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Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

(spectrum.ieee.org)
209 points Luc | 7 comments | 09 May 25 11:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.005s | source | bottom
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omneity ◴[09 May 25 11:53 UTC] No.43935797[source]▶
Warehouses is definitely not where I expected robots with retractable blades to first appear.

The demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWXco05eK28

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krapp ◴[09 May 25 11:56 UTC] No.43935812[source]▶
That's still far slower than a human being, and those bins are far too neat.
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usrusr ◴[09 May 25 12:46 UTC] No.43936128[source]▶
It's not about throughput per unit, it's about throughput per unit of cost.

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.

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bluGill ◴[09 May 25 12:51 UTC] No.43936171[source]▶
What skilled worker? This is a low skill worker they are replacing.
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1. DrillShopper ◴[09 May 25 12:56 UTC] No.43936207[source]▶
For now.

Wait until LLMs get better and destroy the ability for junior developers to get their foot in the door.

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2. warrenmiller ◴[09 May 25 13:21 UTC] No.43936439[source]▶
How do you get senior developers if you replace the junior developers?
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3. _Algernon_ ◴[09 May 25 13:35 UTC] No.43936556[source]▶
Sounds like a problem for some future CEO, long after current CEO has gotten a fat bonus from improving quarterly profits now.
4. mystified5016 ◴[09 May 25 13:38 UTC] No.43936606[source]▶
You don't, you slowly cannibalize your business and industry. By the time consequences show up, you've already jumped ship with your golden parachute
5. dec0dedab0de ◴[09 May 25 13:52 UTC] No.43936756[source]▶
By then the senior developers will be obsolete too
6. DrillShopper ◴[09 May 25 15:16 UTC] No.43937741[source]▶
That's the neat part - you don't.

(The suits think that's a good thing)

7. absolutelastone ◴[10 May 25 16:05 UTC] No.43946724[source]▶
Well the obvious answer is training. Medicine requires 4 years undergrad plus 4 years grad plus 3+ years residency. You might argue medicine can be replaced by AI similarly, but the issue is risk. That 11 years is to reach the point you can be trusted to make the really high-risk and high-value decisions, not to do the easy stuff analogous to entry-level software.

Software has been an outlier in terms of its high salaries requiring only minimal training. That implies automating it will disproportionately be both easier and more valuable than many other skilled tasks.