Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The future is probably a society with more robots than humans.

We can see this happening now at Amazon. Amazon is a good case to watch, because their operations replace humans with robots on close to a one to one basis. Right now, Amazon has about 1.5 million human employees, and 1 million robots. Amazon reached peak humans in 2022, with around 1.6 million employees. Then human employees began to decline slightly. Robots continue to increase. Here's an old chart from 2017, when Amazon had increased all the way to 45,000 robots and some people were worried.[1] Now, it's 20x that.

How a society of mostly robots will work is not clear, but it's coming anyway.

[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/7428/45000-robots-form-part-o...

The 1 million robot number that Amazon keeps on using is a quite nuanced. It includes more ~800K robots that simply just move stuff in a 2D plane. I think the number of robots that actually manipulate things is far far less (probably less than 500) (but really no human wants to just move things from A to B).

Also, I completely agree with what you said. Cars (w/ no self-driving) can be thought of as primitive robots (just like robots of today). For good or bad, we will move towards more and more automation.

The simple Kiva mobile platforms are most of the robot count, but they replaced large numbers of people who did walk around warehouses moving stuff from A to B.

IIRC Amazon laid off the entire team that was working on manipulation research at the Boston area Amazon Robotics

They did? Amazon has recently been showing their Vulkan picking robot, and Aaron Parness still seems to be at Amazon.

they should form a union

The people or the machines? Or both? :)

i meant the machines but the bigger the union the better.

Maybe that's what Skynet really was. Robots wanted vacation days and hourly pay, humans said no. Just the 21st century's version of the 19th century's labor wars.

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