Writing a Social Insect Civilization (centauri-dreams.org)
2 points by JPLeRouzic 34m ago 0 comments
UCSD Pascal: In depth 1/n – markbessey.blog (markbessey.blog)
2 points by rbanffy 40m ago 0 comments
Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans
148 Luc 173 5/9/2025, 11:18:06 AM spectrum.ieee.org ↗
Casinos provide free drinks, cartels offer free prostitutes, it's not unprecedented.
Because people will spend money. The premise here is no-one has money, but somehow adverts exist.
What you are describing is a political problem, not one for entrepreneurs. IMO the solution would be a form of UBI that we can smoothly increase as automation in fact removes jobs or lowers wages. I'd like to see that start ASAP, but OTOH we are still close to record-low unemployment and the last years saw the largest wage increases at the lower end in decades.
Look at street markets in countries with high wealth disparity. The well-off wouldn't shop or eat there, and they certainly wouldn't invest in a street vendor, the vendors are meant to serve the needs of people in poverty.
See Citigroup's plutonomy paper[1] that explores what that would look like and what investment strategies investors should take. The tl;dr is that the formal economy will abandon lower classes in favor of making a ton of money serving plutocrats and their friends and families instead.
[1] https://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-1.pdf
He routinely would keep dialing it up and up and up until too many people rage quit and then dial it down just a notch.
One of the first things unions negotiated for when they stated was control of that knob.
The later is a much easier problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE
Also, from the comments:
"My favorite thing about this is how 2 weeks after this video went up, they had an accident where two robots collided and caused a gigantic fire that cost them like 50 million dollars."
One of these things can be fixed, the other will always be a risk as long as humans are involved.
That's correct, the second one can get fixed with higher wages and benefits, like when Ford introduced the “$5 a day” (doubling market average).
Wonder if the matter has been resolved.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57883332
It’s a shame that the problems being solved are embedded within a business that embodies throwing things away at the first sign of weakness. I’m still upset they bought what seemed on track to be a nice successor to Simple Bank. Now it’s been pivoted again for the third time since acquisition.
Interesting to know companies are still using them as a means to automate their work.
They purchased an AutoStore, then reverse engineered it, made a few changes, and claimed it as their own invention.
This seems difficult to square with your claim that Ocado "just copied AutoStore". (I suppose it's not quite inconsistent with it; maybe Ocado copied a pile of things that AutoStore never patented, and the patented bits were always a sideshow?)
Ocado's initial patents as well were actually modifications of Autostore's robots, running on an Autostore grid, and Autostore manufactured the robots to Ocado's specification before Ocado decided to build the whole thing themselves.
So hard to argue that it wasn't a copy.
IMO I think the UK patent victory was a bit of a joke... Ocado's innovation of the robot above a single cell is both obvious, but also has it's own obvious downsides.
I just looked at videos of the two technologies and it seems difficult to ignore the relationship.
Perhaps this is a case of "technically correct", i.e. that they technically did not infringe the patents, but that in practice they leveraged as much as they could around the patent claims?
A system that works well with 15 robots will often fall apart if scaled up to 150 or 1500 robots. Reliability, planning algorithm complexity, radio performance, all sorts of issues start to come up.
That’s why Hatteland patented the autostore tech in ~1995 and by the time the patents expired they only supported ~100 robots.
It’s not always easy to appreciate, because everyone publicises when they install a new automation system, but nobody publicises it if they scrap it 18 months later. Being discreet about it is better for the share price.
Of course there’s still a perfectly good market for less scalable automation; grocery just has crazy financials.
Robots also get cheaper over time because we learn. You can buy many parts in bulk including computer libraries to control them. You can find many people who know best practices who will not make some of the early mistakes that cost money.
Amazon uses a lot higher stacked spaces than Ocado does.
Are there any real numbers you can reference than just stating that Ocados way is better?
The demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWXco05eK28
From the article:
> “When you’re a person doing this task, you’ve got a buffer of 20 or 30 items, and you’re looking for an opportunity to fit those items into different bins, and having to remember which item might go into which space. But the robot knows all of the properties of all of our items at once, and we can also look at all of the bins at the same time along with the bins in the next couple of pods that are coming up. So we can do this optimization over the whole set of information in 100 milliseconds.”
A restaurant can improve performance during the "lunch rush" by letting neat slip, but that carelessness is already costing them performance at the end of the lunch rush - this works because just as this catches up they get several hours in the afternoon to clean things up. Then supper crowd where they do it again - then they have the rest of the night to clean up from that. (the restaurants I worked in didn't have a breakfast rush, YMMV)
A factory by contrast needs to keep things neat and consistent all the time because there is never a rush/downtime. They want things rolling off the line at a consistent pace all day. Any compromise for speed now is a cost latter in the day.
I have never been in an Amazon warehouse so I don't have great insight into what things are like. I would expect they want to be more consistent all day - but I don't know. Maybe all the trucks arrive at once and then they get time when they are gone to clean up. I wouldn't expect that, but maybe.
The saying I do believe has a difference between robots and humans. The idea largely being that human inaccuracy increases exponentially relative to speed. Ergo, slowing down can lead to dramatically bette accuracy and throughput. Though, robots don't necessarily lose accuracy because they are moving more quickly. Though, I'd agree it is likely that both humans and robots need "smooth" in order to be fast. The key difference is robots do not always lose smooth when moving at high speed.
Look at the above restaurant example, the system has a built in buffer to handle spikes so it can be cheaper or make other tradeoffs everywhere else compared to an equivalently performant system that can do 100% duty cycle.
A robot or human that can deal with messy inventory is facilitating positive tradeoffs elsewhere in the system.
If five cheap robots outperform a single skilled worker, robots win. But depending on jurisdiction, those five robots might still lose to a dozen or so slaves kept near starvation. For the skilled worker it's bad news one way or the other.
Several months of me as a doctor and I'd still be incompetent.
Yes some are better than others. However there is still a vast gulf in skill between those people than engineers (much less doctors), while the gap between them and someone off the street is much less. (the article doesn't say how long it takes someone to get to that high skilled state or even if it is possible to train to that level - if someone can show me data on this I might change my mind on skill)
Wait until LLMs get better and destroy the ability for junior developers to get their foot in the door.
(The suits think that's a good thing)
https://old.reddit.com/r/EDC/comments/dmnuts/53mamazon_fulfi...
and Inbound (or the previous person picking) was usually a bit less careful.
Not slower than human stocking items for a whole day.
There's a reason human beings are worked to the point of exhaustion in these warehouses - the goal is to move as much product as fast as possible. Quality and productivity are at cross purposes, and between the two only the latter makes money.
Fillpy the robot will not:
All those pale in comparison to repair costs. That's why companies are pushing for automation. Because Flippy does its job quietly and diligently 24/7 without complaining.Isn't that a pretty tiny number?
I assume a human probably does 1 every 5 seconds (it's much easier to put an item on a shelf than to take it off).
So that's about 5 months human output.
https://blog.robotiq.com/bid/65024/TakkTile-Sensors-for-Indu...
The technology has applications in the robot sex work industry.
Specifically, both of them had to stop using black-colored boxes and move graphics in from box boundaries.
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Just like how it was bad to have kids crawling around in the textile factories back in the day.
I agree with you. And yet, the people who are working those jobs are doing so because they need them to get by, not for funsies. They will not be better off if they lose that job and there's no income stream to replace it. The two must go hand in hand or you're just ruining people's lives.
In hindsight, I think they were completely right and I feel kind of lucky that they drilled that in so much, because even into my mid 30's I don't have a ton of trouble or resistance to picking up new things. Sometimes I don't love the way new tech is going [1], but I still try my best to keep up with what's in demand in the industry (generally looking at job boards and looking at their keywords and making sure I have at least a cursory understanding of the stuff they're talking about). I will admit I don't completely love that AI is being used instead of junior engineers in some cases, largely because a lot of AI code is shit or flatout wrong in non-obvious ways, but I still have tried my best to utilize it and learn from it because it's clearly the way that things are going. [2]
I've been hired and lost/quit more desk jobs than anyone I know, and I attribute my ability to find work quickly to this characteristic.
[1] e.g. treating memory like it's infinite, disregarding CPU performance as a means of "getting more shit done", making configurations (arguably) needlessly complicated like Kubernetes, etc.
[2] For example, my latest project has been building an HLS and Icecast "infinite radio station" which picks a random song from my collection, feeds a prompt to OpenAI for DJ chatter in between songs,
Generally, though, I'm against the arguments of "automation is bad cuz less jobs". I think that might be true in the very short term, but we're never going to have a case where "all possible work is done", because that's a completely malformed premise. There's pretty much an infinite amount of potential work to do.
The short term matters. It's zero comfort to a factory worker who has lost his job if there will be another, better job for him in a year or two. He still needs to eat between now and then, and he can't buy food with pie in the sky promises of future employment.
The reason for AFAIK, my understanding is it is more common for people to be left behind than to transition entirely to a new industry. (That is my memory of seeing some data around that, not saying I'm correct, but that I find it just as plausible to speculate that industrial transitions don't always transition with the same workers.) Perhaps we should talk farming? That is the biggest example pethaps. Some 80% plus of all populations used to do agriculture. The Grapes of Wraith were all about this very topic.
The people making the decisions to replace their workforce with AI and automation are doing so to maximize their profits, not to improve society or the quality of any life but their own.
Assuming you aren't a member of the capitalist class, and thus complicit, you don't have a say in the matter. They aren't putting the future they're implementing up to a vote. They don't care if you want it. They don't care if you die in the street like a dog.
The factory of the future will have only two employees, one human and one dog.
- The human feeds the dog.
- The dog makes sure no one touches the equipment.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/01/30/future-factory/
No need for a human to feed the dog, a robot will refill the dog feeder.
I think the solution might be multiple dogs.
For example, my dad was an electrical engineer who could fix any radio or TV. Reality: radios & TVs were relatively expensive AND the circuits within them were relatively large (observable with the naked eye or at least a magnifying glass). Today "repair" means at most replacing a capacitor although it's often cheaper & more efficient to just swap out a board. That of course assumes the board is still being manufactured and there are costs for companies to continue doing that, especially how fast technology moves forward.
Of course there are reasonable rights to repair we should have like being able to replace the software with software of our choosing, being able to modify parts within things we own, etc. But it won't be like it was prior to the 2000s where you could actually meaningfully enact repairs on electronic components by swapping out small easily available generic parts.
There are also secondary considerations like security that we haven't figured out technical answers to for right to repair (i.e. right to repair today also often means right to inject security vulnerabilities).
In this case, legislation could help ameliorate this problem, and maybe taxing the actual cost of things (e.g. environmental impact) instead of just letting the future generations deal with it.
You can assume that that’s the kind of person you’re conversing with but you’d be wrong.
I agree with you on taxing things to account and pay for externalities.
Most of what you said can be applied reflexively.
Humans will and agency is the foundation of society. It is required to pass legislation or taxes as well.
"People should just" pass legislation would be specific to congress, so not quite the same thing, or at least not the kind of argument that I was referring to. You're free to think it's a dumb argument but there's a slight pedantic difference.
What I do think is powerful is cultivating anti-consumerism or selective consumption behavior and belief. The desire for reparability falls within within this.
We are now switching over to a self optimizing system approach.
We had big data and didn't do anything with it but now whenever we do something with an LLM, we give it feedback, its getting processed benchmarked stored and used.
ChatGPT 3 was not impressive because it was good, it was impressive because it showed everyone that we started this ara now. This lead to massive reallocation of resources around the globe from a human and money perspective.
Whatever we had with ChatGPT-3 was build with humans and money significant less than what we now have. Which leads to progress unseen before and this will continue at least for now.
https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+raise+wages+warehouse
FWIW I design industrial equipment for meat processing plants, where you'd be lucky to get 6-7 months out of a robot arm. I wish it was affordable to use robotics there, because there's a lot that could be done to eliminate some truly awful jobs.
In reality, I'm a strong supporter of everything above. Maybe we can really provide people better jobs by delegating repetitive and boring things to machines and allow everyone to do something they enjoy to earn their lives.
One can dream, I guess...
Machines are anything but reliable. They need constant servicing and maintenance and still break entirely
When you are not budget constrained, and building things for businesses, a little overengineering goes a long way.
I have a Xerox 7500DN color laser printer next to me, and it's working for more than 20 years at this point. It has gone through a lot of spares, but most (if not all) issues are from parts wearing down naturally. Nothing breaks unexpectedly on that. Same for robots. Give enough design budget, overengineer a little, and that thing will be one hell of an ugly but reliable machinery.
When you work with real "industrial" stuff, the landscape is very different.
If you keep up the maintenance plan for machines they rarely break before their predicted retirement date when you replace them. And since the maintenance and retirement dates are predicted in advance you can plan for them and thus ensure they happen when you want them to.
Additionally, this is now a common feature in CMS space, automated translation of content and assets.
LLM isn't going to drive a forklift; it needs more agency than a textbox in order to do that.
But it's really going to be products (ex. Microsoft Word) rather than a technology (ex. Electricity) that'll replace jobs (ex. Typists).