Fully Autonomous Robots: The Warehouse Workers of the Near Future | Hacker News Reader

Fully Autonomous Robots: The Warehouse Workers of the Near Future

wsj.com

86 pointsgrellas60 comments

I was an order picker once in a grocery warehouse, it helped put me through school. I was also a paperboy, a film projectionist, and a bike messenger. All automated now or will be soon. Later I became an editorial illustrator, and when the smartphone hit critical mass I lost 80% of my running gigs over a couple months, print media collapsed very suddenly: that hurt.

So when Uber drivers complain about self driving cars I just cackle maniacally.

Sort of a tangent but I agree in the character generation from working. I had it too, and I appreciate having had it. I wonder if this really is part of the reason for later launches for millenials.

This is what fascinates me about discussions on subjects such as basic income. BI may not be the right answer and it may not even be viable. However, the writing is on the wall and big changes are coming sooner than we expect.

Or maybe we'll just protect useless jobs legislatively, it's hard to predict.

Good point but we all know money is the bottom line. All it takes is one store chain to automate for profit and others will follow suit in a hurry.

Keyword: "Legislated".

It's already happening... Several restaurant chains have already released fully automated restaurants in Asia ("where it's more socially acceptable"), but apparently it's coming here too. Wendy's is said to be rolling out self-service kiosks that're supposed to help offset costs.

Basically... it appears that humans are going to be too expensive to hire very soon. That's just self-service kiosks, but imagine if you were able to get your food for half-price (aka the same price before the $15/hr wage hike)? Which restaurant would you go to, really?

http://www.businessinsider.com/wendys-workers-will-lose-jobs...

Do you think Wendy's is going to pass the savings along to consumers? That aside, I think the answer is still going to be, "I'd go to somewhere that isn't Wendy's or McDonald's, or some other fast food franchise."

The whole "robots cooking" thing is a lot easier to manage when "cooking" is essentially rote assembly of identical, pre-made products. That's also why the food is disgusting.

>Do you think Wendy's is going to pass the savings along to consumers?

They will if they have a competition.

You think? That assumes that consumers of fast food only look at the lowest price point, which conflicts with why Wendy's exists in the first place. It is however why every one of that type of chain has a "dollar menu".

Their usual MO though isn't to pass savings alone, and they've never lacked for competition.

>That assumes that consumers of fast food only look at the lowest price point

No, it assumes that price is one of the things consumers look at. It's always in the seller's interest to try to move the focus to something else, but... If Wendy's has a dollar menu on their burger vending machine, and McDonald has a dime menu, Wendy's will lose the more price conscious customers.

They already have lost the more price conscious consumer, and that's fine for them. You're not seeing the spread of more expensive places like Five Guys, In 'N Out, etc because price is king anymore. McDonald's can try an (realistically) $.89 menu I guess, but people seem willing to shell out a few more cents for the marketed illusion of quality.

In fact, they shell out far more already.

It's cute that you think competition still works.

Back in 2002, Star Trek Nemesis was released in New Zealand. It had already been out in the rest of the world, the "see it again" campaign had been run, and DVD releases had hit the shelves everywhere else.

But not in New Zealand. My friend there told me that he had been waiting to see it for months, then waited two weeks after its release ("to avoid the crowds") before going in to see it. His words:

"I went in there on the second Thursday after opening day, clutching my twenty dollar note, and stopped to look at the billboard to find out what time it was next going to run. It wasn't. It had been whisked off the screens before two weeks were up."

This particular film was apparently the catalyst of a massive lobbying campaign for their government to ban commercial imports of international DVDs within six months of the release date of a film, because that (and piracy) were the reasons people hadn't flocked to the cinema to see it and other films.

Yes, State-granted monopolies often prevent competition from working. I don't see that applying to fast-food, though.

It's cute that you think that's relevant.

It's not cute to belittle other people with condescending language.

No reason robots can't eventually do complicated cooking tasks that are tedious for people. Plus robots don't steal or spit on your food.

The key word there is "eventually".

> Do you think Wendy's is going to pass the savings along to consumers?

I picked up a watermelon from my local farmer's market this weekend. It was about the size of a bowling ball and was $6. I went to Kroger and found watermelons 3x the size, shipped from across the planet, for $5. "Normal" operations are quickly becoming luxuries. Seriously, there's no reason for me to ever buy from a local farmer except to make myself feel wealthy.

Likewise...

It's going to be more like a survival mechanism or a "staying relevant" rather than a "hey suddenly I can sell you a burger for $0.82."

There is a McDonalds in my hometown that has a self-service ordering kiosk.

I can't wait. Fast food restaurants with the order terminal flipped around so I can put my order in correctly, the first time around, without waiting for ten minutes for somebody else to get around to serving me, sounds like nirvana.

I'm in these places to get some food and get out in a hurry. Streamlining that process is all good.

So far, nobody has done a successful automated restaurant. There have been many attempts. The first was AMFare, built in 1964 by American Machine and Foundry, and it was better than most of its successors.[1] McDonalds tried and failed about a decade ago. Eatsa, the SF chain, is just an automat where you can't see the kitchen. Momentum Machines in SF has a prototype hamburger-customization machine, but hasn't shipped. There's a functioning pizza-making robot from Zume. So far, though, the hardware has a narrow functional range.

There's lots of automated food preparation in the plants that make frozen dinners and airline meals. But those,too, have a narrow product range.

A good place to start would be at the back end. Build a robotic system which can take a tub of random dishes, tableware, and trash, separate them, apply blasts of hot soapy water to anything that needs pre-cleaning for the dishwasher, load the dishwasher trays, and start them down the conveyor to the dishwasher. Everybody hates that job.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmXLqImT1wE

>> There's lots of automated food preparation in the plants that make frozen dinners and airline meals. But those,too, have a narrow product range.

In france, picard does gourmet frozen foods, with very good reviews.

It worked for dock workers when containers were invented... but... these days there's quite a bit of nuance and a lot of money in it.

Much like the legislation around not letting commercials be louder than the main content was subverted, I'd expect companies to weasel around any attempt to keep automatable jobs in human hands.

That's possible, but look at Japan where their automotive robots have been paying union dues for decades. It can happen, although it's probably a really bad idea for it to happen.

"It worked for dock workers when containers were invented." There's a long description of that in "The Box", by Marc Levinson. It sort of worked for workers. But, in some major cases, the entire port moved. In San Francisco, the Port of San Francisco essentially shut down as a freight operation and the container traffic went to a new container port in Oakland. In London, the container traffic went to a new non-union port on the east coast, and the huge London dock complex was abandoned. (Now it's housing and the finance industry.)

The Longshoreman's Union in San Francisco negotiated a "guaranteed annual income" deal, but only for two years ending in 1977.[1] They still have a good pay rate for full "class A" longshoremen: $36.68 plus various bonuses and shift differentials. It's possible to make $150K a year as a longshoreman. And you probably don't have to do heavy lifting. But there aren't that many of them left.

[1] http://archive.ilwu.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/19750207....

That book was good, and I agree that it worked out for longshoremen, but consumers are the ones who've paid for their job security and high salaries.

Consumers would otherwise have had to pay some other amount for their unemployment, poverty, and reliance on handouts.

Laying all of them off also has costs, both financial and human.

If every human being was replaced by a robot, the cost savings to consumers would be enormous. There would also not be any consumers, as nobody would have money to spend.

Consumers and businesses are always going to pay for those who don't work, it's just the mechanism by which we transfer that wealth.

That's how social safety nets work.

I do wished they didn't get rid of Toll Takers on the Golden Gate Bridge.

It was nice to cross that bridge with cash, and not have another bill to look forward to. I don't go to San Francisco like I used to either. Now, I only go if I have to.

I really wonder if certain "useless jobs" are as useless as they claim.

Toll booths are always bad, unless the human population takes a nosedive. The relative merits of getting a bill later are utterly obviated by not having to wait in traffic.

Meanwhile, individuals continue to own entire corporations and the right to appropriate all of its productive output for themselves, as if this idea somehow makes any kind of sense.

The fact that all of the gains from automation will go to a handful of people is a political choice we continue to make every day.

Until competitive cooperatives exist as legit alternatives we don't have any other option.

They exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul

We need to bootstrap this process: successful cooperatives dump excess profits into capital grants for new cooperatives. But this involves people making the initial effort to organize as cooperatives; I'm not sure that legal and tax structures actually support this form of organization in the US.

With automated warehouses and autonomous cars and automated fast food and everything else just think of all the jobs lost. I read articles saying the jobs will be offset with new jobs, but no one bothers to explain what. Also when everyone is unemployed how are they going to pay for these automated goods.

When I was in highschool a job was to build character and get you ready to survive in the world. Maybe this is why more kids are living with their parents longer. I don't agree with basic income, because I believe like welfare people will find ways to exploit it. The people who have a drive to work will seem like they are getting less.

I am not opposed to this type of automation. It is just worrisome what impacts it will have that us little guys cannot control..

I read articles saying the jobs will be offset with new jobs, but no one bothers to explain what.

That's because it's impossible to know what new jobs will exist in the future. Consider the invention of the digital computer. It would have been impossible to know in the 50s that the thousands of typist jobs would be replaced by web designers, programmers, systems administrators, etc.

Once upon a time the majority of people were farmers or herders. 150 years ago the majority of non-farm workers in the advanced economies were doing menial manufacturing work. Machinery that automates work allows individuals to produce more with a given amount of effort. This allow people to produce/afford more goods/services, and leads to the human role in the production process being more managerial.

I don't agree with basic income, because I believe like welfare people will find ways to exploit it.

The whole point of UBI is to avoid means testing, so there's no reason to game it. Of course, if anything, we won't have actual UBI because it's most likely politically untenable because of the exact perspective you have, but some form of extended welfare, which requires some kind of means testing, which is then gameable.

The people who have a drive to work will seem like they are getting less.

If it's truly UBI, then these people can avoid the feeling like they are getting less by not working, or taking a job closer, or starting their own company, that doesn't require driving to work. "I don't want to drive to your office" becomes an acceptable and usable reason to quit your job because you don't actually need a job under UBI.

Erg... English is most annoy. I'm pretty sure OP meant "drive" as in motivation, not the car type :)

But yeah, your point it still kind of valid.

Point being, if you are motivated to work then you inevitably get more. If you simply rely on UBI then you get enough for cheap rent and cheap food.

Pretty sure a UBI doesn't allow for a new xbox games and a carton of cigarettes every week.

Plenty of homeless people will waste it on cigarettes. I'm actually for it. These are precisely those people for which the currently rampant paternalism is NOT helping. It just further communicates that they are no longer worthy of bettering themselves. This attitude is pervasive and exists as a direct reflection of our neo-liberal capitalistic state. It floats around like pollution in the aether between egos and stifles anyone sensitive to it. Once that's happened the means-testing merely communicates that they are being measured and slotted. That anything known of their condition will only be used to humiliate them further; There is no help. I don't have statistics at hand but these people (hobos) largely aren't reproducing. Can they not just smoke and be comfortable? Why are we so desperate to police the abuses of these systems? Making proper use of them is already it's own reward. Let's just allow people to punish themselves for as long as they feel they need to. Without giving them any more evidence that they ought to...

>I read articles saying the jobs will be offset with new jobs, but no one bothers to explain what. Also when everyone is unemployed how are they going to pay for these automated goods.

There's no "also" if job losses are offset by new jobs.

I feel the same way.

I dont feel good about the future. I see that divide between the "haves", and the "have nots" just widening.

I personally think we are living in a bleak time right now.

I felt it was bad in the ninties, but we didn't have a voice.

Sorry--I just see companies exploiting people because they can. I see fees, and fines becoming more than excessive. I see more homeless. I see more escapism through drugs. People don't appear to be experimenting/expanding their minds; they appear to be numbing. It's not just partying like in the 80's. It's complete escapeism?

Plus, I see a complete lack of ethics. I really don't like that whole, "Hay it's legal?". I won't even comment on morality. I have a fake profile of FB, and in all these years I joined one group. I joined an Amish group years ago. I joined because I was genuinely interested in their culture, and found their lack of greed/materialist ambition comforting. And I have a greedy sister who literally stole all her mother's money in a estate matter. She had a multimillion dollar shoe company in Los Angeles, but still needed more money. I guess I am trying to convince myself their are still good people left in this world?

I see too many people pushing my age, and kinda giving up. We work, but we are getting less, and less. Those years between jobs are lengthening. We are being financially squeezed--by anyone who can get away with it.

They say go back to school, and retrain for exactly what?

My hope is Millenials are better people, and do the right thing, but I feel like they won't have much power either.

> I see more escapism through drugs.

Escapism is a great way to expand your mind. If you didn't believe you could escape this why would you conceive of anything else?

Millenials may be the most pathological generation in history; That's only because they were raised by the second most. They know it. They can see the history of the populist political failure; The phony institutionalization of freedom. The centralist optimization of economies as a domain of warfare. They're ants and they know it. They don't know how to proceed. They've met so many wonderful grasshoppers. Yet they feel the grasshoppers in total are evil. There is more dissonance in reality than ever before. Even if that's only because we're so aware as a society now. It has consequences on the developmental outcomes of human's that may not show up until decades after they've taken effect.

You've misunderstood my comment. The point is if the people who say there will be other jobs are correct, there's no reason to worry about who will have money to buy things.

I remember watching an American civil war documentary that linked the dire state of the southern economy to slavery.

Whilst it is true that robots != slaves, at least from an ethical standpoint, the fact that an increasing portion of our economic production is done by unpaid (nonhuman) labour might land us in similarly dismal economic straits.

For the record, I don't think the answer is to pay the robots a salary! :-)

More seriously, I'm also equivocal about the benefits of universal income. A job is about more than money, it's also about identity and self-actualisation. Perhaps a mixture of universal income and indirect public subsidies for academic, heritage-craft, public service and other charitable / vocational work might be the answer?

Actually, paying robots a salary sounds like an equitable way to fund a basic income.

> I read articles saying the jobs will be offset with new jobs, but no one bothers to explain what.

Robots in warehouses (AGV's) need to be sold, designed, welded, eclectically wired, programmed, transported, installed, integrated into an existing system, maintained. All of those are done manually, by sales people, welders, electricians, CAD designers, electronica engineers, software engineers, site engineers, ... . I worked in the Automated Guided Vehicle industry, and custom projects are all made by men, not automated yet (because projects are custom).

They're going to tax the productive autonomous systems (whatever you want to call them, robots, AI, etc).

The politicians are not going to have a solution as fast as the job losses mount. They're going to want to force-fit the solution into their existing way of thinking, into existing frameworks, what they've always known politically and that means taxation + redistribution through existing channels.

If you replace a fastfood worker with a robot, as an owner you're going to pay a fee or tax for that. Politicians will justify it by saying it will go to unemployment benefits or similar.

They're also going to pass laws restricting productivity gains by robots and AI. A fastfood worker can't work 24 hours per day but a robot can. Laws will start to be passed in the near future, stipulating that if you want to use autonomous systems to replace human labor, then your autonomous system can only function near the capability of a person in terms of hours worked or total output potential.

It'll be called the Fairness in Autonomous Labor Act (of 2032).

I think you are quite correct, and that you've outlined a much more likely scenario than politicians implementing a workable universal basic income.

Sales of socially harmful goods (such as alcohol, tobacco and petroleum) are already taxed punitively to restrict their use and implement harm reduction. It's easy to imagine politicians implementing similar laws to restrict the sale of robots.

I suspect that such laws would not be very successful at addressing the problem but then I can't easily think of any laws work entirely as intended. If robots are to be taxed, it is their use which should incur the penalty, not their sale.

Jobs have been automated before since the beginnings of humanity, there is nothing really different this time. When the crisis of '30s hit, the U.S. government stepped in and employed the jobless en masse for infrastructure projects on national level. Problems to absorb large amounts of manpower exist, they are only waiting to be subsidized. I'm not saying that something handicapping as penalty for the automation gained efficiency could not occur, it's just unlikely for a rational mind to recourse to that.

Interesting. The video doesn't show the mechanism by which the little mobile units grab and load a case of something from the racks. That's the classic hard problem with automated storage and retrieval systems. Most of them use special pallets or totes. This one doesn't. That's a big win. Everything else in that video is off the shelf technology.

This is a wholesale warehouse; pallets go in and pallets with different mixes of boxes go out. It's not a fulfillment center where small customer orders are picked. Amazon is working on that, but so far they're only semi-automated. Kiva robots bring the racks to a human picker, who takes an object out of one bin and puts it in another. Amazon has a competition for robots to do that.

I bet the little robots act as platforms for individual boxes. Little mobile conveyor belts. When all of the products are relatively large boxes that can be stacked you don't really have to pick things up. That is the big difference between individual customer fulfillment. Amazon has to pack a bunch of odd shaped items. When everything goes comes in and goes out on pallets you know all the components are pallet friendly. It is a nice niche to be in.

"... There aren’t enough young people coming into the workforce who really want to work in warehouses."

Interesting comment, passing the blame to people. A better comment would have been, "we don't want people to do these type of jobs because we're building a better utopia of the future ..."

Or "since we told everyone to go to college, most of the people with degrees don't feel like warehouse work is the best use of their skills."

"There aren’t enough young people coming into the workforce who really want to work in warehouses."

Translation: We don't pay enough.

If there was a economic shortage then they can simply increase the salary. This will result in a higher supply of workers.

Who does want to work in warehouses? Haven't we all seen those reports of how uncomfortable it, both physically (hot heavy crowded work) and mentally (agressive metrics and no job security)?

The more uncomfortable the job is the more comfortable I am with automating it away.

Mrs Clinton and/or Mr Trump had better figure something out this time round, or next time this country is going to have a large group of grumpy blue collar workers out of a job and a new crop who never got the chance to have one, if they don't figure out quick how to address these structural changes. It won't be one made up of largely rustbelt blue collar workers whose jobs got outsourced overseas or across the border.

This is cutting unskilled and low-skilled labor at the knee. The only bastion left is one that domestic workers are loath to do and that is harvesting and meatpacking --but those will likely fall to automation as well.

This time the giant sucking sound wont be coming from south of the border but rather from the army of robotic workers.

Automated lamb deboning system.[1] Starts with an X-ray to find the bones. Laser scanners build a 3D image. Robot saws and knives cut at the right places. The system is kind of slow and rather complicated. About two more generations of development are needed.

Automated fruit picking for delicate fruits is still a research project. There are lots of slow demo systems with robot arms. 1 apple per second is the state of the art.

In practice, most fruit is picked using mechanical systems such as a tree-shaker that makes all the fruit fall off.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za2dsB0qrMg [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBcWZcjXr-I

I personally assign a premium value to hand-crafted items. I wonder if others do too, which would explain why software and software jobs can be so highly valued - everyone knows there's a craft involved in making it.

Likewise, items that are heavily processed or created via automation have values diminishing to zero (for me). I can't eat at Taco Bell anymore so it has a value of zero for me even though I used to love the taste of their food. Taco Bell is so full of chemicals and the quality of their components have dropped below a level my GI can tolerate so I had to swear them off.

If a robot can harvest, pack, pick, transport, cook, clean, and construct tirelessly and safely, I think we should give those jobs to the robot. People will come to know that the craft has gone from those work products, and I would expect that those non-crafted items should diminish in value as we'd only be paying for components/consumables and the design. Everyone's buying power will increase.

I say let it happen, it's inhumane to have work be dangerous or drudgerous anyways.

And it seems to me we shouldn't be looking to Trump for answers to big existential questions like "what will all the workers do with themselves?" That's the makings of comedy gold!

Just let people plan out their own lives and organize collectively where they must in order to take care of themselves. Pleading with government to save us only leads to more wasteful power grabs and taxes and spending which just exacerbates our problems.

Everyone thinks it's the blue collar jobs that will be lost to automation, but I guess a lot of office jobs will be too.

Especially jobs where the data is easily machine readable, processes can be online, and the work doesn't require human negotiation.

I don't know why you would complain about it.

1. Automate all low skilled jobs.

2. Create technocratic city-states. Maybe seasteading, maybe something else.

3. Robots won't be able to vote on things like Trump or Brexit.

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