Hacker News Reader

Comment by srssays | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Go will be worse. There are a lot more retail workers than drivers. The technology is closer to fruition: Amazon has a working autonomous store, but we are still a long way from fully autonomous vehicles.

The hardware requirements for any store that wants to adopt Amazon's tech are minimal: some cameras, an entry gate and possibly some pressure pads under the shelves.

Even if Amazon doesn't license out their tech -- and they would be foolish not to -- you can be sure that Google and Microsoft are working on their own versions. The market is staggeringly big.

View on HN

Hmmm...I would respectfully disagree :). While it would most certainly impact stores by reducing cash clerks etc. people would still be required for warehousing/monitoring etc. A lot of high volume retailers/grocers already have a self-checkout station, if they had wanted more automation, they would probably just increase the number of these stations.

Also, anything more than a basic grocer would still want real people to help people with purchasing etc.

> A lot of high volume retailers/grocers already have a self-checkout station, if they had wanted more automation, they would probably just increase the number of these stations.

I mean, this is a great example against your point (imo). Those self checkout stands, sure they do employ a staffer to monitor, but each of those stands is basically a line that doesn't have to be employed by a dedicated staffer.

They managed to potentially drastically reduce the number of required staffers via self checkouts. I say potentially, because 1 self checkout doesn't inherently equal one checkout clerk, but you get where i'm going with this.

If my safeway can fire the 6 clerks i regularly see staffing the checkout lines, and hire 1 to monitor.. that's still a drastic layoff.

And what about all the manual labor involved? I'm sure it won't be all robots stocking shelves, so mostly stockers can remain employed for the time being, but i'm sure at least a few employees who specialize in managing stock will be laid off as well.

Just because it's not 100% layoff doesn't mean it's any less serious, imo. We're slowly decreasing the available job market simply put. Where are these people going to go?

Not to mention the fact, back in the 80's/90's you go to walmart and every single aisle was open. Now pretty much any store I go to--there's maybe 3-4 open checkouts, and ALL self-checkouts are a go. Lines just are a lot longer, but it's not like people are going to stop shopping because of it. So they've cut a lot of jobs EVEN though there's a need for more workers at the registers

I'm not saying that all retail jobs will go... yet. But the number of employees per store will go down, and since there is a large absolute number of retail workers, it will still be bad.

Secondly, once people get used to shopping at stores where they don't have to line up to pay, the new experience will become expected by consumers.

So there is a double effect whereby stores who adopt the new tech will save money on payroll, and stores that don't will lose some business.

The advice part of a storekeeper's job is the easy one to automate.

If we get rid of all the manual labor that humans do, why wouldn't we move the advice-givers to remote offices and improve their utilization? A call center to tell you where the milk is or which wine goes with your recipe might sound bad, but consider that you'd never wait another second to talk to a clerk, and everything would get even cheaper as more and more of the basic questions for the call center get moved onto intelligent bots.

You realize Amazon has an warehouse system run by robots, so there's a major flaw there..why do we need people to stock or work in a warehouse when that too can be automated? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quWFjS3Ci7A

Amazon Go is not much of a change from an existing store where there are self-serve checkouts in terms of staffing. The huge staff cuts have already happened in most supermarkets.

Yeah, Amazon go seems like more of a boon for customers who don't have to check themselves out anymore. Go in to a CVS in the city and there will be one employee at an empty register and four self checkouts with a short line.

Interesting side note. I overheard staff talking at a local grocery store with a good number of chains. Now, i'm not sure to the extent of this (ie all chains or just those in my state), but they had to actually remove self checkouts.

Why? They were being targeted to test stolen credit cards and it was costing the company a pretty penny having to deal with all those fraud checks/etc.

Not a detraction from your point - i just found it interesting. "Automation" seemed great there, but they were having difficulty managing how it was being used.

I wonder what might happen with the upcoming automation(s) in a similar manner?

Self-checkout also doesn't work terribly well in grocery stores because there's a lot of slow fumbling around things like weighing produce and bagging. I've also seen self-service discontinued in some grocery stores that put it in.

I find it somewhat odd that another category of stores that often aren't a great match for self-checkout--big box home improvement stores--seem to have adopted it so broadly, at least around where I live.

People at my local supermarket told me it doesn't seem to save the company much money, but there are a lot of customers who prefer self-service.

Self-checkout seems to be one of those things that become popular or not based on fashion rather than necessarily good reason.

As I mentioned, at least in the Northeast US, it seems to be particularly popular in big box home improvement stores (Home Depot, Lowes) even though it's problematic for a lot of purchases there. OTOH, I basically never see it in supermarkets here even though it's almost ubiquitous in London markets (albeit smaller stores with less fresh/un-barcoded produce).

I'm curious where you're experiencing so much self-checkout. The vast majority of stores I go to have, at most, a single self-checkout lane.

Personally, I think if Amazon Go can follow through on its promise we'll see a drastic reduction in retail employment. The problem with existing self-checkout systems is that they're incredibly clunky and frequently require staff support/intervention. I've literally never had a successful self-checkout where everything worked properly.

Amazon Go stores still need to be stocked, don't they?

As I understand it, grocery stores employ more people back-of-house and in areas like the deli counter, than they do at cash registers.

You are still looking at millions and millions of jobs at risk. And stocking shelves is a problem that will be solved eventually anyway.

"Truck driver" is the most common profession in most US states

Or not - http://www.marketwatch.com/story/no-truck-driver-isnt-the-mo...

Interesting, I'll stop pushing that as ground truth

This has been discussed on HN previously, I think nobody was able to show that the categorization (binning of professions) was not arbitrary.

So "largest" may simply be an artifact of said binning.

Good breakdown of numbers in the transportation sector: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/h...

I think it would be hard to argue that we are a long way from fully autonomous vehicles, since millions of miles have already been driven by autonomous vehicles. What remains is mostly regulatory hurdles, psychological hurdles, and fine tuning.

> What remains is mostly regulatory hurdles, psychological hurdles, and fine tuning.

And driving in non-inclement weather. And driving in places that aren't meticulously mapped by Google. And being able to refuel themselves....

I'm not denying the accomplishments of current autonomous vehicles, but there is still a ways to go technically.

Don't underestimate the difficulty of those hurdles. Driverless cars are a technology that will be directly responsible for human deaths. We as a society don't have a legal or ethical framework to deal with that sort of thing yet. Driverless cars could very well be the first deployment of autonomous robots within the general public, that is significant.

> What remains is mostly regulatory hurdles, psychological hurdles, and fine tuning.

I think this is too optimistic. Self-driving cars only work because they are in the minority. Can you imagine a city full of current state-of-the-art self driving cars and it not turning into a traffic chaos?

In particular, I think that self-driving cars cannot work fully autonomously without communicating with other cars or the road infrastructure. And I am not aware of any effort to create a cross-vendor car-to-car communication protocol.

There are trivial cases where pure autonomous following of traffic rules will lead to deadlock (or other issues). Take these two simple examples: 1) 4 cars arrive at the same time in a four-way intersection without signals or yields 2) on a three lane road, two cars from the outer lanes try to switch to the middle lane at the same time.

These are by no means difficult problems (I'm sure there are more difficult cases too), but they must be solved and so far they're not being worked on.

You think you're smarter than a team of Googlers and that you can just think of something they haven't thought of in 10 years of development? 1) They have a random the 4way stop delay which means one of the cars will be the first to start moving again. 2) They would just both abort, then retry at a later time. It's very unlikely that the situation could repeat again on a retry unless you think perfect symmetry can be achieved in physical world:)

Add to that, car to human-driven-car, and car to human (police officer, traffic coordinator) communication.

Sometimes the communication needs to be complex (I.e. Verbal). I've had a few instances when I've had to negotiate to unblock a traffic deadlock, mostly when a two way lane is constricted to one vehicle only due to parked cars, or a HGV which is too big to drive past. In London this happens quite frequently.

I really cannot think how an autonomous car, with no human inside, could handle these scenarios.

Driving millions of miles is easy if you are driving circles around a test track. Which is not quite what current self-driving cars are doing, but they aren't driving on arbitrary roads in all conditions either.

I am exited about autonomous cars, but I'm not convinced they are as ready as various companies want us to believe.

The number of miles is not what matters, but the number of trips in which a human driver can be reliably replaced by a robot. It doesn't matter how far the vehicle can go; what we care about is the degree of confidence we can have that the vehicle will reach its destination without incident.

Designing for the unexpected edge cases is harder than designing for the normal cases. In accordance with Cargill's ninety-ninety rule, we can expect that the "fine tuning" you mention will be turn out to be a very big job.

As an extreme demonstration, consider the fact that you could rack up a million "autonomous" miles in a matter of months, using vehicles capable of nothing more than "lane keeping assist" and "adaptive cruise control" - just set 'em loose on a NASCAR loop and run them around in circles until this artificial example's point has been proven.

That store, deviod of clerks, seems like a shoplifter's dream to me.

The advert's buzzwordy, bullshitty, vague explanation of the tech hints that they're not super confident themselves about how well it will face up against shoplifters.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com