KIVA Robots Continue to Conquer Warehouses
singularityhub.com
singularityhub.com
They didn't create an advanced robot. They created an advanced system that works really well in whole.
Of course, I understand that.
But if you watch the video again, you may notice that a vast majority of items being shipped are .. boxes, not irregular shapes. Determining if the order consists entirely out of box shapes is straight-forward. And since the packaging needs not be optimal in terms of space, just not overly wasteful, so there is a lot of potential for further automation.
I would imagine Amazon might already be doing this, anyone ever seen a video??
wrong. it is completely solved, but simply too expensive. in a couple of years this technology will be cheap and replace most human pick & place processes. The same thing happened during recent years and will continue with exponential groth.
I wonder how many other dotcom flameouts went on to rethink the expansiveness of their plans, and started solving individual problems that caused their failure. Clearly, webvan in 2009 would stand a better chance than webvan 1999.
Well, if it's a choice between anthropomorphizing and demonizing, and given human psychology it probably is precisely that choice, anthropomorphizing is the radically better choice. Cultures that demonize robotics will shortly find that supremely maladaptive.
I've sort of worried about the demonizing undercurrent of American culture, but perhaps it will be shown merely a Hollywood-induced fad once the rubber hits the road and we all continue to deal with ever-more robots.
Like the Roomba, these guys found a way to use tech that we already have to do something magical.
Looks like he was off by a year on the robotic revolution, and he got the wrong industry where it starts.
It means we will need to change our economic systems to adapt to that reality. Otherwise, Manna might be the result.
So, as sci-fi that makes you think, I find it useful.
Okay, I'm kidding, of course, and I struggle with this all the time. I mean, if a factor that used to require 1000 people to build cars now only requires 100, or 50, or 1 or 0 or whatever, then what happened to the rest of the workers?
They have moved on to auxiliary industries such as engineering (somebody needs to design the robots right).
The endgame, however, will be the mechanized production of everything. At that point, energy will be the currency (instead of labor..think about it, paper money is just a unit of time*energy). If we can tap the near-limitless supplies of energy from fusion, we will have achieved a nearly Utopian Society.
Of course, you can stop that from happening by creating 'comfortable enough' homeless shelters, and lacing the food with appropriate chemicals. The poor masses will be happy, fed, and clothed for a minimal amount of money, and can be quite easily swept under the rug.
I don't think this is terribly far-fetched; culture in the U.S. seems to be highly focused on 'who has more', which is meaningless and self-destructive in a society that can readily satisfy the needs and wants of all of its inhabitants.
2. Only a relatively small percentage of the population has the skills for creative scientific and technical work such as programming and engineering. (Let's say 20%.) Once robots can do all of the work of individuals 90IQ and below, what do you do with these people?
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/5/8/02946/35811 has an example of a channenged man being fired from McDonalds.
"God, I'm so fucking angry. My brother doesn't care about the pay. He just wants the chance to be out there with people - to feel the same sort of satisfaction that all of us working stiffs experience from knowing we've contributed, however marginally, to the human machine. The kind of satisfaction that only a job can provide.
He's upstairs crying right now."
(Note: I am not suggesting that anyone is owed a job, here, but rather that there is a dignity involved with being able to contribute to society in some fashion, and that we could see instability with a lack of outlets for individuals.)
We already see the problems in Detroit with the lack of jobs and ability to get out. While some of these people could be retrained into other fields, many cannot. We have to figure out how to keep them integrated into society, or present an alternative path.
3. Perhaps we see the example from Elf Sternberg's utopia world -- he presumed that in societies with no need for human production that people would create what they enjoyed and that the system would move to a gift culture. Perhaps. Even with power, however, we're still looking at some way to ration resources...
The former farmers found jobs because plows can't work at factories, call centers, KFC, etc. Sufficiently smart robots could. That's why analogies with previous technological advances don't work.
A more relevant comparison would be with horses and machines that replaced them pulling plows, hauling stuff, etc. Where are all the horses, mules and oxen now? Were they freed from unnecessary drudgery to specialize in labor where they had a competitive advantage, or did they suffer severe declines in number, surviving essentially as pets and museum pieces?
I think society has the ability to adapt and diversify fast enough to keep up with our technical innovation, but I don't see any way that we can adapt fast enough to handle the ultra-rapid industrialization of China, especially considering their seeming willingness to work 70 hour weeks for wages that are miniscule compared to the value of their output.
I just don't see how China can manufacture basically everything for us (there is still more that hasn't been outsourced, but will), we outsource whatever information based services we can to India, and we sit here and cut each others hair and build each other beautiful houses, while they live in shacks and share one bathroom between 20 people in workers dorms.
And what do we send them? Pieces of paper with ink on them. Which they use to buy our government bonds.
If overseas workers don't start charging more for their labor, thereby being able to actually consume some of their output, I don't see how there is a happy end to this story in the medium term.
I think the myth here is that there is a tiny cabal of people that would control everything. They wouldn't be tiny: they would be public companies with many, many thousands of shareholders.
2) There are a lot of people who aren't smart to join the creative classes. Assuming that robots remain dumb and can only do the kind of work that people with IQs of, say, 100, do, that means people with IQs of 100 or less would be unemployable.
3) Goods and services would become cheaper so you probably wouldn't have to have a lot of capital to survive even if you lost your job, so the "cabal" probably wouldn't be tiny. But you would still have to have some capital or you would be completely dependent on the good graces of those who do, (or those who can coerce them, ie the government). Lots of people in the US have negative net worths.
The point here is not that there wouldn't be lots of winners, but that there could potentially be a lot of losers, depending on how wealth is distributed.
2. The richer we get, the easier it will be to make a living in a creative class.
3.We already have a huge chunk of society that are negative net worths.
I completely agree that there could be lots of losers. I also agree with another comment that the issue is the rate of change. Too fast, and you get disruption. But you don't get the bullshit in manna. That story is bad scifi imho
Most of human history is a comparative handful of people executing effective control over most of the available resources, isolating themselves in heavily-barricaded encampments and putting lots of effort into maintaining that control (castles/cities/gated-and-guarded-communities/etc).
It's a pretty stable equilibrium: once you've got effective control over most of the available resources, you can easily afford to maintain your barricades, and if on the other hand everyone else is effectively shut out from those resources it's going to be pretty hard to organize much of a revolt; most of the shake-ups are due to sudden shifts in technology or unexpected "black swan" events (eg a mongol invasion or a plague).
The exact nature of the relationship between the barricaded and the rest varies with circumstance: sometimes the rest are useful for labor (like tilling the fields), or to raise an army; in the modern era it's often the case that the rest are left to fend for themselves, at least as long as they're not causing trouble.
You don't have to travel far to see the same pattern surviving into the present era: just go to Argentina, or Brazil, or Africa, etc.
So social organization resembling the dystopia in "Manna" has been more-or-less the normal human experience since Sumeria, if not earlier, and is still existent today for maybe 20-40% of the world's population (depending on where you draw your lines); it's possible that "western" modernity -- of the sort you have in the US/EU/Japan/Korea/ -- marks a turning point in history, but it could just be a brief interlude between variants-on-the-theme-of-feudalism, also.
On the face of it Manna is cartoonish and whatnot, but positing a return to quasi-feudalism is pretty much betting on mean reversion, which could be a bad bet but isn't necessarily comical.
Smart cookies - they deserve the success!