"My favorite thing about this is how 2 weeks after this video went up, they had an accident where two robots collided and caused a gigantic fire that cost them like 50 million dollars."
Meanwhile, the warehouse down the road underwent a strike that put them out of commission for weeks, forced expensive wage concessions, and incurred NRLB fines, costing them like... 60 million dollars.
One of these things can be fixed, the other will always be a risk as long as humans are involved.
I didn't flag your other reply, by the way, but I did vouch for it. Your retort about LLMs is spot-on, as was your point about how "they're all robot jobs." We just currently disagree on whether eliminating such jobs -- all of them -- is a good goal or a bad one.
You defended your perspective by arguing, correctly, that people take undesirable jobs because they don't have a choice. We agree there as well, and my point is that this is a form of coercion in itself. The status quo treats humans as if they were robots.
(And I really don't care if someone thinks I live in a cave. Life in my cave is actually pretty comfy. It beats the hell out of a warehouse or a cube maze at a click farm. It's a privilege, one I'd like to see more equitably distributed.)
Of course there is! Since you're here, you're probably a programmer or engineer, a student, or a dedicated professional in some other IT-adjacent field. How would you react if someone offered you a job in a warehouse?
Once you've thought that through, apply the same reasoning to human beings in general, not just white-collar HN denizens. Few people want to work a hard blue-collar job for the same reason you and I don't want to: we have better things to do with our time.
I'm curious how Amazon handles fire in the midst of their Kiva pods. Do they have procedures for retasking an army of robots to clear a path for humans to get access?
True, though the problem isn't just robot batteries burning up, but setting all the stock ablaze and this part is indeed feeding in atmospheric oxygen.
Walmart isn't considered a super high-tech company, but I took a tour of one of their warehouses in Bentonville and even that was quite cool. There were tons of conveyor belts everywhere, it kind of felt like something you'd see in Satisfactory.
I would argue Walmart is quite high tech! They’ve been approaching their business goals from lots of different angles. Tech, finance, logistics, etc are all a huge part of their business operations.
It’s a shame that the problems being solved are embedded within a business that embodies throwing things away at the first sign of weakness. I’m still upset they bought what seemed on track to be a nice successor to Simple Bank. Now it’s been pivoted again for the third time since acquisition.
Oh it wasn't trying to diss Walmart in this case. I used to work there (Jet.com -> Walmart Labs -> Walmart Global Tech), and I generally liked it. Some of the smartest humans I have ever known came from Jet and Walmart Labs.
Back in the early aughts when I was still in college, My roommate was an IE and worked as an efficiency engineer intern during his Summers. I vividly remember him talking about the company he was working for had a huge project to improve UPS's efficiencies. Their big improvements was to add dozens and dozens of conveyor belts in order to move the packages faster. He concluded his experience by saying, "Yeah man, its crazy, this is what the future is going to look like. This is how they're going to automate everything."
Interesting to know companies are still using them as a means to automate their work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE