It's so strange that a site full of software developers reacts so harshly to the idea of robots. What exactly is it you people think you are building? You automate stuff for a living.
Is it okay to automate sales and customer service and marketing, but warehouse workers are where you draw the line? Do you have any idea how many jobs this industry has already "killed"?
we realized that we don't want all the money/profit to circulate around the top 10 tech companies in the world where all of us are out of the equation...
HN isn't a monoculture. Many people visit this website to hear the criticism from a diverse constituent of software developers. If you expect any unanimous conclusion, I'd argue your expectations are the strange one.
My foremost concern is that robots, particularly American-made ones, aren't ready for primetime yet. Human bodies solve problems that aren't easily automated even with a perfectly capable humanoid robot and AI-powered IK solver. I've worked in the computer vision and factory automation fields, and outside a completely automated redesign I don't think robots will significantly reduce headcount in this field.
It's so strange that a site full of entertainment workers reacts so harshly to the idea of Madame Web. What exactly is it you people think you are making?
Well, a the scale at which AI and other things are proceeding to replace humans just for the sake of saving money for few top earning people. It's horrible. I shall say you should ban AI for most of the things where it can help solve issues! Now that's upto to humanity how it want to keep people eating food or have a proper life
Software jobs replaced administrative white collar jobs where instead of the bureaucracy being human interaction and paper forms, it is computerized and encoded in malleable and evolving code.
Sales underwent consolidation where the same human interactions scaled to bigger deals. Customer service was outsourced. Marketing still remains a mysticism with no clear evidence of a return on investment.
This news topic is also a thinly veiled replacement outsourcing. The engineers involved will replace these roles. When the robots fail, it will most likely have foreign pilots taking control.
The barrier to entry only gets higher, and the people left behind are stuck in a donut hole.
And has meant that some professions are basically dead and fewer people are in lots of jobs. The folks that lose jobs aren't generally qualified for the jobs that opened and aren't always even located in the same country.
And that happens with a lot of advances. Creates but also takes away.
…Yes? Someone needs to design the robots, build the robots, administer and direct the robots, repair and maintain the robots, evaluate the performance of and improve upon the existing design of the robots… not to mention write the software that controls the robots in the first place, design the UI that users use to interface with the robots…
Pre WW2 the USA had skid rows and flop houses full of men who didn't make the cut to the new industrialized economy. People literally rented a rope to lean on for the night. WW2 changed things for the US where that was no longer a common thing.
People fear that we are heading back into that, with no plan other than 'things turned out fine last time this happened' ignoring the, you know, skid row, flop houses, etc and no idea what the magic jobfairy will bring us to be these new, magically appearing 'jobs to come'.
The cotton gin is the literal textbook example of a technology that ethically backfires and induces magnitudes greater suffering than what it was intended to obviate. It saved and expanded the institution of chattel slavery in the USA.
Before people bring their pitchforks to this headline, take a look at existing automation in factories [1][2] and ask yourself why would we ever want humans to do something that robots can do this well? Also despite the fact that humanoids are all the hype now (and included in the article), note that amazon has been investing in much more specialized approaches for quite some time [3][4].
There are so many things we can be doing with our time, and moving objects from a left-bin to a right-bin simply does not need to be one of them. The real question is if we have the collective will to get all these folks education and opportunities to do something else before they feel too much pain in the near term.
> Before people bring their pitchforks to this headline
In addition to your points, something people forget is that in the previous model of brick and mortar stores, the consumer is the person that did the walking around the store and picking the items off the shelf and carrying them to the checkout.
So a portion of what Amazon is automating used to be performed for free by the consumer. This was one of the big arguments about their business model for shipping books early on, the additional costs in a competitive retail market seemed like it would be unprofitable.
That leads to the cost of cleaning up after the customer to make sure they can buy what they need.
Before Amazon, there were the club warehouse retail models like Costco where the frontend experience was cut down and the backend infrastructure scaled up. This all led to cost savings passed onto the customer.
Amazon seems like the next step where the last mile delivery infrastructure was expanded and the retail frontend was replaced by a website. Instead of millions of frontend retail workers, it's software knowledge workers with an accompanying expansion of the backend retail workers.
Now, the software knowledge workers are eating backend retail.
Imagine the crash in book sales if humans were not hustling and could spend time socializing meaningfully.
Job culture is nothing but empty competition. Billions of normalized thinkers reduced to nothing but tools of a "trade". Where trade is normalized to time for money.
Not a fan of the racism and gender bias, but am 1000% indifferent to bougie labor exploiting office workers being handed their hat.
"Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!" Yeah but you all suck to work with because that's all you are; HR slang, marketroid speak, programming language gibberish. Yawn.
Am psyched the zeitgeist is turning on "knowledge workers" who ignored worker exploitation and devaluation of others just the same.
> if we have the collective will to get all these folks education and opportunities to do something else
I hear this often, but have not read a single explanation of what the "something else" is that these people are supposed to do (a "something else" that we aren't also actively trying to replace with AI or AI driven processes). Barbers? Nail salons? I think we have enough of those already.
We could be spending our time more wisely, but our addiction to quarterly cycles needs something now as opposed to a hypothetical better future for the displaced workers.
> Job losses could shave 30 cents off each item purchased by 2027.
This is incredible. It's far less than I would imagine. It represents how well optimized the warehouses are. If we roughly estimate a median product price to be $20, then the automation represents less than 2% cost saving. Of course, Amazon is at a scale that this is still net positive despite all the R&D cost. But if automation was to reduce the cost of living, there are probably better areas to focus on.
It represents how well optimized the exploitation of the warehouse workers is - extract maximum amount of work from employee while paying them as little as possible. And once the "cobots" (robots that work alongside humans) come along, they will feel even more like a cog in the great Amazon machine, until they probably quit on their own rather than waiting for their turn to be replaced...
They won't be destitute. Population collapse is coming, it's imperative we automate anything we can, so those workers are freed up to work in non-automatable jobs. 94% population loss in South Korea over the next three generations. Similar numbers in South America as well.
There are barely any customers in this country now. We're operating off credit: the US (as a currency, not just the government) is 1.2 trillion in the red. It's an accounting identity, it can't be argued with.
It's an inevitability that people unproductive in the real economy will get cut off. You can't run an economy on gigwork that just makes parasitic upper-middle and upper-class lives more comfortable. Elite comfort isn't real production. You cannot feed, clothe, or house people with Uber rides and advertising. Instead, in the US, you feed, clothe, and house people with imports, purchased with borrowed foreign currency.
And the government takes whatever it gets and redistributes it upwards to capital-intensive industries and "US" businesses that are completely supplied by imports. It's almost an optimized destruction.
How do you square that China is way more in the red than the USA and things like their high speed rail aren't able to pay down the construction loans, let alone cover the coming maintenance?
China is operating on the 'I just bought a new house so my only expense is my mortgage and I have no technical debt because it's all new' position, which doesn't last.
The USA is in the 'all we have is technical debt' phase. Which means smart investment spending can bring real gains IF we don't allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by where we currently are.
The problem is our 'elites' got addicted to that post 2010 hyper short term growth based on digital products. Boeing management moved to DC away from production, because to modern American business the product is removed from the company, something to outsource to someone else. Our MBA/management/leadership types are too precious to be wasted on those sorts of details.
The same thing we are doing now: nothing. The poor already aren't customers, and what remains of the middle class is already being priced out of basic necessities.
Have no fear, they are gunning for the upper class, now. A quick glance at big tech gutting their ranks is just the beginning for high wage earners.
History shall repeat itself, and many of those jobs will vanish forever.
This is a discussion Jimmy Carter wanted to have when computers were just becoming mainstream --- the idea was the taxes on the sales of computers would be used to fund worker re-training --- cue old news stories about the compositor unions bargaining for sinecures and the last compositor retiring after decades of punching in and sitting in the breakroom all day.
LLMs and robotics look to be the first mainstream technological development in a long while which not only reduces the number of workers needed, but also doesn't have a commensurate increasing of the size of the economy in terms of increased wages through efficiency and profits being paid as wages --- instead, it is the concentration of profits by those who own the means of production as Karl Marx warned about and the Luddites feared.
If less work is needed to keep society running, why not have a reduction in the work week, and either pay folks overtime (in keeping with the increased efficiencies/profits) or have more workers (to reflect the added efficiency and spread out the workload).
> Or, perhaps it's time for universal basic income?
Funded by Carters idea where we tax corporations for job elimination. For every head you reduce with automation you pay a tax to help support that head in their time of unemployment. Then we tax the automation products.
Of course with the current government situation this isn't happening. Ever.
To jump in on the political, in minimum wage "debates" the conservative side was always that higher minimum wage will encourage automation.
But as we look at post-pandemic automation (the counter operator is mostly replaced by an app) or automation (China's robots per capital), or tax policies that encourage capital spending (2018 tax bill, depreciation) it becomes obvious that automation will happen and is in many ways good. But our policy makers, media, and therefore average voter miss the forest for the trees.
>LLMs and robotics look to be the first mainstream technological development in a long while which not only reduces the number of workers needed, but also doesn't have a commensurate increasing of the size of the economy in terms of increased wages through efficiency and profits being paid as wages
UBI is going to be the only option eventually, outside of a moneyless, post-scarcity utopia.
Investing in subsidized worker retraining can work very short term, but with widespread automation and a reduced requirement for human workers, that can only go so far as the demand for employees simply won’t be there.
So we either have strong laws and protections that enforce that everyone receives the benefits of automation, or we don’t and only a small percentage of the population receives the benefits while everyone else starves to death.
Nobody has managed the politics of a true UBI, and America will be one of the last places to get it. The need to punish perceived slackers is just too high.
As a whole, in the US, people don't even want people to have free healthcare. What do you think the chances are that they want people to have "free" money?
Nobody has been talking about UBI except in the same sense that people talk about warp drives, i.e. as a nice-to-have-someday bit of speculative fiction. Everyone is aware that if UBI were actually proposed in the political sphere it would be killed immediately, by most of the some oligarchs who dishonestly talk about it now.
I'm supportive of effort to mechanize work, but humanoid robots always seemed like a "horseless carriage" approach to me. The human body is powerful in its adaptability but most industrial processes are better enhanced by purpose-built machines.
Not to mention that general purpose robotics seem like they will always be more expensive to buy, run and maintain than a human is. Perhaps bountiful renewable energy will change that.
A reliable and effective general purpose robot will always be more expensive than a less reliable, less effective human being. Why would you sell something better than the average human willing to take the role, for less than that human wants?
I see too many students treat a robot arm like an automation hammer when watching a few episodes of "How It's Made" will give you a much better view into true automation.
I know we’re living through turbulent times with a lot of disruption. I’m struggling to decide whether to keep my retirement investments in equities or move to something more stable. While AI and robotic automation clearly benefit corporate bottom lines, fewer people will have jobs. Who will be buying the products and services these companies sell?
> At the Shreveport facility, more than 160 people work as robotics technicians, and they make at least $24.45 an hour. Most of Shreveport’s 2,000 employees are regular hourly workers, whose pay starts at $19.50.
And this is for a prototype plant where you would expect the need for more and top-qualified technicians. (Most likely this does not count the robotics installers and tuners which might be from a different sub-company and classification - but still.) This might change when demand for qualified robotics technicians keeps increasing.
Another noticeable thing was that even with this automation push, Amazon is mostly planning to hire LESS. Not really reduce yet. It seems they are still growing beyond the potential improvements of robotics.
Still another is the insane capital-intensiveness of retail now! Wow.
> And this is for a prototype plant where you would expect the need for more and top-qualified technicians.
One would think, but that's not really the reality for the technicians. Amazon assuredly brought in some experienced techs from other facilities to help with launch, but most of the staff are just locals.
> At the Shreveport facility, more than 160 people work as robotics technicians, and they make at least $24.45 an hour. Most of Shreveport’s 2,000 employees are regular hourly workers, whose pay starts at $19.50
The associate pay sounds right, but the average starting pay for robotics technicians is in the low-mid 30s. The $24.45 figure is for apprentices, who are not a large part of any maintenance cohort.
Readit News
Is it okay to automate sales and customer service and marketing, but warehouse workers are where you draw the line? Do you have any idea how many jobs this industry has already "killed"?
we realized that we don't want all the money/profit to circulate around the top 10 tech companies in the world where all of us are out of the equation...
My foremost concern is that robots, particularly American-made ones, aren't ready for primetime yet. Human bodies solve problems that aren't easily automated even with a perfectly capable humanoid robot and AI-powered IK solver. I've worked in the computer vision and factory automation fields, and outside a completely automated redesign I don't think robots will significantly reduce headcount in this field.
Sales underwent consolidation where the same human interactions scaled to bigger deals. Customer service was outsourced. Marketing still remains a mysticism with no clear evidence of a return on investment.
This news topic is also a thinly veiled replacement outsourcing. The engineers involved will replace these roles. When the robots fail, it will most likely have foreign pilots taking control.
The barrier to entry only gets higher, and the people left behind are stuck in a donut hole.
And that happens with a lot of advances. Creates but also takes away.
People fear that we are heading back into that, with no plan other than 'things turned out fine last time this happened' ignoring the, you know, skid row, flop houses, etc and no idea what the magic jobfairy will bring us to be these new, magically appearing 'jobs to come'.
The cotton gin is the literal textbook example of a technology that ethically backfires and induces magnitudes greater suffering than what it was intended to obviate. It saved and expanded the institution of chattel slavery in the USA.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
There are so many things we can be doing with our time, and moving objects from a left-bin to a right-bin simply does not need to be one of them. The real question is if we have the collective will to get all these folks education and opportunities to do something else before they feel too much pain in the near term.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Sino/comments/1iwgb19/a_dark_factor... [2] https://www.fortna.com/ [3] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/amazon-vulcan-ro... [4] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/10-years-of-amaz...
In addition to your points, something people forget is that in the previous model of brick and mortar stores, the consumer is the person that did the walking around the store and picking the items off the shelf and carrying them to the checkout.
So a portion of what Amazon is automating used to be performed for free by the consumer. This was one of the big arguments about their business model for shipping books early on, the additional costs in a competitive retail market seemed like it would be unprofitable.
Before Amazon, there were the club warehouse retail models like Costco where the frontend experience was cut down and the backend infrastructure scaled up. This all led to cost savings passed onto the customer.
Amazon seems like the next step where the last mile delivery infrastructure was expanded and the retail frontend was replaced by a website. Instead of millions of frontend retail workers, it's software knowledge workers with an accompanying expansion of the backend retail workers.
Now, the software knowledge workers are eating backend retail.
Job culture is nothing but empty competition. Billions of normalized thinkers reduced to nothing but tools of a "trade". Where trade is normalized to time for money.
Not a fan of the racism and gender bias, but am 1000% indifferent to bougie labor exploiting office workers being handed their hat.
"Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!" Yeah but you all suck to work with because that's all you are; HR slang, marketroid speak, programming language gibberish. Yawn.
Am psyched the zeitgeist is turning on "knowledge workers" who ignored worker exploitation and devaluation of others just the same.
I hear this often, but have not read a single explanation of what the "something else" is that these people are supposed to do (a "something else" that we aren't also actively trying to replace with AI or AI driven processes). Barbers? Nail salons? I think we have enough of those already.
Or else we will have masses of disenfranchised and dissatisfied people with no incentive to keep society working.
Theres plenty of things that are worth investing in, and can easily sustain jobs for people...
This is incredible. It's far less than I would imagine. It represents how well optimized the warehouses are. If we roughly estimate a median product price to be $20, then the automation represents less than 2% cost saving. Of course, Amazon is at a scale that this is still net positive despite all the R&D cost. But if automation was to reduce the cost of living, there are probably better areas to focus on.
It's an inevitability that people unproductive in the real economy will get cut off. You can't run an economy on gigwork that just makes parasitic upper-middle and upper-class lives more comfortable. Elite comfort isn't real production. You cannot feed, clothe, or house people with Uber rides and advertising. Instead, in the US, you feed, clothe, and house people with imports, purchased with borrowed foreign currency.
And the government takes whatever it gets and redistributes it upwards to capital-intensive industries and "US" businesses that are completely supplied by imports. It's almost an optimized destruction.
China is operating on the 'I just bought a new house so my only expense is my mortgage and I have no technical debt because it's all new' position, which doesn't last.
The USA is in the 'all we have is technical debt' phase. Which means smart investment spending can bring real gains IF we don't allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by where we currently are.
The problem is our 'elites' got addicted to that post 2010 hyper short term growth based on digital products. Boeing management moved to DC away from production, because to modern American business the product is removed from the company, something to outsource to someone else. Our MBA/management/leadership types are too precious to be wasted on those sorts of details.
Have no fear, they are gunning for the upper class, now. A quick glance at big tech gutting their ranks is just the beginning for high wage earners.
History shall repeat itself, and many of those jobs will vanish forever.
LLMs and robotics look to be the first mainstream technological development in a long while which not only reduces the number of workers needed, but also doesn't have a commensurate increasing of the size of the economy in terms of increased wages through efficiency and profits being paid as wages --- instead, it is the concentration of profits by those who own the means of production as Karl Marx warned about and the Luddites feared.
If less work is needed to keep society running, why not have a reduction in the work week, and either pay folks overtime (in keeping with the increased efficiencies/profits) or have more workers (to reflect the added efficiency and spread out the workload).
Or, perhaps it's time for universal basic income?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45590900
Funded by Carters idea where we tax corporations for job elimination. For every head you reduce with automation you pay a tax to help support that head in their time of unemployment. Then we tax the automation products.
Of course with the current government situation this isn't happening. Ever.
But as we look at post-pandemic automation (the counter operator is mostly replaced by an app) or automation (China's robots per capital), or tax policies that encourage capital spending (2018 tax bill, depreciation) it becomes obvious that automation will happen and is in many ways good. But our policy makers, media, and therefore average voter miss the forest for the trees.
What is your evidence of this?
Investing in subsidized worker retraining can work very short term, but with widespread automation and a reduced requirement for human workers, that can only go so far as the demand for employees simply won’t be there.
So we either have strong laws and protections that enforce that everyone receives the benefits of automation, or we don’t and only a small percentage of the population receives the benefits while everyone else starves to death.
Deleted Comment
And this is for a prototype plant where you would expect the need for more and top-qualified technicians. (Most likely this does not count the robotics installers and tuners which might be from a different sub-company and classification - but still.) This might change when demand for qualified robotics technicians keeps increasing.
Another noticeable thing was that even with this automation push, Amazon is mostly planning to hire LESS. Not really reduce yet. It seems they are still growing beyond the potential improvements of robotics.
Still another is the insane capital-intensiveness of retail now! Wow.
One would think, but that's not really the reality for the technicians. Amazon assuredly brought in some experienced techs from other facilities to help with launch, but most of the staff are just locals.
> At the Shreveport facility, more than 160 people work as robotics technicians, and they make at least $24.45 an hour. Most of Shreveport’s 2,000 employees are regular hourly workers, whose pay starts at $19.50
The associate pay sounds right, but the average starting pay for robotics technicians is in the low-mid 30s. The $24.45 figure is for apprentices, who are not a large part of any maintenance cohort.
Source: Amazon robotics technician.