Amazon would love nothing more than to fully automate its warehouses. It's already reached 'manna' levels of automated worker management (arguably far more draconian than the author of the short story envisioned)
The recent advances I've seen in robotics mirror LLMs to a lesser extent. I fear we're on the precipice of exponential change on the S curve here.
>and the company tries for that. Like most jobs, it depends a lot on the folks one works with/around, and what their behaviours result in management doing.
It's a complex thing to unpack because it depends a lot on a person's relationship with not just their employer, but with their idea of work, and even their idea of LIFE. It gets pretty existential.
On a core level, why do we work? From the beginning, everyone's answer will sit somewhere on a range that goes everywhere from "Because we are exploited cogs in a capitalist machine" to "Because we need money to live" to "Because we are contributing to the growth of humanity" to "Because we need purpose with our finite existence" to "Because it is a virtue on an infinite metaphysical plane".
These depend on how naturally philosophical you are about how you perceive yourself, humanity, the universe, and your time on earth.
And it depends on how much luxury your born circumstances (family, class, education, geography, society) offer in terms of agency and choice in your employment.
So IMO i very much respect the people who take your attitude: "It's a job. You make what you want of it. You work hard. You get compensated. You contribute to society. You move forward"
But I also understand the people who take the attitude of "It has no dignity. You can tell the employer wants to replace me with a robot but until robots can be as good at nuance as I am, will expect ME to be as efficient as a robot. I am a cog in a machine that created the richest person on the planet, and all it cost was the destruction of small town Americana. (Though WalMart probably did most of the death blows)"
Why do we work? Because the natural state of the modern human is subsistence farming. Anything more than that (like groceries, clothes, health care, beds, running water, electricity, cable tv, magazines, restaurants, etc) requires capital and organized labor. A job is nothing more than performing labor, using capital, in concert with other workers.
a minor nit here: I'm pretty sure the natural state of the modern human is hunter gathering, not farming. Seems like the modern human species originated 230k years ago [0] and agriculture a mere 25k years[1].
The overall thrust of your comment is still correct.
I was using "modern" to refer to "right now", and I think I'm correct that if civilization collapsed tomorrow we would go back to being subsistence farmers, not hunter gatherers, because we have access to all sorts of plants that are amenable to being farmed. But you're right, the phrase "modern humans" does have a specific meaning, and I did not use it correctly.
Ages ago, I was a Night Counselor at a school for boys --- I made it a point to attend the weekly staff meetings.
Once, there was a not particularly bright young man who had been at the school for almost a year, which was longer than most students and it was suggested that he simply be removed from the program on the basis that he hadn't made much progress recently, and wasn't likely to, to which one of the other counselors commented, "He's only going to be a janitor anyway." (referring to his lack of intellect) and another rejoined, "Yeah, one who pilfers stuff when no one is looking." --- my response was that if we kept him in the program and pushed him to graduate we would get an honest janitor who wouldn't steal and that there was dignity and worth in that. The lead counselor agreed, he stayed, and a couple of months later he was graduated.
A couple of years later, I met him in a nearby town --- he was attending a trade school and about to graduate.
When I was much younger than he was, I worked each summer baling hay --- I was 104 pounds when I enlisted in the Air Force, and I was quite a bit less than that at 14--16 --- but I picked up 40--75 lb. hay bales and put them on a truck until the field was empty.
As regards compensation at Amazon --- when I first started, folks got stock, but then that was negotiated away for more immediate compensation, so I don't understand why folks complain about not sharing in Amazon's valuation.
The fundamental problem is that there is a finite amount of work which needs to be done each day so as to make it possible that each person has food and electric and so forth, as well as whatever else they might want --- how is that work to be apportioned out?
> Ocado now has 18 CFC sites (including 2 micros) open of its 58 committed so far with six of those having opened in the first half of 2022. The six new sites include the first CFC for ICA in Sweden, a second site in Canada for Sobeys, and 4 further sites for Kroger in the US.
Excellent video as always from Tom Scott, and I come back to it frequently. I can't help but think about how much more efficient this robot model seems than the bipedal humanoid concepts. I'm not sure what the obsession is with bipedal robots.
Is it possible to go from linux administrator into something related to robotics without a major amount of training? or is that leap more of a go back to school for four years type deal?
That's a pretty big jump but doable, depending on what you want to do. Just wanting to move a robot arm doesn't involve a ton of math or anything hard beyond basically trigonometry. There's pretty good software for that and things like driving robots and mapping that help a lot (ROS or the Robots plugin for Grasshopper are great). It's best to have a real goal like a small robot arm that you're trying to program to do a task, or a little driving robot you want to get to drive from A to B. That will help you with some scaffolding to hang further learning on. Good luck!
> Is it possible to go from linux administrator into something related to robotics without a major amount of training?
Certainly possible. You are probably not going to work on the core control, planning or perception algorithms, but many of these robots run linux systems. Managing them, especially at scale, requires a lot of linux know-how. (Both on the robot and off the robot too! Data pipelines, CI/CD, MLOps, etc. All required for the project to sail smoothly.)
I’m working at a self driving car company. As a first approximation self-driving cars are robots on four wheels. As a secondary approximation they are weird data centers with sporadic network connections. Initially we needed a lot of robotics expertise to make the product do the basic things, but as things mature we also needed a lot of linux expertise to scale and get us to a smoothly running machine.
I assume you are not in the UK , so probably not of direct interest to you but here is one of our job adverts which is tailormade for someone with the right kind of linux expertise: https://apply.workable.com/oxa/j/EB627E54F2/
At least in the demo video, the robot is moving slowly enough to where I would say it waddles.
What seems odd is the form factor: why does it have to be bipedal?
Moving boxes and other things around a warehouse seems like it would benefit from a wheeled (omniwheels, ideally?) base, multiple manipulators, and a whole bunch of machine vision stuff.
Amazon does use non-bipedal robots in some FCs. Not sure what the current state of rollout is, but they are small robots that lift and carry entire shelves to where pickers work to pack boxes. The act of taking items and putting them in the packages still requires humans, and I would imagine they’re keen to automate that aspect. No idea if these bipedal robots are able to do that work though.
Countless details show a lack of polish, finish, or thoughtfulness. As an example the looped video, arguably the main feature, is clipped in portrait mode and is rendered (literally and figuratively) underwealming. It’s viewable in landscape.
Perhaps it’s just an intense focus on the end product instead of external marketing. I can’t help but wonder if there’s an eye for excellence in this org.
No question, humanoid robots are coming. If this startup can’t stand up a decent website after an Amazon investment and an Amazon PR push, did they rake the time to through safety concerns (local shut off, etc)?
31 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 50.4 ms ] threadThe recent advances I've seen in robotics mirror LLMs to a lesser extent. I fear we're on the precipice of exponential change on the S curve here.
It was fine back when I worked there
https://old.reddit.com/r/EDC/comments/dmnuts/53mamazon_fulfi...
as I noted:
>It's a job. The motto is:
>>Work Hard. Have Fun. Make History.
>and the company tries for that. Like most jobs, it depends a lot on the folks one works with/around, and what their behaviours result in management doing.
For folks not familiar w/ "Manna":
https://marshallbrain.com/manna
On a core level, why do we work? From the beginning, everyone's answer will sit somewhere on a range that goes everywhere from "Because we are exploited cogs in a capitalist machine" to "Because we need money to live" to "Because we are contributing to the growth of humanity" to "Because we need purpose with our finite existence" to "Because it is a virtue on an infinite metaphysical plane".
These depend on how naturally philosophical you are about how you perceive yourself, humanity, the universe, and your time on earth.
And it depends on how much luxury your born circumstances (family, class, education, geography, society) offer in terms of agency and choice in your employment.
So IMO i very much respect the people who take your attitude: "It's a job. You make what you want of it. You work hard. You get compensated. You contribute to society. You move forward"
But I also understand the people who take the attitude of "It has no dignity. You can tell the employer wants to replace me with a robot but until robots can be as good at nuance as I am, will expect ME to be as efficient as a robot. I am a cog in a machine that created the richest person on the planet, and all it cost was the destruction of small town Americana. (Though WalMart probably did most of the death blows)"
The overall thrust of your comment is still correct.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_human#cite_ref-Vi... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture#cite_ref-19
Once, there was a not particularly bright young man who had been at the school for almost a year, which was longer than most students and it was suggested that he simply be removed from the program on the basis that he hadn't made much progress recently, and wasn't likely to, to which one of the other counselors commented, "He's only going to be a janitor anyway." (referring to his lack of intellect) and another rejoined, "Yeah, one who pilfers stuff when no one is looking." --- my response was that if we kept him in the program and pushed him to graduate we would get an honest janitor who wouldn't steal and that there was dignity and worth in that. The lead counselor agreed, he stayed, and a couple of months later he was graduated.
A couple of years later, I met him in a nearby town --- he was attending a trade school and about to graduate.
When I was much younger than he was, I worked each summer baling hay --- I was 104 pounds when I enlisted in the Air Force, and I was quite a bit less than that at 14--16 --- but I picked up 40--75 lb. hay bales and put them on a truck until the field was empty.
As regards compensation at Amazon --- when I first started, folks got stock, but then that was negotiated away for more immediate compensation, so I don't understand why folks complain about not sharing in Amazon's valuation.
The fundamental problem is that there is a finite amount of work which needs to be done each day so as to make it possible that each person has food and electric and so forth, as well as whatever else they might want --- how is that work to be apportioned out?
> Ocado now has 18 CFC sites (including 2 micros) open of its 58 committed so far with six of those having opened in the first half of 2022. The six new sites include the first CFC for ICA in Sweden, a second site in Canada for Sobeys, and 4 further sites for Kroger in the US.
from 2022 https://deliveryx.net/ocado-updates-cfc-development-latest-z....
PR: https://www.ocadogroup.com/our-solutions/fulfilment/
Certainly possible. You are probably not going to work on the core control, planning or perception algorithms, but many of these robots run linux systems. Managing them, especially at scale, requires a lot of linux know-how. (Both on the robot and off the robot too! Data pipelines, CI/CD, MLOps, etc. All required for the project to sail smoothly.)
I’m working at a self driving car company. As a first approximation self-driving cars are robots on four wheels. As a secondary approximation they are weird data centers with sporadic network connections. Initially we needed a lot of robotics expertise to make the product do the basic things, but as things mature we also needed a lot of linux expertise to scale and get us to a smoothly running machine.
I assume you are not in the UK , so probably not of direct interest to you but here is one of our job adverts which is tailormade for someone with the right kind of linux expertise: https://apply.workable.com/oxa/j/EB627E54F2/
At least in the demo video, the robot is moving slowly enough to where I would say it waddles.
What seems odd is the form factor: why does it have to be bipedal?
Moving boxes and other things around a warehouse seems like it would benefit from a wheeled (omniwheels, ideally?) base, multiple manipulators, and a whole bunch of machine vision stuff.
It's just a PR exercise.
Like their Amazon Prime drone deliveries that never happened on mass.
For perspective, Blackberry 10 was fresh on the shelves ten years ago.
https://agilityrobotics.com/
Countless details show a lack of polish, finish, or thoughtfulness. As an example the looped video, arguably the main feature, is clipped in portrait mode and is rendered (literally and figuratively) underwealming. It’s viewable in landscape.
Perhaps it’s just an intense focus on the end product instead of external marketing. I can’t help but wonder if there’s an eye for excellence in this org.
No question, humanoid robots are coming. If this startup can’t stand up a decent website after an Amazon investment and an Amazon PR push, did they rake the time to through safety concerns (local shut off, etc)?