Walmart Launches Small Army of Autonomous Scanning Robots
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I don't understand why some people propose this as inherently a bad thing. A robot taking a job means that a human can be freed to do other things; things that we can't easily automate or have robots to do (like curing cancer). These jobs/problems exist whether or not the robot is there to take the human's job. Otherwise why wouldn't we simply regress to the stone ages and have way more jobs for everyone.
People need jobs to survive in this country.
They aren't "freed" to do other things, not in this country.
And yes, you're right, this isn't new.
But if you look at the amount of debt we are all in - education and housing in particular - those are very symptomatic that people are living beyond their means. And the educational debt is indicative that people at least believe they need to be in that much debt to find a reasonable job.
Hooray that unemployment is so low right now. But will it stay there?
The FED is increasing interest rates. What will happen next?
Hopefully just more cycles, and not something new.
It's entertaining watching economists state as law that people will always find work, just because it's always happened before. It's fine at making predictions with statistical confidence, but that's poor consolation when your prediction fails at something so incredibly important.
If you can argue that a robot that makes a certain manual human work obsolete is not good for society, then you may as well argue against all technology that reduces unnecessary manual work in order to create more jobs for the less capable.
The whole point of technology is to reduce the amount of work we need to do so that we can do more complicated things. If you're artificially impeding such progress in order to create useless busy work for people, then you're avoiding the main issue: we have too many useless people. However in my opinion people aren't useless and can always be repurposed for higher order tasks that robots or AI cannot master yet.
Ask my neighbor the ex-steel worker how his work in Oncology is going.
There are benefits, for sure. But the cycle is too fast and people get push aside. Those people suffer.
If you use a bit of imagination, robots at the lowest level can free up jobs so that the lower level say coal worker or walmart worker can be freed to pursue something slightly higher level, which can free up options for jobs at an even higher level, and so on and so forth, until pressure is relieved to allow for more cancer researchers.
Imagine if we had automated cars that could drive us anywhere. The decreased costs of transit would make everyone else wealthier as we can do more things in the workday, go to new places, get more done. Former Uber drivers can now go back to school or training for less menial tasks, and the ability to train for jobs that can improve society even further (in the same way that automated driving did). Such improvements would make the job of a cancer researcher easier in and of itself, but also the labor force that is now relieved of duty, but more importantly now forced to pursue more useful tasks, will lead to further improvements in society that ultimately benefit the cancer researchers at the top of the pyramid.
Over 600 million people in developing countries have to walk miles to get fresh water. Arguing that automation should be impeded to save jobs is the same as arguing that these people should continue walking so they don't lose their jobs walking for water. It's pretty clear if you look at that that before any of those developing country citizens can cure cancer, they'd have to solve their water problem first (by automating it with pipes and filtration), fix their mosquito and public health issues, and other things that should be solved/automated away so that no more manual labor is required.
> If you use a bit of imagination, robots at the lowest level can free up jobs so that the lower level say coal worker or walmart worker can be freed to pursue something slightly higher level, which can free up options for jobs at an even higher level, and so on and so forth, until pressure is relieved to allow for more cancer researchers.
I don't understand this connection. They are already "free" to do those things but can't for varying socioeconomic reasons or simply because they don't want to. Suddenly losing their job isn't going to free them into making their life better.
> Over 600 million people in developing countries have to walk miles to get fresh water. Arguing that automation should be impeded to save jobs is the same as arguing that these people should continue walking so they don't lose their jobs walking for water.
I, and I assume most people, are not arguing that. What we are arguing is that when these things happen they are painful and hurt people and that often their lives don't get better. When we, as people in tech, automate out a career we also have a responsibility to help those people whose life we ruined. Collecting water to survive != working at walmart making some goober in a suit a ton of money. Of course when people's basic needs are met better their lives get better. We are taking away their ability to meet their needs (income), not freeing them from those needs to improve their lives.
I mean, there is actually an incredibly utilitarian reason to curb the rate of technological growth as people are given a chance to catch up and adapt to the changing world. This isn't a reversion to the stone age, but more like checking unbridled growth that kills the organism - we have a term for that.
"I don't understand why some people propose this as inherently a bad thing."
I told you why I think they see it that way - because UNTIL we fix those other problems, increasing automation will make the lives of some people much worse.
If you would like to have a conversation about what to do with all of this information, I'd be glad to.
"I'm sure that cancer patient is ecstatic that we're focusing on keeping people doing unnecessary jobs rather than progressing with technology..."
I love this line of thought, because it's so wrong-headed. I worked in Medical Imaging - turning CT and MR data into 3D images for radiologists, cardiologists.
I didn't just make a radiologist BETTER at their job, I made it so that FEWER radiologists were needed to handle the same case load.
That's right, I put cancer doctors out of work.
I'm not saying my technology was a bad thing. But I'm saying that the relationship between money, jobs, and research is no where near as simple as you are portraying it (I suspect you know that, so I'm not trying to insult you.)
"If you can argue that a robot that makes a certain manual human work obsolete is not good for society,"
I literally helped put some of the most highly-trained people in the world out of work.
It's not just "manual human work" that's at risk.
"then you may as well argue against all technology that reduces unnecessary manual work in order to create more jobs for the less capable."
This is where you're putting words in my mouth.
I'm saying, "Technology is advancing so quickly that we really, desperately need to look at the fundamentals of our economy, because technology is turning Supply and Demand on their heads like we really haven't seen before."
The economists smirk that we have seen this before. I sincerely hope they're right and I'm wrong. 3.5 million unemployed truck drivers should make a good data point, shouldn't they?
With a properly run automation program, an entire category of jobs can be eliminated in < 1 year now.
It's time we stop ignoring two things: (1) the pace of technological employment disruption is increasing (in speed, if scale is debatable), (2) the time for an employee to reskill is > 0.
Trump was elected on neo-liberal economics failing to compassionately account for the consequences of and requirements for frictional unemployment (moving from one job to another). It'd be nice not to make the same mistake again.
That seems..not right. Robotics companies like Bossa Nova have been at this since 2006-2010. That's a good 8-15 years and multiple changes in political offices.
Even still I think its a decade till we see any effect on the labour market. We still have time to act....for now.
For context, I've been a blazing sword through 100+ person offshore teams with projects that took a month to build. :/
E.g. "the stuff that accounting has to do every month to keep the company operating" or "half of your call center workload"
This is just plainly false.
If after looking into those, you're still convinced we have Progressive Taxation, then I'll hear you out.
But convincing me that Warren Buffett pays a HIGHER portion of his income as federal taxes than his secretary is going to be pretty dang hard, frankly.
That's where.
If you have evidence that Warren Buffett in fact pays a higher share of his income in federal taxes than his secretary, I'll hear you out.
Can't recall anyone thinking it's ok, people take jobs so they can pay to survive.
As automation and AI take bigger roles, couple with the population aging, we the human being need more and more support from other human fellows, and those professions become more important.
I can explain this! It's actually simple.
People are afraid of unemployment and what it could mean for themselves and their families. So while there are possibly benefits, it's also possible that they will not be able to provide for their family and that's incredibly scary to people.
* a person may be happier working 8 hours for $100 than getting a $100 handout
* some n% of people may be better suited for repetitive work than creative work, and when these people are automated out of a job there will not be other repetitive jobs to go to
* in the above proposition, n may be closer to 100% than we know
* working in a hot and dangerous steel mill for $100 of wages may be preferable, in the long term, to washing floors for a rich person for $120
* the above proposition may be doubly or triply true for men
* the above proposition may be additionally doubly or triply true for the subset of men most disposed towards violent conflict resolution
* ethnically diverse societies may be at higher risk for societal breakdown than ethnically homogeneous societies
* some jobs may be better than others at providing a person with a sense of identity and dignity, and this metric may not correlate with automatibility
* some persons with anti-social tendencies may be “tamed” by the requirements of employment and may be less anti-social out of work hours
* jobs may take time and energy away from self- and society-destructive behaviors — someone who has just done a long shift may be simply too tired to “raise hell”
* individual choices with respect to work may not be utility maximizing for the society OR the individual over the long term — someone may say “yes” to the idea of collecting their wage without ever having to work again, but after 30 years of Netflix may be a less happy person for having done it
It's almost impossibly hard to describe the different realities that people from different social networks/classes inhabit - I mean, completely alien realities to each other. Deborah Espinoza is worried about robots taking people's ability to earn bread, and the response is "Let them eat cake".
I'd argue people in Walmart stocking shelves shouldn't have expected their job(s) to be around indefinitely - but hey, some people don't think ahead.
[0] : https://www.princeton.edu/news/2013/08/29/poor-concentration...
In this case, simply replacing a few tedious and error prone tasks probably won't get us to 45% unemployment.
Yeah, like being unemployed.
People are creative. They can always fill jobs that can't be automated yet since humans are extremely pliable and trainable.
Artificially impeding progress to engineer a class of people doing jobs that are completely unnecessary is the type of social engineering only the rich and privileged could possibly dream up.
We have to move to a post-scarcity style economy at some point if you want people to not be upset. That's where things like universal basic income or at least lower-hours work weeks come into play.
with the url: http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/03/20/walmart-launches...
then this post is submitted with same url but with /?href= added http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/03/20/walmart-launches...
and it hits the frontpage.
Is that all it takes to resubmit the same story?
They are different URLs, so a simple "same URL is a re-submission" check is going to let them both pass.
No automated system is going to be able to reliably tell the difference between two similar URLs that point to different articles on the same source or similar URLs that reference the same content, without pulling the content for both and analysing the differences (and even if they are the same resource, the requests might be slightly different if they include things like timestamps, per-request varying advert include markup, and so on).
Scanning the shelves is tedious, slow and prone to error. The robots are not error-free but they are a bit faster.
Another bot could be used just for stacking.
Others would just be for cleaning etc.
http://osxdaily.com/2017/11/20/stop-autoplay-video-audio-chr...
I'm aware that I posted almost the same comment twice ... I may be old but I'm not that forgetful yet. How is your comment adding value to this thread? How is the comment I'm typing now? At least my original comment was suggesting some community norms.
Have a great day!