Boston Dynamics Unveils New Robot for Warehouse Automation
bostondynamics.com
bostondynamics.com
But I have to ask: Can this thing fight queen xenomorphs?
Unless we get something like UBI we'll always need shitty job to keep people busy. Automation for the sake of automation doesn't bring much if 70% of the population is still working 8 hours a day 5 days a week on more and more useless tasks.
This isn't even talking about the fact that we're increasing productivity per unit of time but never reducing working hours, I wonder when this is going to end
That's a pretty darned condescending attitude to harbor there. I know a lot of people who have what you'd call s#### jobs, and they're happy, fulfilled, and proud of the work they do.
I'm the condescending condescending one ? They're being shat on by capitalism.
I wish only one thing, for their lives to get better. I'm not going to lie and pretend people working 8+ hours a day, doing back breaking repetitive tasks, with no real possibilities of evolving their career are living the dream... all of that to get paid wages that barely let them afford a decent life and never let them escape living pay-check to pay-check
They've been tricked into being proud slaves, that all the pride there is in there. We could do so much better
For what its worth, a high percentage of people are living paycheck to paycheck, no matter how big that paycheck is. Many people will adjust their lifestyle to or above their means, so they have to live paycheck to paycheck to support that lifestyle.
I worked lots of jobs before my career in coding. Manual, sometime menial work. The fact that you deem me to be a “proud slave”, too stupid to even see my shackles might be the most stunning condescension I’ve heard, and there’s no shortage of it on the internet.
There is a fulfillment I still miss in that work. I could see the effect of my work immediately, as it was grounded in the physical world. I could leave and the work wouldn’t follow me.
> There is a fulfilment I still miss in that work.
What work are you talking about ? Moving boxes of gadgets all day for lord Bezos while being tracked by optimisation software telling you when to pee or take a smoke break ? Slicing chicken breasts 10 hours a day in a slaughter house ? Driving your leased car for uber 12 hours a day to earn a semi decent wage ? Driving a delivery van, working crazy shifts and not being able to take restroom breaks ?
I'm not talking about a guy making hand made wooden tables in his garage enjoying his craft and skills, I'm not talking about a plumber or a mechanic fixing real world problems, I'm talking about human beings used as robots, doing indecent work for indecent wages.
People aren't stupid, they're lied too, since birth
I find myself often making this assumption too, but I wonder if it's warranted? A "shit" job is often shorthand for a job you can grab someone off the street and more or less have them start working, an "unskilled" job. But the fact that pretty much anyone can do a job isn't the same as saying that someone doing a "shit" job is only capable of that kind of work.
What if we did get to a point where nearly all the tedious, unskilled jobs were done by machines -- what exactly is the barrier to taking all the humans previously doing those jobs and leveling them up to do jobs machines can't do as well? I don't think it's human capability -- I'm quite skeptical of the idea that there's whole classes of people actually _unable_ to learn skills needed for better work. It seems the barrier is that generally it's not economically beneficial to do so -- training takes time and money. But if that's actually the problem, then its not an overall lack of money, it's a distribution question.
Perhaps it's because I'm watching The Expanse now and remember the books, but I'm not completely sold on UBI. I think it gives up on the idea that masses of people can work better jobs. As a supplementary income program I can see it working, but as a replacement for having any job at all I'm not sure I'm on board.
UBI can ensure no one has an unmet need for basics, but many people with nothing to do would likely lead to unmet fulfillment and security needs. UBI is unlikely to fund digital nomads in the short term, and unbounded travel isn't for everyone. The classic work for independence mindset that drove early settlers also becomes permanently non-viable.
I'm a fan of UBI, but I think it brings us closer to asking the question of how do we structure a society where a 40 hour work week is optional? what will people who are satisfied with the basics do?
The devil makes work for idle hands.
Whatever they want, why would we care ?
What would you do if work stopped everyday at 1 PM ? Go to the park, chill with friends, read a book, learn music, go for a walk in the woods, play with your kids, take a nap, go fishing, ... live life ? Are we really so alienated that we can't imagine what we'd do outside of work ?
Because history repeats itself. Yesterday's factory workers are now slaves of the service/gig economy. These things have been discussed in basically any economy book since the 60s. Automation in itself just moves the problem, if there are no societal changes to assist it you're just running in circles. Politicians of the 70s were promising 5 hours work days and 3 days of work per week thanks to automation, last time I checked we work as much as back then (if not more because retirement age is going up)
> It seems the barrier is that generally it's not economically beneficial to do so
It's not economical because in today's world you need an army of cheap labor to generate big money for the sharks on top. And this is exactly why you'll always have shitty jobs paying the bare minimum for insane amount of work, it'll take a looooong time before a 7$ an hour worker gets more expensive than a robot for any task remotely difficult.
I'm not saying UBI would solve these issues, or any at all really, it's just something we should at least give a shot. But the problem is that in our societies being a worthy human being = working 8 hours a day 5 days a week, and as long as this is default we'll never get rid of shitty jobs, no matter how much we automate, we'll always have to find new occupations for people, and by definition these jobs will be more and more abstract, less and less stimulating, &c.
One challenge with this that I rarely hear talked about is that many people aren't inclined to do those jobs. Here on HN, we tacitly assume that everyone loves intellectually challenging, mentally complex work, but that's simply not the case for many people. Lots of people prefer to use their hands, or their bodies, or to do jobs that are primarily social. Many (most?) people don't consider thinking to be a deep source of joy and satisfaction in their lives.
When we automate away the skilled manual labor jobs, we implicitly say that the only kind of being human that has value is brain work, but that is an absolute aberration in human history. For most of Homo sapiens evolutionary history, it was just as important to have physical and manual skills.
But here I am, later in my career, and I don't honestly see the reward of upskilling. For the time, money, and effort it would take. There's not a lot of things I'd rather be doing than what I'm doing now. And some of those things are maybe 5-10 years of training down the road. And then I'd be starting out at a Junior-level in pay, which is completely un-doable in my situation.
Of course, I'm not obsolete in what I'm doing yet. So I don't have THAT choice to make.
According to Jordan Peterson, around 10% of the population has an IQ below 83, (at which point the army will no longer take you).
> but as a replacement for having any job at all
I find it unlikely UBI can properly account for the market if it's just a flat rate. Instead a more complex version of "food-stamps" might be better i.e. discount items of food, clothing, accommodation etc with category specific UBI. If people can live on basics without working, so be it - just as long as there is no competition with taxpayers.
That said, there are some things that are still difficult: insurances, medical and crime for example.
Suppose the cool jobs require knowledge of physics, linear algebra, coding, genetics - most people will be unable to do these jobs or unwilling. There are going to be human-in-the-loop kind of jobs for monitoring AI models though.
And there are going to be new applications that will keep us busy, whenever we gain new abilities we also expand our ambitions - like the car industry, which killed the horse and buggy industry but created a huge number of new jobs.
Disability recipients fall into both categories. Some are not trainable for skilled work with current methods, while others are trainable but not desirable (lack of current work history, lack of hard/soft skills that only come from work).
In short, they're getting some training but not getting the work from it. That has to change somehow.
> It seems the barrier is that generally it's not economically beneficial to do so -- training takes time and money.
Seeing that a lot with entry level IT. It is more economical to wait for the unicorn than to train the people that are available.
What would have to happen to change that (short of a miraculous repeat of the late 1990s)?
People have been worried we'll run out of jobs ever since farming started to decline from being 90% of jobs.
People will always want better things, whether cell phones or TV shows. There are ALWAYS jobs to produce those better things.
There's no need to "keep people busy". People just always want better things and will work for them.
> ALWAYS
Earth is a finite environment, with finite resources, at some point it won't scale anymore, especially with today's ecological concerns. The world isn't going to run on cells phones and TV shows indefinitely, and even if, I think we should strive for more than that
> People just always want better things and will work for them.
It hasn't always been the case and it won't be forever, capitalism is fairly new, I hope we'll reconcile with our humanity at some point, there is more to life than working 50%+ of our awake time to watch netflix and buy iphones
> there is more to life than working 50%+ of our awake time to watch netflix and buy iphones
Life is what you make of it. If you want to write poetry or symphonies in your free time, or watch Netflix and play Candy Crush, I'm not going to judge you either way. You have the choice to make your life what you want. You can focus on yourself and you don't need to judge others.
I don't think we live in the same world then, we've never imported/exported so much shit, third world countries are catching up with the west in term of how they want to live (personal cars, bigger houses, more electronics), we're polluting more than ever, &c. all the metrics are going up, not down
> Life is what you make of it.
Well, yeah, exactly, but what can you make of it when you work 8 hours a day 5 days a week for the 40 best years of your life
> You can focus on yourself and you don't need to judge others
Or I can think about myself _and_ others by thinking that the world would be a much better place for everyone including myself if people didn't have to work so much for so little.
I was referring to manufacturing per output -- e.g. per-car or per-toaster uses less energy, pollution, etc.
People consuming more or less objects total is a choice people make, not manufacturers.
I always use the plane engine analogy, 10 years of research gives you a 3% boost in fuel efficiency, during the same time you doubled the number of flights per day ....
Fortunately we have an entire solar system. That should last us a shocking amount of time.
* literal biological paradise we've been engineered for millions of years to live on
There is no fundamental reason that you need to "keep people busy" with unproductive labor. Due to increases of productivity, we could all be working 20 hour weeks today and enjoying the same standard of living as 50 years ago.
But we want to enjoy the standard of living of today, we always want more, our desires fill up any level of productivity increase.
Yes, a nurse's role is to heal, but also to offer comfort to a patient, a teacher's job is to instruct, but also to try different ways of connecting with a student struggling to understand an idea.
I don't know if people think those types of jobs are bad or not. I think some of my family members would have had better hospital experiences if they could have had more attention from staff, so I don't think I'd call it useless.
I think that automation could lead to a world where more of the humans-dealing-with-human-things types of jobs are being done.
I'm sure we can eventually have truly general-purpose robots, but in the mean time, I'm kind of skeptical about how much cost and labor these things are going to save. Not to say this isn't impressive or cool, just saying that a completely fully automated warehouse is still pretty far away.
The most difficult part of business is the human element. For better or worse these mitigate that. The resources freed up from addressing the human element can focus on other opportunities.
These may have lesser costs than their human equivalents, but I don't think they're magically zero-maintenance.
Yes, of course robots aren't indestructible or immortal. But they're still easier to manage than the majority of humans.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/male-infertility...
I mean, Boston Dynamics’ new robot is on (Mecanum?) wheels and it has some basic machine vision capability, but it really doesn’t seem like a dramatic, exponential departure from the 60 year old Unimate robot.
(Boston Dynamics’ other robots are much more impressive from a technical standpoint, but I’m not terribly surprised a company that has been struggling to get profitable is turning to more mundane but practical robotics applications.)
Which doesn’t mean I don’t think something like this isn’t practical. It just goes to show there’s still a ton of fairly virgin ground out there for increased automation and productivity growth just deploying technology from half a century ago and adding some minor tweaks. And I think part of the reason we HADN’T deployed this kind of automation tech earlier is because wages have just been too low, with wage growth fairly stagnant after the 1960s.
Every day I’m less and less worried that automation will get rid of all our jobs and more and more frustrated at the slow uptake of productivity improvements we have just sitting in front of us, perhaps because companies don’t compensate their employees enough for it to be worthwhile.
Automated truck loading and unloading robots are already available. It's neat that Boston Dynamics made a mobile one, but they are not the first to do that.[3]
The real frontier in this area is fully automated order picking of miscellaneous objects in fulfillment centers. Nobody has that in volume use yet, although there are many demos.
[1] https://youtu.be/QfbdVboVNUM
The reference design/concept for zero-human warehouse operations might exist in China now: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/02/the-rush-to-deploy-robots-in...
But yeah, assuming infinite space, I'd work on standardizing packaging for products; miniature containers, each containing one of a product. Probably would need multiple sizes of containers though. But a manufacturer would, instead of packaging everything in boxes, use the reusable containers to deliver products to the automated warehouses. Probably massively inefficient in terms of packaging though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_storage_and_retrieva...
They haven't managed to master bipeds yet, but it's understandable given how hard controlling those are.
As most of us here are in the technological sector we are often blinded by the idea of unending linear progress, but we really have to respect how hard robotics actually is. The current manual labor tasks that have to be automated are optimized are actually not that 'repetitive' in the scientific sense, they actually require a lot of elaborate limb movements, split-second decision makings, and handling of countless edge cases for even just the simple task of moving objects from point A to B. It's easy to manage this when you're in a warehouse that has been purposefully designed for robots to do things easily (with entirely flat floors and standardized box sizes). But as soon these robots meet environments where humans live, come and go, with all the irregularities and edge cases it has, it will fail miserably. Too much of our surrounding infrastructure are designed for humans and not for robots, that's why there is immense value in creating robotic systems mimicking natural systems. But robotics researchers are still having an incredibly hard time replicating the delicate movements of human limbs and hands (both in terms of hardware and software), and rightly so; the human body is an incredibly elaborate system of muscles, bones, and neural pathways that almost seems like a miracle of nature (how the fuck did evolution really create this insane complicated system that can do all sorts of weird movements???) And even if we know how the whole system works, it's not a easy task to replicate this in mechanical terms. Note that we haven't begin talking about mass production of these complicated robots, there's always a question of whether it will scale (and would it be more competitive to humans, especially in the developing world?). I think robotics will still have quite some progress in the 21st century but a bit pessimistic that it will seriously begin to replace traditional manual labor in my lifetime.