As Walmart turns to robots, it’s the human workers who feel like machines (washingtonpost.com)

This is so impressively close to the early stages of automation in the novella Manna by Marshall Brain [1] that it almost seems like Wal-Mart executives used it as a playbook...

[1] https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Maybe Walmart can stop its health insurance scheme with this and those people can do work elsewhere. There are plenty of customer service jobs.

Here are videos of some of the robots at work:

Bossa Nova makes the inventory scanning robots shown in the WP article. Here is a video of it working in a Wal-Mart during a 2018 pilot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRJV1SPYpIE

TechCrunch had a brief sit-down with the Bossa Nova CTO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXEaCZ4KzL8

This article follows an earlier one from WP talking more specifically about the floor-cleaning bots mentioned here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/04/walmart...

Video about the floor scrubbers here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=rcMCFe6XVC0

For those who don't have a subscription to the Washington Post, you can access the article here: https://business.financialpost.com/technology/walmart-has-un...