Amazon's acquisition of Kiva is one of the best examples of vertical integration in the e-commerce industry.
The article reminded me of acquisitions in the Gilded Age. Perhaps one could compare Bezos to Rockefeller, presuming Bezos was the one who pushed for such purchases.
For anyone yet to read the article who is initially confused (as I was), besides the Kiva you might know from microlending, there's also a Kiva who make industrial robots for warehouses. As per the article, Amazon bought the latter Kiva and forced competitors to turn to alternatives that were yet to be developed.
Interesting. I wonder if this system and that "Hover" technology would be a good fit? A warehouse seems like one of the good places to line the floor with metal and clear the people out.
Not sure what hovering would do for these little guys but the good news about a robotic forklift running over a robotic inventory picker is you just file a bug report not an accident claim. At the least it seems like a great way to scale insurance, benefit, and labor management costs.
You mean the electromagnetic 'hoverboard' thing? This is probably the best bet for that tech to become relevant, but it's hard to see how it'd be more efficient than just using air cushions, which are an established way of moving heavy things around on smooth floors (let alone wheels).
Isn't that the point of UBI? Getting us past the local maxima of "this job is soul-crushing and a waste of a person's intelligence, but economics make it cheaper to use a body than a robot"?
Fair. But a soul-crushing job is better than no job, and the question remains as to whether or not mobility into a job of equal requisite skill exists.
Do you mean: "Being paid to do soul-crushing work is better than not being paid" ?
Or: "Doing soul-crushing work is better than having nothing to do" ?
The first is an issue of income and the distribution of product (in the GDP sense of product). There is no axiomatic rule that says "you have to have a job to get paid", it's just how our current economy operates.
If I owned a farm that produced a variety of food in excess of the needs of my whole family, but was totally operated by self-maintaining robots, would I need to have a job? The robots would produce all the food I need, and I could sell the excess in order to obtain other goods.
I guess I could say my job was "farmer" or "grocery salesman" or "robot supervisor", but I wouldn't actually being doing work.
If I am a truck driver, and I own my own truck and I make an income by transporting goods, and then I convert my truck to be self-driving so that I no longer need to be the driver, then (if we temporarily ignore external price pressures) I still make the same income as I used to. But I'm just reaping the benefits of my self driving truck, I don't actually "work" anymore (or at least to nowhere near the extent I used to).
But if I am a truck driver, and someone else owns the truck and I make an income by being contracted to transport goods, and then they convert my truck to be self-driving so that I no longer need to be the driver, then I no longer make any income, and I'm screwed. The owner of the truck reaps incredible benefits, and I don't actually "work" anymore, but I also don't have an income.
That's how things work in our society, but it doesn't have to be that way. There's no universal moral law that says that the first ex-truck-driver should continue to be paid for doing nothing much, but the second ex-truck-driver needs to get off his butt and go find a new soul-crushing job so that he can earn an income.
As our economies change to produce more output with fewer workers, there becomes less useful work for the citizens to do, even though GDP is increasing. That ought to be a good thing (economically) - more "stuff we want", less effort to produce it. But it won't actually being a good thing for the general population unless we move to a different model for the distribution of income, so that there's a way for the populace to share in the increased productivity even though their manual labour is no longer needed.
That where ideas like "Universal Basic Income" (UBI) come in.
> Or: "Doing soul-crushing work is better than having nothing to do" ?
Are we sure this isn't true? Are people who don't have to work (e.g. those on permanent disability in the US) more or less happy than comparable people in dead-end soulless jobs?
I don't know of any studies, but I suspect there would be some.
In addition to the question of "how do we share income in a less-work world?", there is the question "how do we ensure that the are opportunities for everyone to contribute something meaningful to society?"
Ideally those questions would connect - we would use our increased product(ivity) to fund a wider range of human endeavours that might not have been considered "economically productive" in previous generations.
I don't know what that looks like, but I would hope it means more art and science, rather than more soul crushing, meaningless busy-work.
Or even, how many researchers are working at McDonald's because their families' circumstances didn't afford them other opportunities, including ability to further their education?
Maybe not many, but I feel pretty confident that number is greater than 0.
While it may be informative, one of the differences between UBI and simply expanding current welfare programs is cultural. Right now, being out of a job is considered shameful, and it's often isolating (since "everyone" else is working while you're not). Even in my holiday-friendlier (compared to the US) EU country, the fact that an unemployed person takes a few days from searching for work to go to the beach is met with scorn.
One of the hopes of UBI is that when everyone receives a salary just from being alive, and working earns you extra on top of that, whether one works become more of a choice (like living frugally) instead of a failure, and loneliness is reduced when unemployment isn't an evil to combat, and more people choose to do something else.
You can't use terms like 'useful' when measuring jobs or output. It's in the eye of the observer.
Apparently nail painting businesses are a viable industry, in my eyes they are totally useless.
Most of the businesses we recognise today would have been hilarious to our ancestors. Paying good money for a personal trainer? Paying someone to wash your car?
This is an age-old problem which keeps solving itself.
The "eye of the observer" in aggregate is what forms the invisible hand in a free market.
But jobs existing are a consequence of two things: (1) demand & (2) ability to price work output above a minimum.
UBI answers a world where there aren't enough of (2) to satisfy labor supply (whether through automation or increases in efficiency). Because bar repealing minimum wage statutes we're going to reach a point where for {minimum wage salary} there only exist X potential jobs (additional jobs not economically-feasibly offering a sufficient income), and labor pool > X.
I know many college graduates in their mid/late twenties doing various "knowledge" jobs. Many of them consider their jobs soul crushing.
Most people don't like their work. Most people don't like waking up on someone else's schedule and do work that their told to do. That's why businesses pay them, after all.
The more a person wants to do a job, the less compensation they will demand because the emotional satisfaction they get substitutes for a part (or sometimes all) of the compensation. When there are a lot of people who have a strong preference for doing a job in a particular industry, they collectively drive down the price of their own labor into the ground.
Companies will only pay what they have to.
Some examples of industries where tons of people work for shit money (less than a person of their abilities could earn in other industries) or even sometimes for free because of an emotional attachment to that industry are showbusiness, art and academia.
Then you have the opposite examples, like working on an oil platform - most of those people would earn less money if they had picked a different industry, because they have to be paid more to agree to live on an oil platform and do a shitty and dangerous job.
Robotic automation of any sort doesn't occur in a vacuum.
If 50% of the jobs in a field are automated, in the near term you still have 100% of the former labor looking for that job, pushing salaries down towards their minimum, thereby reducing the cost effectiveness of further automation.
Though of course (without passing a value judgment on such policies) minimum wages set an artificial lower bound on the cost of human labor here, and this kind of low-skill work is inexpensive enough that hitting that bound is likely (vs., say, automating legal work), especially as minimum wages rise. For some industries getting to the point that near-100% automation is cheaper than $15/hour for humans is totally plausible to me.
Exactly. The differences between minimum wage and UBI is fascinating, but I didn't want to bring it up above.
To me, minimum wage says "if you work, then you should at least able to support yourself on your income$." UBI+ says "if you work, you must find greater fulfillment than mere sustenance in your work."
Personally, I can't see minimum wage applying to anyone receiving UBI. Although it might make sense to have a "less than minimum wage" tax that helps fund the UBI directly.
$ Abstracting away actual amounts and whether or not they're enough
At the same time, an UBI will make it so people still don't care to perform certain below-current-minimum-wage jobs. E.g. if I were on UBI, and I effectively earned $15/hour through it, I still wouldn't bother looking at jobs unless they paid, say, $5/hour or more.
I think that's one of the most fascinating questions about UBI though. Hypothetically, if you had UBI and were content at that level of consumption, what would you do? If I absolutely loved animals, I can certainly see working in a pet store for $2/hr or a pittance.
That people "need" awful picking jobs they hate doing but can be done better by robots is basically the existential problem humanity needs to solve this century or we are very likely to get Filtered, Robin Hanson style.
It's only existential in sci-fi books. Textiles were one of the first industries to be automated with the punched cards\power loom 150 years ago. We still have millions of human weavers all around the world.
The problem with automation is you cant ask the robot why X, Y or Z is going wrong and how to fix it. A master weaver on the other hand will do it over a 15 minute conversation.
> The problem with automation is you cant ask the robot why X, Y or Z is going wrong and how to fix it. A master weaver on the other hand will do it over a 15 minute conversation.
That's a very romantic view of weaving which hides the real reason there are still many weavers, mostly in low-cost countries: They are cheaper than machines. There is no guarantee that this will still be true in face of increasing computing capabilities and machines which learn better than before.
> We still have millions of human weavers all around the world.
Yes, mostly in Asia, living in hellish conditions, often struggling to get enough food. I'm not sure what point you were trying to make with that comment.
The only reason those jobs exist right now is that humans are still much better than robots. Amazon is working on pick/pack robots in the hope of changing that.
The consumer surplus created by cheaper and faster goods will lead to people purchasing other products and services, which will create new types of jobs provided that nobody does anything stupid with regulation.
It's always been this way.
Besides the population of most countries is starting on the path to decline.
But those jobs are already shitty. I visited Amazon warehouse once, the workers there aren't happy. Guess no one will if your daily work is about following instructions on the screen to move stuff from A to B. The warehouse is noisy, and the process is optimized in a way that there is very little human interaction. Those kinds of jobs are the one that need to be automated.
I was reminded of how Dell originally pioneered extreme operational efficiency as the tool which made them hard to beat. I also particularly like the warehouse robotics application, it is a good mix of being able to make some adaptations in the environment to mitigate some of the more serious robotics challenges and yet able to effectively evaluate the net value to the business with and without.
Just wish I'd started a warehouse robot company 4 years ago :-)
As a Computer Engineering student, what sort of courses do you recommend I take in order to work on robotics? My only experience with the field so far has been high school robotics competitions really.
Robotics is a hugely interdisciplinary field. Some of the hardest parts to work on are motion planning and navigation. For us familiarity with ROS is pretty important and project courses where you build something that actually works are super important. Search algorithms come up all the time, spatial searching especially.
For specifics I'd refer to the CMU Masters courseload or the WPI undergrad:
I'd wondered how Kiva's old customers were doing. Now we know. There really isn't a direct replacement for Kiva robots from another vendor.
The great thing about Kiva robots is that they're quite simple and robust mechanically. They're a battery, motors, wheels, and a lift mechanism. They're completely interchangeable, and having one fail isn't a big deal. Maintenance is replacing batteries, motors, wheels, and maybe the electronics module as necessary. The infrastructure they require is modest. The competing systems all seem to require more elaborate robots, special totes, and special shelf construction.
Amazon says that Kiva robots cut their order picking time from 90 minutes to 15. Other retailers, seeing that number, must be terrified. It's a technological improvement like that which makes same-day delivery from a large inventory possible.
A company gaining a huge advantage by getting a total monopoly over another market, which they can enforce due to having patents.
That’s not what patents were supposed to create, and what Antitrust regulations were supposed to prevent.
If this is the future, it’s quite a dystopia: Monopolies everywhere.
Sure, I get that the Silicon Valley business model is to destroy regulation, get a monopoly (ideally in a new market niche, but destroying existing competition with illegal predatory pricing is also common), and then to abuse the monopoly, but is no one thinking that for the average consumer a free, competitive market might be better?
This is my theory as to why Europe can't compete with silicon valley. It turns out, what they're "competing" on is willingness to turn a blind eye to monopolies and their negative economic effects.
For a fixed level of technology, a competitive industry is better for customers than a monopoly industry. But an innovative monopoly may be better than a stagnant competitive industry, and the prospect of monopoly rents encourages innovation. The patent system is supposed to be the compromise here: if you innovate you get 20 years of monopoly, after that your innovation is commoditised.
But even when with regards to innovative monopolies, the monopoly can lead in the wrong direction. On example is that today because Google monopolizes search, you cannot find a decent forum search engine, which seems terrible from the Democratic perspective.
Of course in reality, patents are filed in large numbers by monopolies, and potential competitors are threatened with nuisance lawsuits, into either avoiding competition with incumbents entirely, or paying fees to them. Another area where the US seems happy to let monopolies flourish at the expense of progress and competition.
Ehhh Kiva being the only company isn't a healthy market. Even if they're selling to everyone.
To be honest Amazon buying Kiva is probably the best thing that could happen. They broadcast to the world that such a company is worth almost a billion dollars. Now the market is filling with competitors and investment. That's exactly what you want.
Patents over physical mechanisms are somewhat defensible IMHO. Generally they really do need to be innovative because physical processes are easier to understand (unlike software) and so they are harder to defend in court.
Additionally, from the article it looks like patents were only one reason no one else is as good - it seems more like no one else had tried to build anything like them.
Also, Amazon is generally seen as good for consumers - they force down prices like no one else. They might not be that great for warehouse employees though.
You do know Amazon is now using your history to find out which products you want, and increase the price shown to you for them, or even lock them behind a Prime requirement?
Monopoly is the natural end state of capitalism. Once a company is big enough it's easy to destroy or buy out all competition. It's only regulation that prevents all industries becoming monopolies over time.
You're confusing monopolies coopting government to maintain control with large government causing and maintaining monopolies.
Once a company is big enough it's easy to destroy or buy out all competition.
Can you provide one single example of this having happened? I'm willing to believe it, I just haven't found one. Typical examples provided fall short of that claim.
"Due to competition from other firms, their market share had gradually eroded to 70 percent by 1906 which was the year when the antitrust case was filed against Standard, and down to 64 percent by 1911 when Standard was ordered broken up"
Yes, Standard Oil is the typical example, which is why I remain unconvinced. They didn't "destroy or buy out all competition" (they had more than a hundred competitors), which is why - as joslin01 points out - their position of dominance was very short lived. And did they abuse that position by charging exorbitant prices? No, the evidence was that they had generally lowered them.
And finally, this little tidbit: "The dissolution had actually propelled Rockefeller's personal wealth." Hurray for the Sherman Act..?
Sorry, but no. Creative destruction is the end state of capitalism as has been proven time and time again. There are no examples of monopolies lasting more than a few years unless they have overt support from the state.
Large governments cause monopolies to happen. You said the same thing. Business co-opting a government to creat a monopoly is only possible when the large government exists. You could argue that water and dirt don't cause trees to grow, but without either there is no tree. The language definition is immaterial.
Increases in government size can only occur by taking over parts of the economy into state monopolies. The ultimate large government is a totalitarian communist government, which has a monopoly on everything.
The ultimate cure for monopoly behaviour is a smaller government and more competition by avoiding regulations that favour larger operations over smaller ones.
Standard oil? Microsoft? At a high level government and big business are very similar in scope. It's not a matter of one or the other - your analysis is too simple. Government created the baby bells, not creative destruction. Government circumscribed ms.
Standard Oil was never a monopoly, and even its 90% market share had already dropped to 70% two years later when the government even filed charged, and even more when the case was decided.
Microsoft's market position is inseparable from its support by government in the form of software patents. When their rent on Android phones is larger than their income from their own phones, and that rent is purely based on having a patent on an obsolete filesystem which is only useful because it was previously "the standard" (ie., imposed by them), the government is directly helping Microsoft take advantage from their dominant market position in other markets - exactly what they purpose to ban.
Microsoft was monopolistic in the 1990's, where they exploited their Windows monopoly to the expense of Netscape. That wasn't patents, it was market dominance.
(Not a fan of patents, but that wasn't the problem back then).
The claim I was supporting was "there are no examples of monopolies lasting more than a few years unless they have overt support from the state", not that no company ever gains an overwhelming market share. Yes, IE was once at the very top. And a few years later, it wasn't, thanks to competition.
Meanwhile, the government lawsuit not only did nothing to curb their position (IE kept rising at the same rate), as it gave Microsoft "a special antitrust immunity to license Windows and other 'platform software' under contractual terms that destroy freedom of competition."[1]
> The ultimate cure for monopoly behaviour is a smaller government and more competition by avoiding regulations that favour larger operations over smaller ones.
That would be the libertarian fantasy, but no, unfortunately that is entirely incorrect.
The "regulations" that you assume make monopolies possible is really unrestricted capitalism in itself, which leads to accumulation of capital in the hands of one or few, often colluding entities.
Capitalism favors larger operations over smaller ones through efficiencies of scale. There is no human-created regulations that do this.
Despite Kiva's simplicity, the warehouse has to be designed completely for robotic use, whereas these robots navigate around existing human accessible shelves. If Kiva is railway trains, these guys are automated cars: designed for the existing world.
Invia isn't shipping a product. They're just demoing a prototype under ideal conditions. Their robot doesn't look robust enough for a real warehouse. In a few years, they might be able to compete with Kiva, but not yet. If you have a distribution center with Kiva robots, and need to replace them now, you have a problem.
A Kiva warehouse is just a big space with a flat floor. It's not like the old Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems, with their custom tracks, conveyors, and towers.[1][2]
Yes, I am aware that kiva is a big space with a flat floor, with the floor containing taped markers and the robots taking up all the space. That's why I said "designed for robotic use". There are plenty of warehouses that are laid out more like Invia's demo than Kiva's floor, hence it would be cheaper to bring in a couple of robots to try them on vs investing in something like Kiva.
I'm also aware that invia hasn't shipped yet, that's why I said "could be interesting"
They can't be used for large item warehouses and are probably not worth it for smaller warehouses. Also existing warehouses that are multilevel with plywood flooring probably can't be retrofitted easily. Since their focus seems to be on same day, one hour delivery from small urban warehouses, the majority of their new warehouses are probably not going to use kiva.
I don't think 1-day will be that important, 2-day is fine for most orders. But the warehouses help them save a lot of money on shipping.But surely the saving on opex in a small robotic warehouse is less than a big robotic warehouse.
Cost of installing the system, cost of maintenance for a smaller number of bots, less dense shelving, more specialized training, lower picking costs because of smaller area. Prime now also delivers refrigerated food which probably Kiva can't do.
Probably smaller warehouses are not purpose built for Kiva so maybe they don't have power, floor space, or layout to make kiva work well. This one in Manhattan is only 40k feet and has low ceilings:
http://time.com/4159144/amazon-prime-warehouse-new-york-city...
This has been my view of Amazon+Kiva as well, there is obviously some problems with rolling out Kivas everywhere since little has happen. The problems I've seen stated are the big initial cost of deployment, like invest at least ~$1 billion to save $1.8 billion, this article also mention really flat floors. I also guess it's hard to iterate the design if you change all warehouses directly so to spread out the risks you go slow.
According to the article Amazon now have 30k Kiva robots and that in all of the US there are about 200k more warehouse workers since 2007.
Komplett.no, which aims to become the Amazon of Norway (the real Amazon doesn't care about Norway), has a really cool automated warehouse (AutoStore) which seems even more advanced than Amazons:
The packages still need to be packaged by hand though, but it seems like it would be easier to automate that for the AutoStore system since each product has its own box as opposed to Amazons Kiva system where multiple products are placed on the same shelf.
I find autostore to be a much cleaner solution than the adhoc system amazon uses. With the amazon system you need a lot more space and staff to fill those shelves. In addition you have to be careful not to load them top heavy.
The only downside I see with Autstore is building maintenance.
What about maintenance on a column? You have to stop the whole system, unload & disassemble part of the grid just to run a new cable or check for humidity or whatever on your structural columns.
That's the only downside I see. It's a very simple concept solving a very real issue and their motto "stop airhousing start warehousing" real hits home!
From what it looks like it may not be so bad. Since the system appears to be dynamically scalable you can most likely move all items out of a section and make it off limits. Then do maintenance etc on that section.
looking at autostore I was curious how many skus can be done efficiently and how deep you can go relative to the number of fast moving lines? With a million SKUs it might be fun to see what initial mapping can be done. Also, how can hazardous stacks be integrated to they can deliver to the same work station as regular items?
as for maintenance I would think a few strategic extra rows could serve that purpose without losing too much efficiency.
most the picking I am used to has both voice and light based picking with high velocity parts duplicated to the front.
It will depend on the size of the grid, number of positions on one level and number of robots. For fast movers, autostore can prepare those products and bring them to a few of the top levels when users are not actively picking or doing putaway. When the picking starts, those robots can get accessed to fast movers more quickly.
For maintenance, there is an extra area outside the grid where you can move the robot out of the grid to do some maintenance work on it without affecting the rest of the system.
I really enjoyed seeing this, it's thought provoking and futuristic.
It does seem to emphasize efficient use of land area, though, and in the case of modern warehouses in North America, at least, I imagine the real estate itself is effectively cheaper than ever (because modern warehouses are built so big and so far away from everything, and because tax incentives often reward new construction) and only getting cheaper. It seems like an odd variable to optimize.
If real estate were at a premium, wouldn't we expect to see traditional warehouses, distribution centers, data centers etc in a multi-story format? But as far as I know, we don't. Instead, owners opt for giant footprints on cheap land.
Amazon has both national warehouses in middle of nowhere (but near airports) for general shipping, and small local warehouses for 1day delivery in urban areas.
The innovation is great. But it is scary that amazon may start buying all these robot startups just to keep the patents and their products out of the hand of other e-commerce companies.
This article really overhypes the Kiva robots. I work in the warehouse automation industry for a fortune-500 retailer with several large e-commerce brands. Robotic goods-to-person is only one of many applications of robotics and automation in warehouses. It is also really only useful for certain types of long-tail operations - many SKUs, low volume per SKU. It also still very labor intensive because someone still has to pack all of those orders.
I think the Kiva robots are an important part of Amazon's fulfillment efficiency but I don't see a huge market for that technology across the warehousing industry because there are a lot of other problems that it doesn't solve at all or doesn't handle very well.
From my point of view the automated storage and retrieval and shuttle systems are much more interesting and more widely applicable. They are also a much more efficient use of vertical space.
One of the nice things about the Kiva robots is that they will actually organize the warehouse based on popularity of the SKUs automagically. Things that are low volume get placed farther away from the pickers, and things that are high volume are never far away from the pickers.
There are 5 or 6 vendors that have offerings in that space.
Some of them are: Opex Perfect Pick, Dematic Mulishuttle 2, Intelligrated OLS Shuttle, Witron's OFS, SSI Schafer's Navette.
These solutions are definitely more capital intensive than Kiva robots but they are faster and have a much smaller footprint.
If you have a Kiva-type goods to person robot system and your order profile changes like more lines per order or more order lines of a particular SKU, the system can run into scaling issues. There are only so many robots and so much floor space to navigate in. Shuttles to some extent have the same problem but because of their smaller footprint you run out of horizontal space slower than you do with Kiva robots.
Isn't the issue that a Kiva system is more scalable since it allows for rapid handling of far more SKUs? A key part of Amazon's retail strategy is that it's the first place you go to look for something because you know they have seemingly product on earth...they're the default e-commerce site for many. My understanding was that these shuttle-type systems simply don't allow for that. Maybe I'm wrong...if so what are the other trade-offs? Thanks
With either system you can scale in the following ways:
-Add more shelving units to store more SKUs or to store more of faster moving SKUs.
-Add more robots to process more order lines simultaneously.
-Add more pack stations/labor
Adding more shelving units is limited by floor space. The equivalent scaling for shuttles is adding more aisles. Adding more aisles scales farther than adding more shelving units because it uses the entire vertical height of the building. Even taking mezzanines into account aisles are going to scale farther.
Adding more robots or shuttles will scale until the travel paths are congested. Whichever technology moves faster is going to scale better here. I don't know enough about the speed of the Kiva robots vs shuttles to say who is better here but I suspect shuttles can move faster.
Adding more pack stations is something either type of system can do and I can't see any advantage either system has over the other there. Kiva is probably more flexible here because you don't need expensive conveyor reconfiguration/addition if you want to add more pack stations. Shuttles, with the proper supporting conveyor can probably get higher throughput.
I think where Kiva really shines is in its flexibility. It can store a lot of different types of items and it is flexible in its ability to move stuff around. It is definitely not the most labor efficient goods-to-person automation technology and it is also not a great use of space. It runs into problems if you need to scale up in SKUs per order or overall order lines per day because you don't have enough travel space available to get all that stuff to the pack stations. Based on my ordering habits and what I have seen of friends Amazon is dealing with a very low number of SKUs per order so it works for them.
Another advantage of the Kiva system is that they are not picky about the types of items that can be stored. They can store and move just about anything that fits on a shelf. Shuttle systems have some restrictions about the types of items that can be stored. Amazon has such a wide range of items that the flexibility of their shelving units allows them to get the most advantage out of their goods-to-person robots.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadThe article reminded me of acquisitions in the Gilded Age. Perhaps one could compare Bezos to Rockefeller, presuming Bezos was the one who pushed for such purchases.
On the other hand, there's going to be short term turmoil as people scramble to find new jobs in an increasingly automated world.
Really?
Do you mean: "Being paid to do soul-crushing work is better than not being paid" ?
Or: "Doing soul-crushing work is better than having nothing to do" ?
The first is an issue of income and the distribution of product (in the GDP sense of product). There is no axiomatic rule that says "you have to have a job to get paid", it's just how our current economy operates.
If I owned a farm that produced a variety of food in excess of the needs of my whole family, but was totally operated by self-maintaining robots, would I need to have a job? The robots would produce all the food I need, and I could sell the excess in order to obtain other goods.
I guess I could say my job was "farmer" or "grocery salesman" or "robot supervisor", but I wouldn't actually being doing work.
If I am a truck driver, and I own my own truck and I make an income by transporting goods, and then I convert my truck to be self-driving so that I no longer need to be the driver, then (if we temporarily ignore external price pressures) I still make the same income as I used to. But I'm just reaping the benefits of my self driving truck, I don't actually "work" anymore (or at least to nowhere near the extent I used to).
But if I am a truck driver, and someone else owns the truck and I make an income by being contracted to transport goods, and then they convert my truck to be self-driving so that I no longer need to be the driver, then I no longer make any income, and I'm screwed. The owner of the truck reaps incredible benefits, and I don't actually "work" anymore, but I also don't have an income.
That's how things work in our society, but it doesn't have to be that way. There's no universal moral law that says that the first ex-truck-driver should continue to be paid for doing nothing much, but the second ex-truck-driver needs to get off his butt and go find a new soul-crushing job so that he can earn an income.
As our economies change to produce more output with fewer workers, there becomes less useful work for the citizens to do, even though GDP is increasing. That ought to be a good thing (economically) - more "stuff we want", less effort to produce it. But it won't actually being a good thing for the general population unless we move to a different model for the distribution of income, so that there's a way for the populace to share in the increased productivity even though their manual labour is no longer needed.
That where ideas like "Universal Basic Income" (UBI) come in.
Are we sure this isn't true? Are people who don't have to work (e.g. those on permanent disability in the US) more or less happy than comparable people in dead-end soulless jobs?
I don't know of any studies, but I suspect there would be some.
In addition to the question of "how do we share income in a less-work world?", there is the question "how do we ensure that the are opportunities for everyone to contribute something meaningful to society?"
Ideally those questions would connect - we would use our increased product(ivity) to fund a wider range of human endeavours that might not have been considered "economically productive" in previous generations.
I don't know what that looks like, but I would hope it means more art and science, rather than more soul crushing, meaningless busy-work.
Maybe not many, but I feel pretty confident that number is greater than 0.
One of the hopes of UBI is that when everyone receives a salary just from being alive, and working earns you extra on top of that, whether one works become more of a choice (like living frugally) instead of a failure, and loneliness is reduced when unemployment isn't an evil to combat, and more people choose to do something else.
Apparently nail painting businesses are a viable industry, in my eyes they are totally useless.
Most of the businesses we recognise today would have been hilarious to our ancestors. Paying good money for a personal trainer? Paying someone to wash your car?
This is an age-old problem which keeps solving itself.
But jobs existing are a consequence of two things: (1) demand & (2) ability to price work output above a minimum.
UBI answers a world where there aren't enough of (2) to satisfy labor supply (whether through automation or increases in efficiency). Because bar repealing minimum wage statutes we're going to reach a point where for {minimum wage salary} there only exist X potential jobs (additional jobs not economically-feasibly offering a sufficient income), and labor pool > X.
Most people don't like their work. Most people don't like waking up on someone else's schedule and do work that their told to do. That's why businesses pay them, after all.
Companies will only pay what they have to.
Some examples of industries where tons of people work for shit money (less than a person of their abilities could earn in other industries) or even sometimes for free because of an emotional attachment to that industry are showbusiness, art and academia.
Then you have the opposite examples, like working on an oil platform - most of those people would earn less money if they had picked a different industry, because they have to be paid more to agree to live on an oil platform and do a shitty and dangerous job.
If 50% of the jobs in a field are automated, in the near term you still have 100% of the former labor looking for that job, pushing salaries down towards their minimum, thereby reducing the cost effectiveness of further automation.
To me, minimum wage says "if you work, then you should at least able to support yourself on your income$." UBI+ says "if you work, you must find greater fulfillment than mere sustenance in your work."
Personally, I can't see minimum wage applying to anyone receiving UBI. Although it might make sense to have a "less than minimum wage" tax that helps fund the UBI directly.
$ Abstracting away actual amounts and whether or not they're enough
+ Market adjustments aside
The problem with automation is you cant ask the robot why X, Y or Z is going wrong and how to fix it. A master weaver on the other hand will do it over a 15 minute conversation.
That's a very romantic view of weaving which hides the real reason there are still many weavers, mostly in low-cost countries: They are cheaper than machines. There is no guarantee that this will still be true in face of increasing computing capabilities and machines which learn better than before.
Yes, mostly in Asia, living in hellish conditions, often struggling to get enough food. I'm not sure what point you were trying to make with that comment.
Depends how short the "short term turmoil" is. If its 20+ years then it could blight an entire generation.
It's always been this way.
Besides the population of most countries is starting on the path to decline.
Just wish I'd started a warehouse robot company 4 years ago :-)
For specifics I'd refer to the CMU Masters courseload or the WPI undergrad:
https://www.ri.cmu.edu/ri_static_content.html?menu_id=469
http://www.wpi.edu/academics/robotics/ugprograms.html
The great thing about Kiva robots is that they're quite simple and robust mechanically. They're a battery, motors, wheels, and a lift mechanism. They're completely interchangeable, and having one fail isn't a big deal. Maintenance is replacing batteries, motors, wheels, and maybe the electronics module as necessary. The infrastructure they require is modest. The competing systems all seem to require more elaborate robots, special totes, and special shelf construction.
Amazon says that Kiva robots cut their order picking time from 90 minutes to 15. Other retailers, seeing that number, must be terrified. It's a technological improvement like that which makes same-day delivery from a large inventory possible.
A company gaining a huge advantage by getting a total monopoly over another market, which they can enforce due to having patents.
That’s not what patents were supposed to create, and what Antitrust regulations were supposed to prevent.
If this is the future, it’s quite a dystopia: Monopolies everywhere.
Sure, I get that the Silicon Valley business model is to destroy regulation, get a monopoly (ideally in a new market niche, but destroying existing competition with illegal predatory pricing is also common), and then to abuse the monopoly, but is no one thinking that for the average consumer a free, competitive market might be better?
To be honest Amazon buying Kiva is probably the best thing that could happen. They broadcast to the world that such a company is worth almost a billion dollars. Now the market is filling with competitors and investment. That's exactly what you want.
Additionally, from the article it looks like patents were only one reason no one else is as good - it seems more like no one else had tried to build anything like them.
Also, Amazon is generally seen as good for consumers - they force down prices like no one else. They might not be that great for warehouse employees though.
And for the suppliers, it’s also problematic.
That’s why usually the solution is a free market.
Most monopolies can only be sustained through state intervention, which is why large government is more of a problem than large companies like Amazon.
This situation is fantastic for the consumer - companies competing to lower prices and increase service.
As the story says the market has responded quickly and the industry is growing, precisely how things are supposed to work.
You're confusing monopolies coopting government to maintain control with large government causing and maintaining monopolies.
Can you provide one single example of this having happened? I'm willing to believe it, I just haven't found one. Typical examples provided fall short of that claim.
"In 1904, Standard controlled 91 percent of production and 85 percent of final sales." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil
"Due to competition from other firms, their market share had gradually eroded to 70 percent by 1906 which was the year when the antitrust case was filed against Standard, and down to 64 percent by 1911 when Standard was ordered broken up"
And finally, this little tidbit: "The dissolution had actually propelled Rockefeller's personal wealth." Hurray for the Sherman Act..?
Large governments cause monopolies to happen. You said the same thing. Business co-opting a government to creat a monopoly is only possible when the large government exists. You could argue that water and dirt don't cause trees to grow, but without either there is no tree. The language definition is immaterial.
Increases in government size can only occur by taking over parts of the economy into state monopolies. The ultimate large government is a totalitarian communist government, which has a monopoly on everything.
The ultimate cure for monopoly behaviour is a smaller government and more competition by avoiding regulations that favour larger operations over smaller ones.
Microsoft's market position is inseparable from its support by government in the form of software patents. When their rent on Android phones is larger than their income from their own phones, and that rent is purely based on having a patent on an obsolete filesystem which is only useful because it was previously "the standard" (ie., imposed by them), the government is directly helping Microsoft take advantage from their dominant market position in other markets - exactly what they purpose to ban.
(Not a fan of patents, but that wasn't the problem back then).
Meanwhile, the government lawsuit not only did nothing to curb their position (IE kept rising at the same rate), as it gave Microsoft "a special antitrust immunity to license Windows and other 'platform software' under contractual terms that destroy freedom of competition."[1]
[1] http://www.unclaw.com/chin/scholarship/nando.pdf
That would be the libertarian fantasy, but no, unfortunately that is entirely incorrect.
The "regulations" that you assume make monopolies possible is really unrestricted capitalism in itself, which leads to accumulation of capital in the hands of one or few, often colluding entities.
Capitalism favors larger operations over smaller ones through efficiencies of scale. There is no human-created regulations that do this.
In fact it is quite the opposite of what you're imagining.
That’s why I usually consider government monopolies as better than for profit companies, as better than private monopolies.
(Considering the correlation between government monopolies being usually regulated better).
Sadly, in the past decades, we haven’t seen those in many places anymore.
The UK has mismanaged the NHS for many years, and is now considering to privatize it into a private monopoly.
Look at Comcast, TWC, etc, who have regional monopolies, and how well they work.
And considering how easy politicians are to bribe, I am not sure we can get properly regulated monopolies at all anymore.
Until we can ensure the proper regulation, we might want to prevent monopolies from even occuring.
Despite Kiva's simplicity, the warehouse has to be designed completely for robotic use, whereas these robots navigate around existing human accessible shelves. If Kiva is railway trains, these guys are automated cars: designed for the existing world.
A Kiva warehouse is just a big space with a flat floor. It's not like the old Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems, with their custom tracks, conveyors, and towers.[1][2]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It7qr6fga3c [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuvrP1QKsdk
I'm also aware that invia hasn't shipped yet, that's why I said "could be interesting"
I thought I read somewhere that new warehouses were not using the Kiva systems.
Probably smaller warehouses are not purpose built for Kiva so maybe they don't have power, floor space, or layout to make kiva work well. This one in Manhattan is only 40k feet and has low ceilings: http://time.com/4159144/amazon-prime-warehouse-new-york-city...
According to the article Amazon now have 30k Kiva robots and that in all of the US there are about 200k more warehouse workers since 2007.
http://autostoresystem.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O0UKARdLDc (360° video)
http://www.tu.no/artikler/unik-video-bli-med-inn-i-kompletts...
The packages still need to be packaged by hand though, but it seems like it would be easier to automate that for the AutoStore system since each product has its own box as opposed to Amazons Kiva system where multiple products are placed on the same shelf.
What about maintenance on a column? You have to stop the whole system, unload & disassemble part of the grid just to run a new cable or check for humidity or whatever on your structural columns.
That's the only downside I see. It's a very simple concept solving a very real issue and their motto "stop airhousing start warehousing" real hits home!
as for maintenance I would think a few strategic extra rows could serve that purpose without losing too much efficiency.
most the picking I am used to has both voice and light based picking with high velocity parts duplicated to the front.
For maintenance, there is an extra area outside the grid where you can move the robot out of the grid to do some maintenance work on it without affecting the rest of the system.
It does seem to emphasize efficient use of land area, though, and in the case of modern warehouses in North America, at least, I imagine the real estate itself is effectively cheaper than ever (because modern warehouses are built so big and so far away from everything, and because tax incentives often reward new construction) and only getting cheaper. It seems like an odd variable to optimize.
If real estate were at a premium, wouldn't we expect to see traditional warehouses, distribution centers, data centers etc in a multi-story format? But as far as I know, we don't. Instead, owners opt for giant footprints on cheap land.
I think the Kiva robots are an important part of Amazon's fulfillment efficiency but I don't see a huge market for that technology across the warehousing industry because there are a lot of other problems that it doesn't solve at all or doesn't handle very well.
From my point of view the automated storage and retrieval and shuttle systems are much more interesting and more widely applicable. They are also a much more efficient use of vertical space.
If you have a Kiva-type goods to person robot system and your order profile changes like more lines per order or more order lines of a particular SKU, the system can run into scaling issues. There are only so many robots and so much floor space to navigate in. Shuttles to some extent have the same problem but because of their smaller footprint you run out of horizontal space slower than you do with Kiva robots.
Adding more shelving units is limited by floor space. The equivalent scaling for shuttles is adding more aisles. Adding more aisles scales farther than adding more shelving units because it uses the entire vertical height of the building. Even taking mezzanines into account aisles are going to scale farther.
Adding more robots or shuttles will scale until the travel paths are congested. Whichever technology moves faster is going to scale better here. I don't know enough about the speed of the Kiva robots vs shuttles to say who is better here but I suspect shuttles can move faster.
Adding more pack stations is something either type of system can do and I can't see any advantage either system has over the other there. Kiva is probably more flexible here because you don't need expensive conveyor reconfiguration/addition if you want to add more pack stations. Shuttles, with the proper supporting conveyor can probably get higher throughput.
I think where Kiva really shines is in its flexibility. It can store a lot of different types of items and it is flexible in its ability to move stuff around. It is definitely not the most labor efficient goods-to-person automation technology and it is also not a great use of space. It runs into problems if you need to scale up in SKUs per order or overall order lines per day because you don't have enough travel space available to get all that stuff to the pack stations. Based on my ordering habits and what I have seen of friends Amazon is dealing with a very low number of SKUs per order so it works for them.