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I expect workers like this. Warehouse picking is grueling work and no one really likes it per se. So having a robot do it is good to allow humans to do other things.

I don’t think the solution is to keep grueling jobs or pay more to make people do things they don’t want to do. Of course more money is good, but at the end of the day, it’s a repetitive job that doesn’t require much thought.

What’s interesting is that if these only cost $3/hour to operate that’s only $25k/year (assuming 365x24 operation) so if these things last 5 years then that means the idea is they will only cost $125k to buy and maintain. That’s cheap enough that middle class people will have live in super servants. And that’s much more appealing to me to have a laundry/dish/sweep bot. Especially since I could probably chip in with neighbors and eventually not have to do these household chores.

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There are a few keywords in this article that make me think this isn’t coming to a home near you any time soon:

“eventually.” “Plus software overhead” … “Amazon.”

For that last one, keep in mind that Amazon can afford to invest millions to billions and also totally control the working environment. Warehouse workers are practically robots already with the structure that is imposed on their work. A home isn’t like that.

Except that some of the investment that Amazon does goes to code that is also useful for the home robot. Amazon can afford it - probably saves money - so they make the investment. then they come along later and realize that the home robot is in some way affordable as so many of the parts needed already exist.

Of course I cannot say when it will affordable. It may be Amazon has to solve the last remaining hard problems and then the R&D is paid for: all that remains is packaging and marketing, it may be thousands of hard problems remain. (I'm guessing someplace in between) I also don't state what the home robot will do. May the home robot just picks up the kids toys when they are done but can't do laundry - even though I want the laundry robot more the toys only one is still useful.

Amazon already has a robot for the home. It’s not even compatible with round edges or black floors. This makes me think the technology has a long way to go.

The question is robots (in general, maybe not theirs) only a few more developments away from ready for those things or not?

What do these laid off warehouse pickers do instead? Go back to their old jobs as cloud infrastructure architects, or hedge fund managers? I agree that most people don't want to work as pickers, and I think that's the point: in general, if you've got a shitty job, it's because it's the best available to you. They don't want to work that job, true, but they sort of have to, and if it goes away they'll have to get an even worse one—if they can.

> That’s cheap enough that middle class people will have live in super servants.

Take into consideration that, if AI and robot super servants exist, the idea of a middle class will almost certainly have to be redefined downward. Your job will be less valuable, as you get get undercut both by automation, and by the highly motivated people who lost their jobs due to automation and who would do yours for less money. That would change the economic accessibility of live-in super servants.

> What do these laid off warehouse pickers do instead?

this line of reasoning was also peddled by slave owners before the Civil War...these people can only do one thing and will starve unless we provide this opportunity to them...

> What do these laid off warehouse pickers do instead?

What did all of the laid off agricultural workers do when farming was mechanized and industrialized? This isn’t the first time we’re facing technology taking jobs away from people.

They got manufacturing, shipping, or warehouse jobs.

I see this thinking all the time, that if something worked ok in the past, then it is absolutely guaranteed to work next time.

And it is absolutely not. People live as they are protected by some divine power over the consequences of their collective actions.

> People live as they are protected by some divine power over the consequences of their collective actions.

I mean, most people in the world are religious, aren't they? I sometimes forget that fact working in tech where everyone seems to be an atheist (myself among them), but it seems like a very helpful psychological adaptation to living an uncertain and finite existence.

I do think it will eventually doom us however as we create problems beyond our ability to manage. I was thinking it would be climate change that will doom human civilization if not the species itself, but AI (even just the economics effects rather than some rogue intelligence) also seems like a contender.

Nobody is saying that it's a 100% certainty, but when this is exactly what has happened many many times throughout human history, the burden of proof that this time is different kind of falls on you, doesn't it?

You could absolutely be right but I see zero evidence that this technological advancement will be any different than the countless before over the last thousand years.

We literally had world wars with millions dead because of the technological breakthroughs.

You should be blind not to see how technological advancements driving the increasing gap between classes and put pressure on governments in developed countries all over the world.

No one says that people will go extinct, but throughout the thousands of years you mentioned we had periods of very very bad times. It is very naive to think that high paying tech job will protect from the outcomes of other people losing their jobs en masses.

Were those wars caused by the technological breakthroughs, or did the breakthroughs just make them more devastating? Is it possible they would have been longer, and more deadly, without those breakthroughs to bring them to quicker ends?

You seem to be implying that these recent advances are somehow going to drive massive irrevocable unemployment and that that's somehow going to lead to some sort of - world war? Or at least "very very bad times?" Presumably at least one of those events is that none of these warehouse workers who stand to lose their jobs will be able to get work doing anything else, which seems extremely unlikely.

> Your job will be less valuable, as you get get undercut both by automation, and by the highly motivated people who lost their jobs due to automation and who would do yours for less money.

Couldn't that be solved via political means? You can either institute a de-facto/de-jure caste system (like medieval nobles) or engage in career gatekeeping (like doctors).

There are plenty of other low-skill or medium-skill jobs available. People have been making this argument since the start of the Industrial Revolution and there are still jobs for them. Sure, the labor market will shift, but it's not like we are suddenly replacing all humans with robots.

> What do these laid off warehouse pickers do instead?

Whatever they eventually go on doing anyway, considering Amazon reportedly has a crazy turnover rate of 150% per year:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/edwardsegal/2022/10/24/amazon-r...

What value is a job you can't really hold on to for even a year because it's so gruelling?

A sudden rush of so many similarly situated workers is going to be a very difficult situation.

The robots may be good but the cost of the social upheaval should be factored in to the cost of their operation. Otherwise the rest of us are paying for the externalities of these devices and incentivizing the displacement of workers.

Will it be sudden? I expect it will happen over many years with the robot:human ratio starting at 5% and taking a while to get to 95% or whatever the optimal ratio is.

I’m not sure why you think all humans would be fired immediately and replaced.

Most likely is that humans will stay and robots will be mixed in to increase capacity.

They do something else, as has happened hundreds - thousands - of times throughout human history when some innovation has made entire classes of occupations obsolete.

Nobody's making textiles on looms anymore but the mechanization of that work eliminated a lot of jobs, but it created jobs both higher in numbers and more economically valuable.

Eliminating the need to humans to pick a box off of a shelf and put it into a slightly larger box to get put on a truck is an objectively good goal for the economy (which is probably obvious) and for people, including those doing that job now (definitely less obvious).

> They do something else, as has happened hundreds - thousands - of times throughout human history when some innovation has made entire classes of occupations obsolete.

Exactly! They'll stop being warehouse workers and do intellectual and creative work, for instance by becoming commercial artists!

Oh wait.

At some point, you really need to take "past performance is not a guarantee of future results" to heart.

> At some point, you really need to take "past performance is not a guarantee of future results" to heart.

While this is true, I think it’s a better assumption than “this time, we’re just too stupid to change and sit here and starve to death.”

Evidence shows humans as creative problem solvers and I think the trend of people doing more productive things to survive will continue.

There’s a million examples of this. And just look at fast food restaurants and cashiers being replaced by kiosks. Did all the cashiers get fired or starve to death?

> While this is true, I think it’s a better assumption than “this time, we’re just too stupid to change and sit here and starve to death.”

I don't think so, for a few good reasons:

1. Making the "everything will be fine" assumption discourages taking proactive steps (e.g. if buggy-whip making is going away, It'd be better to retrain the buggy-whip makers 5-10 years beforehand they become redundant, rather than letting their businesses fail and letting them die penniless and forgotten).

2. This time may be different. There's a lot of hype going on about AI, but if even a little of that is true, it's going to put insoluble squeeze on a lot of workers (e.g. their job gets automated away along with most of the other ones they were supposed to pivot into).

3. You talk about "humans" in the abstract, but what about the seven billion people who are actually out there? You abstraction is a rug that can hide a lot of actual damage. To give an extreme example: what if "humans figuring it out" means two million tech billionaires living in an automated paradise on top of seven billion skeletons of workers they no longer need? "Humans" made it through a lot of things, while lots of individual humans were immiserated an/or died.

> There’s a million examples of this. And just look at fast food restaurants and cashiers being replaced by kiosks. Did all the cashiers get fired or starve to death?

Yeah, happy endings like "the rust belt."

What did everyone else do when their job was made obsolete over the last 150 years? They seem to have mostlyade out ok from wealth effects causing more demand for labor in other fields, often at better wages.

Your argument has no historical precedent for and lots against so the likelihood of it coming true can only be estimated as very small and you honestly shouldnt be worrying about it too much. Its equivalent to arguing that you are going to win the lottery. Somebody will win eventually but the proba ility makes anything but assuming it wont be you irresponsibke

Where I live, entire towns have sprung up around Amazon warehouses and the huge influx of workers this brought with it. If picking jobs are eliminated, this will be quite the change for those areas.

interesting to think that Amazon and Walmart have created a modern boom-town paradigm.

next I guess comes the corporate towns and company scrips.

This happened in the UK when some of the large industrial companies shut down. British Aerospace in Hatfield was a fine example. It destroyed the whole area for the best part of 20 years.

Car industry in Birmingham, coal industry up North...

I was recently driving in a rural area near a UPS warehouse. I could not believe the amount of cars/traffic lined up on a rural road pulling into the warehouse to go to work.

There will definitely be a change, no denying that.

Just like how those towns didn’t exist 20 years ago, they may not exist again 20 years from now.

Indeed, Amazon should automate it, and we'll collectively tax the automation to prevent all the gains going to shareholders. Profits still made, just not too much.

What's the point of automating stuff for Amazon if then the gains are taxed?

The gains aren’t taxed at 100%.

Right! Workers aren't working shit jobs, the business still operates, consumers get the "consumer excess" benefits, shareholders still make a return, but the economics are kept in check.

You want to optimize for all the good things above without enabling wild power imbalances via cashflows and wealth.

Why would a human get a job when they have to pay income tax?

That make sense.

I remember in microeco101 they talked about how Walmart’s low prices are effectively like a tax with the end result of benefits spread to the lowest income people who benefit the most by low prices on commodity goods.

If Amazon lowers prices due to profit, then, theoretically that gets passed on to consumers. So it’s like a super efficient tax where the tax would be distributed to poor people in food stamps or something. Of course, that’s assuming they reduce prices instead of just keeping profits.

>> and we'll collectively tax the automation to prevent all the gains going to shareholders

If you think you have any chance of fighting big corporation lobbies to impose that, I have a bridge in SF you might be interested in.

fwiw, I don't put much stock in doomer comments, they have no value in achieving success. Failure is when you stop trying. Comment if it helps you in some capacity (no snark intended). Cultivate some grit through adversity.

The automation is already taxed. It’s called capital gains tax, or income tax, or property tax (wealth tax). Simply changing those tax percentages/formulas will result in the change you want.

Or we could all simply enjoy the benefits of capitalism and market competition instead.

People used to fight wars for salt. Now it’s given away for free by restaurants.

Capitalism results in abundance. Or you can tax / centrally manage it away into scarcity.

> I expect workers like this. Warehouse picking is grueling work and no one really likes it per se.

Yes and no. While, I'm sure warehouse workers don't actually like doing the physical labor of the job (after all, someone has to pay them to do it); I suspect they like starvation and homelessness even less.

> So having a robot do it is good to allow humans to do other things.

We, as a society, have no solution to that. The only thing we do have is hand-waving hope (which, for the record, is not a solution).

> What’s interesting is that if these only cost $3/hour to operate that’s only $25k/year (assuming 365x24 operation) so if these things last 5 years then that means the idea is they will only cost $125k to buy and maintain. That’s cheap enough that middle class people will have live in super servants. And that’s much more appealing to me to have a laundry/dish/sweep bot. Especially since I could probably chip in with neighbors and eventually not have to do these household chores.

1. This looks no where near being some kind of general "super servant." It's probably only suited to do specific kinds of warehouse work in a specially designed environment. Also, IIRC, folding laundry is actually a super-hard robotics task.

2. You're out-of-touch if you think "middle class people" can blow $125,000 on a robot to do their laundry, load their dishwasher, and sweep their floors for 5 years.

> We, as a society, have no solution to that.

We definitely do, as evidenced by all the jobs that have been automated over the past 100 years and people who are currently employed.

It’s not like people who manually harvested crops starved to death after tractors. Over history, automation has always created jobs.

Regarding middle class use of robots, I meant that middle classers would chip in and have a neighborhood maidbot. Having 10 households chip in $12.5k every 5 years is definitely doable. And since the robot is automated it could just spend an hour or two a day in each person’s home without any need for intervention. Just walking down the sidewalk between houses doing whatever needs doing. That’s a cool future.

> We definitely do, as evidenced by all the jobs that have been automated over the past 100 years and people who are currently employed.

No, we don't. That's the hand-waving hope I'm talking about: expecting past performance to guarantee future success.

All of those previous waves of automation involved pretty limited technologies. AI has the potential to be quite different. For instance, if you have an AGI with average human intelligence, and robots doing manual labor, what jobs are all the average-intelligence humans supposed to do? Door-to-door sales to other door-to-door salesmen? If the technology lives up to the hype, their options may be "die homeless" to the more optimistic "be warehoused at minimum cost until natural death."

> only cost $125k to buy and maintain. That’s cheap enough that middle class people

do you actually know any middle class people? what do you think a middle class income is?

and given the current trend in robots, why do you think the middle class will continue to exist?

You have an interesting definition of "middle class" if you think middle class people can take on an extra 25 thousand dollar yearly expense.

Not to mention those are wildly different use cases. Picking items in a warehouse is a less complex task than handwashing a single sink full of assorted dishes, let alone being a general servant.

First, lots of middle class people send their kids to college. Middle class in the US goes up to $200-300k/year.

But I was thinking neighborhoods would chip in together so it’s just a few grand a year. I didn’t mean that every house would have their own robot, Bicentennial Man-style.

> You have an interesting definition of "middle class" if you think middle class people can take on an extra 25 thousand dollar yearly expense.

Petit bourgeois people very often can.

If by “middle class” you mean “around median income”, which is mostly people firmly in the working class (a use of “middle class” invented to beutralize working class solidarity rather than reflecting any real class distinction), then, well, no, they probably can't.

The only thing middle class people (as in somewhat close to the median income) spend $125k on in their lives is their house. And I'm not sure how well something optimized for ~10k hours of 24/7 warehouse picking and packing work is going to translate to housekeeping work.

A positive spin is each human worker gets a robot to supervise and delegate tasks to.

I assumed the robots were the supervisors

Except the robots are currently handling returning empty totes, so humans spend more time picking.

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