bin then moves into position, and this goes on. Training time req…

Well, until it's fully automated, human safety is still important. I think the problem we have is that destroying a human body with mindless repetitive tasks is often still "cheaper" than engineering an automated solutions. It is simply cheaper to feed off desperation than to value human lives, and there is the engrained notion that humanity cannot be productive without putting humans into positions of desperation. T…

It's only cheaper because of the externalities. If employers were required to pay for the damage the work does, it's be a different story.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#87

Post by lotsofpulp »

logicslave wrote: post #19
Judgmentality wrote: post #10

> Jeff Bezos’ 14 leadership principles are famous inside and outside Amazon for vividly articulating what is expected of the company’s leaders. The first is customer obsession. “Leaders start with the customer and work backwards,” it reads. And yet Amazon has no real interest in solving its counterfeit problem, the same way it has no real interest in solving its safety problem. I feel like it's all PR and bullshit at…

No interest in solving the problem? I work at Amazon, we are hiring all the top ML people to work on this problem. Legions of ML PhDs. Its not easy and you are just making stuff up

It's super easy. Stop commingling inventory and put back the option to only search for items shipped and sold by Amazon.com. Didn't need a PhD for that.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#88

Post by gowld »

Klinky wrote: post #59
Aperocky wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a graduate student, the lab next door was working on robotic arms and picking challenges, their PhD grad was then hired by... Amazon. I don't think it's cheaper, it's just that a solution has yet to exist. Once it start working, it will go out at breakneck pace.

I'd imagine hiring PhDs to work on hard problems is not cheap, and I doubt Amazon would invest unless they believed that the long-term investment would result in a cheaper outcome than what they have now. The problem is that human labor has been so cheap that automation is often not even worth any R&D effort for most companies. If human labor cost more, this would cause more impetus upstream to find automated solutio…

Full automation is always out of reach, but McDonald's is extremely automated.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#89

Post by hinkley »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #71
Aperocky wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a graduate student, the lab next door was working on robotic arms and picking challenges, their PhD grad was then hired by... Amazon. I don't think it's cheaper, it's just that a solution has yet to exist. Once it start working, it will go out at breakneck pace.

> I don't think it's cheaper, it's just that a solution has yet to exist. Once it start working, it will go out at breakneck pace. I don't think this is a single problem. There are several dimensions to it, and you can trivialize some at the expense of others. Stop storing things compactly in bins and you can make it a lot easier to grab those things with a robotic arm. Give everything very robust packaging and you n…

There still seems to be a degree of 2.5 dimensional thinking with the current robotics systems.

If you occupy the entire volume of a warehouse, then the volume occupied per object becomes less of an issue than when you have huge air columns between the roof and robots, workers, or shelves.

You could move most of the manual handling to the ingest side; having truck workers load product into what amounts to a fancy Pez dispenser customized to each high volume product. The humans spend more time dealing with oddball items and trying to arrange the order to fit within the box, instead of grabbing things out of bins.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#90

Post by pfranz »

komali2 wrote: post #64
reaperducer wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The response to this is usually, "Well, then people should be retrained." It's kind of an elitist, SV bubble trope at this point. There are millions of people who simply cannot be retrained. Yes, pick-and-pack is mind-numbingly boring for many people. But for others, it's good. Or even challenging. I've worked on an assembly line three times in my life. I found it tedious and pointless, and to keep my mind busy, I mo…

> These people still need jobs. I think this is a statement worth teasing apart a bit. Nobody "needs" a job, for most definitions of "job." Everyone needs food water shelter. Maslow's hierarchy makes this clear. In most places in the world, you justify your right to access food, water, and shelter by providing labor to earn capital (or you just have capital because your parents had capital) to give to someone else fo…

> just throw UBI money at them and warehouse them in apartments like cattle

I think this is how the bottom portion of Maslow's hierarchy is often dismissed.

What I think the parent is talking about is higher up in the hierarchy--esteem needs. In our current society, most people get fulfillment through their job or raising kids. You often hear about issues with empty nest or retirement because people have trouble losing that purpose in their life.

I've heard a lot of people bring up this dilemma, but not a lot of discussion about solutions. Often, they seem to imply work is the only way for fullfilment and don't even mention raising kids.

I think history has a bunch of examples. None are going to be a good fit for everyone and I can imagine many people just being warehoused, consuming media with no other purpose. Historically, you saw well-to-do women run charities outside of raising children. A lot of scientists were very well to do people following their whims. For retirees, they can find purpose in maintaining a garden, playing music, or something else that offers personal fulfillment.

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