Yeah the type of thing Boston Dynamics does is sexy for investors / the general public obsessed with anthropomorphism, but it is very unclear whether this is the most efficient way to automate a task.
On the other hand, this sort of highly incremental "replace a human, warehouse stays the same" automation is in a weird way lower risk. Sure, the robot is hard to get right and might not work well, but you can try it out without reconfiguring the rest of your warehouse. Firms not really being pressed on labor costs, might still more "leisurly" want to to automated. They would do this less because profitability demands it, than because they are curiousn about either raising profits or cutting costs to induce more demand. (And indeed, one suspects the demand for most do-hickies amazon fullfills is highly elastic. Such "experiments" need to more low risk than high reward, and with this sort of automation, Boston dynamics doing the fancy pants robotics work absorbs all their risk. Perfect!
For the type of automation PP is talking about, in contrast t oI would encourage one to read https://homesignalblog.wordpress.com/2020/12/25/industrial-s...
If we really wanted to be as efficient possible, things would have gone very differently:
- We would still be using way more rail, and industry would be clustered around that rail minimizing trip distances,
- We would apply the simple logic of containerization at multiple levels, creating smaller countainers to fit inside larger containers
- Railway switching yards would have tons of simple af crude pnumatic push and pulls, shuffling the fixed-sized boxes between containers.
This is something like the Factorio model. We probably could have done this with 1980s-level internet, barcodes, etc. Or at least 1980s tech with 1990s cheaper prices and more advanced supply chains.
A lot of people "oh, it's harder than it looks, etc. etc." I dunno. I really don't believe it: the hard parts here are mainly getting people to coordinate on the standards, label things properly, etc. Lack of complete monopolies makes that very difficult.
I think we simply don't do these things long ago not because we can't but because such coordination and physical investment-heavy automation is expensive for firms, and they only do it "on demand" when there are labor market issues. The more we automate, the weaker and cheaper labor gets, and the weaker and cheaper labor gets in a consumer economy the more sluggish everything gets as there are aggregate demand issues. Together this means we stop automating way before our technological potential.
This, to me, is the most exciting part about UBI + shrinking the work week. Make labor scarse. Make aggregate demand strong and extremely reliable. Then automating finally makes economic sense, and for shear glory (and more leisure :)) we can engineer unbridled.