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Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

The Amazon of China, Jingdong, has a fulfillment center that handles hundreds of thousands of packages a day and employs just five people: https://youtu.be/RFV8IkY52iY

Amazon used humans because the investment to build full automation was too expensive and take too long to build out compared to spinning up human labor. However now the logistics of the fulfillment center are well understood and they can be rebuilt with full automation.

It was clearly a matter of time and money, not “these jobs are impractical hard to do with automation”

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Automation doesn't work for everything. Like when the product being shipping is of varying size and shape. Like clothing, books, pouches all in one box. Or stacking the boxes in a truck. Or look at something like car assembly. Tesla still uses people to route wiring harnesses through the car body because robots can't do it well. Many simple things can get automated but there is still a lot not yet possible.

Why does it matter if automation doesn't work for everything. There is a particular breaking point in unskilled labor where doing enough means lots of unemployed with little chance of being reeducated for the necessary jobs the future demands.

So what are we going to do about it as a society? "More jobs" isn't the answer, I don't think. Maybe getting rid of "jobs" entirely is.

>It was clearly a matter of time and money, not “these jobs are impractical hard to do with automation”

I take it you haven't seen a single item dropped on the floor result in several Kivas playing bumper cars with each other, necessitating human beings to physically drag them away.

How many human beings do you need? Web search lists 90,000 fulfillment center employees at 25 fulfillment centers, so let's assume 3600 employees per warehouse. Amazon ships about 1million packages a day, so let's estimate 40,000 per fulfillment center per day. So that's 11 packages shipped per employee.

Now, let's assume a 0.1% (probably very high) item drop. So about 40 packages will be dropped a day. How many people do we need to run out and get 40 dropped packages? Certainly not more than 40. So at this failure rate, I can reduce the number of employees by a factor of 3600/40 = 90x!

Clearly, handling failure cases is a much lower workload and needs far fewer people in the pipeline. Like I said, Jingdong has a fulfillment center that does 250,000 packages a day they claim, and they say only 5 people are needed to babysit its operation.

BTW, if you look at the Jingdong video, they're not doing Kiva. Kiva was designed for human packers to bring human-sized shelves to the packager.

Jingdong is doing what Musk talked about: A 3D space filling factory. They've build a Voxel-like 3D positioning system of shelves. The entire warehouse space seems to be used, stacking stuff up to the ceiling. Robot sleds seem to be able to address any X/Y/Z coordinate in this space, moving down to where a robot arm unloads a palette.

So basically, it's Kiva bots, but on 3D degrees of freedom.

They do have Kiva-style bots for the final part that loads the wrapped packages onto the Jingdong delivery trucks.

The thing is, Amazon's warehouses are still designed around human beings. Stowing, picking and counting in bins with random assortments and arrangements of items requires visual, spatial reasoning and fine motor skills that are still difficult to automate. The Jingdong factory doesn't appear to be using random item placement and appears designed entirely around automation.

I don't think Amazon can easily automate its existing warehouses beyond a certain point (I don't know what that is, they probably haven't reached it yet) because so much effort has been put into optimizing them for a human workforce. Obviously, Amazon is going to automate away as many jobs as it can, but it's not clear that full or close to full automation would necessarily be cost effective.

What part of fulfillment, though?

In my area, Amazon has its own trucks delivering packages, for the most part. That's not exactly something that can be automated.

Not yet, but one self driving takes off, delivery drones are probably one of the first use cases to be used. Hell, they don't even have the 'unrestricted left turn' problem that cars have, because UPS already restricts its drivers to right turns only or restricted left turns only. You just need a self-driving UPS truck, and for a certain subset of packages in a certain weight class, just a self-propelled dolly that comes out of a ramp in the back of the truck.

I'm guessing no more than 20 years before all of this is automated. And then what for low skilled labor?

That video looks like a demo/marketing video. Are there any videos of the factory working at full load?

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