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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

Amazon already owns Kiva. If you make the minimum wage high enough, it just gives them more incentive to automate.

They've already automated the easy parts in a lot of their warehouses. They've gone from runners to using the Kiva bots to bring the items to the packagers. Automating picking and boxing from there will be really hard.

It's impossible to give Amazon more incentive to automate, since they already intend to automate everything as soon as it's feasible. Raising minimum wage or even wages in general for warehouse workers wouldn't accelerate that schedule, since the obstacles to automation are primarily technical.

Kivas are nice and all, but they can't pick and they definitely can't stow. They could probably move pallets, but couldn't palletize, and having them run around the facilities at the necessary speed dragging a train of pallets would be a safety hazard.

They are really good at reading QR codes and turning at 90 degree angles, though.

But it's a business decision to pay expensive engineering time to automate what can be done by people for much cheaper. If the people become too expensive, the business decision becomes easier.

There are places in India where they pay 100 men pennies to dig a trench. Sure, they could buy a machine so 1 person could do the work of 100, but if the machine costs 100k and the guy who is trained to operate it makes 10 an hour, the payoff time is too long to justify. If the guys digging the trench demand 5 an hour, the barrier to the investment goes down significantly.

This is why, if a 15 dollar minimum wage is passed nation wide, you will never order from a person at McDonald's again... and any niche restaurant that does use people will cost significantly more. A large business like McDonalds benefits from this because they can absorb the cost. A small business can't, so big corporation's have less competition and can make even larger profits because they have less downward pressure on their prices.

I can't back it up with data, but I'm not certain that $15/hr would be too expensive for Amazon warehouse labor. Automating those warehouses entirely would either require very expensive, as yet technically infeasible, robots (and the engineering infrastructure to maintain them) capable of adapting to the existing human-centric ergonomics, and/or committing to redesigning all of the facilities around a new automation paradigm. Paying humans more still seems like a better deal for the forseeable future.

Have you seen the videos of Kivas at work?

https://youtu.be/cLVCGEmkJs0

With enough money, they could probably reduce the amount of warehouse workers needed.

I work in a warehouse full of them, I see them more often than I see my own family. They do one thing well, but still require human intervention at times and still run into each other now and again.

Other facility jobs, like picking and stowing, run up against vision and fine motor skill problems that turn out to be really difficult for AI and robotics to solve. They'll be automated eventually, but I don't think it will be soon. I might be wrong, though.

I have no idea if this is relevant....

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-singapore-robots-ikea/fla...

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