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Amazon hid its safety crisis

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Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#91

Post by numpad0 »

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…

That only thing left is also one of ultimate problems in robotics. What’s brilliant(and inhuman) about Amazon is they don’t push it but just wait for the technology to mature while humans cheaply do it.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#92

Post by hinkley »

programd wrote: post #58
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…

THe Kiva video is not state-of-the-art I think. Check out this automated grocery warehouse, something right out of Factorio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKrcpa8Z_E Humans would just get in the way and get mangled.

That warehouse burned to the ground about a year ago, didn't it?

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#93

Post by tpmx »

Animats wrote: post #78
tpmx wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a rendered video of the Ocado warehouse system, which I think is a ripoff of the Swisslog Autostore system. There was a lawsuit. Then Ocado hired Swisslog... Btw: This Autostore system is becoming the standard automated warehouse system for Swedish e-retailers, as they prepare for Amazon entering the Swedish market in a month or two. I think there are at least like 10 very large Autostore installations in Swed…

I'm amazed that Swisslog system works reliably. All that precision track and rack. All those moving parts. There have been big automated storage and retrieval systems for decades, but they're often a maintenance headache. The Kiva system just needs is a flat floor. The robots are mechanically simple and totally interchangeable. On-site maintenance is limited to replacing batteries and wheels; for anything else it goe…

I think the major design philosophy differences between the two systems are:

- Kiva robots are designed to work along with cheap labor

- Swisslog Autostore is designed to minimise labor, because labor is expensive in Europe (it does more of the work).

Here's a four year old video of an Autostore at komplett.no/komplett.se:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWK5xL_o3f4

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#94

Post by TAForObvReasons »

prewett wrote: post #34
logicslave wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't think all the ML PhD's in the world can fix a system with misaligned incentives. Anonymous seller says this product is the same as that name brand one, oh we believe you, we'll co-mingle them. This right here is undoing the whole point of a brand, that it comes from a known source. You can't ML your way out of that. The system is bad by design: it trusts those who have an incentive to lie. So when people say…

Amazon's approach of letting customers return "shipped and sold by amazon" items and letting an automated system issue refunds proactively for basically any reason is actually one of the more scalable approaches. It just sucks that the system pushes quality control to the customer

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#95

Post by brewtide »

mschuster91 wrote: post #77
heavyset_go wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon doesn't even let their customers choose the correct reason for returns when they receive counterfeit items. Instead of being able to choose " This item is a counterfeit " or " I believe this item is a counterfeit ", the customer must choose between reasons for their return that aren't entirely accurate, like " Inaccurate website description " or " Item defective or doesn't work ". You'd think that a company th…

It's like politicians preventing studies on racism in police (a current hot topic in Germany): As long as there is no data, no one can demand action (i.e. getting rid of racist cops) or subpoena it (i.e. a class action lawsuit against Amazon). Amazon has a vested massive interest in not provably knowing numbers about counterfeit rates!

"If you don't test, there are no cases". Emu reactions never solve anything.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#96

Post by Klinky »

gowld wrote: post #88
Klinky wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that automation or scale? Doing things on a large scale can be more efficient and require less labor, but McDonald's is still hiring people to do effectively the same thing in the stores as they did 50 years ago. A lot of industrial food tech is not new or cutting edge, and has limits, like you can't freeze dry a fully-made hamburger for later consumption.

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#97

Post by bsanr2 »

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 is simply cheaper to feed off desperation than to value human lives

When the inherent costs are externalized, of course. The public pays the bills of these people who can't afford medical care or end-of-life expenses. My last job was a late-night warehouse position, where the hazard pay of 50¢/hr in no way covered the health consequences of a disturbed and atypical sleep schedule (driving heavy machinery, in my colleagues' case).

Re: Amazon hid its safety crisis

#98

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]
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