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Comment by at_a_remove | Hacker News Reader

I am still surprised that they didn't buy Boston Dynamics. I would have been all over that. Perhaps they know something I do not.

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Boston Dynamics builds thinly disguised military robots that are meant to be very flexible and can operate in rough terrain (for 15 min or whatever until the battery runs out, but that's another story). They're hugely expensive literal overkill for a highly predictable and controlled environment like a warehouse, which is why the Kiva robots that Amazon actually uses are basically boxes on wheels.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UxZDJ1HiPE

They have some demos and robots that are literally designed for warehouse work.

Amazon’s demand for warehouse picking and packing is highly seasonal, centered around the American holiday season. I think they do have robots, but it’s still cheaper to hire seasonal humans rather than have a bunch of expensive robots idle for 8 months of the year.

One of those dystopian facts that makes me feel some kinda way.

Is it more or less dystopian than fewer humans being needed due to robots being cheaper?

Maybe more? I believe the issue with the human race reaching the singularity point isn’t the world post singularity, but the transition period leading up to it.

Ideally, robots doing all of our work should be utopian, leaving humans free to pursue other interests. Unfortunately, the current structure of society instead makes this dystopian.

That's where we are going with Capitalism. In 500 years when we had improved robotics to the point of being able to do most of human work (excepting maybe knowledge work), it will be cheaper to buy a robot than to hire a human.

With more than 20 billion people at that time (the USA could have 850 million ppl), the only way for people to survive will be through hyper-efficient production processes and equalitarian distribution policies.

4 months full usage, 1 month maintenance, 5 months of Amazon Rental Robots.

modern day Biorobots

They bought a warehouse robot company Kiva Systems in 2012. They have lots of robots.

Yeah, that was a smart acquisition. They have hundreds of thousands of robots working for them now [0]. The Kiva Systems founders were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame last year [1].

It's interesting to read in [1] that one of the founders is working with RightHand Robotics [2] on picking. I wonder if RHH would be another acquisition target for Amazon if they solve that problem.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Robotics

[1] - https://www.therobotreport.com/kiva-systems-creators-inducte...

[2] - https://www.righthandrobotics.com/

Why? Amazon already has significant automation in their warehouses and Boston Dynamics has yet to find a significant market for thier products.

Same, I don't understand it. Also still surprised that Google sold them.

A non-trivial amount of Boston Dynamics' funding came from DoD. Pretty sure Google was not interested in sustaining those contracts but without them it was likely a net loss.

Google knew that going in. Even if it hadn't been public knowledge (it was), it would have come out during due diligence.

There has to be a different reason, we just can't tell what it is.

My assumption is that the tech makes good videos, but is basically limited in what it can do, without someone always offscreen handling the controls.

Can they already do order picking?

if they automatize too fast then people will call for UBI... that's my guess

I think UBI is further off than you think. Look at how Andrew Yang was treated during the presidential election. Boomers and their rotten ways of thinking need to die off from positions of power first.

Main arguments I saw (from the left, at least) against Yang's UBI proposals were how he planned to gut social programs to pay for it. I think there will definitely be more discussions about UBI in the US political sphere in the coming years.

UBI is often viewed on the right as a cost neutral way of spreading social Security spending around so that Bill Gates, the unemployed and the permanently disabled all get the same $290 check in the mail every month.

The upside being lower spending on things like testing eligibility, the downside being that either the cost balloons to about $4-6 trillion a year or you basically just accept that some people are not gonna be able to survive.

> just accept that some people are not gonna be able to survive.

Their arguments against unemployment benefits are instructive. I don't think a livable UBI is a possibility in the current US political climate, doubly so since it cannot be sustained by income taxes on a shrunken labor base, necessitating more taxes on robot companies.

>I don't think a livable UBI is a possibility in the current US political climate

I can't help but wonder sometimes if that isn't the point for some people.

A raised minimum wage has the potential to become expensive. Pipe dreams, meanwhile, are free.

Many social programs in theory could afford to be gutted if we just stopped checking for, certifying, and auditing eligibility and started paying people directly with fewer questions. To what extent and how the transition would work out remains to be seen.

Yang was treated terribly because he's an outsider and not part of the establishment. See also Bernie, Trump, Tulsi. The GOP, DNC and corporate media were all against them during the primaries.

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