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Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

(spectrum.ieee.org)
209 points Luc | 3 comments | 09 May 25 11:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.706s | source
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thisisnotauser ◴[09 May 25 16:14 UTC] No.43938444[source]▶
Henry Ford famously wanted his workers to be able to afford his cars. When Bezos replaces everyone with robots, who will be left to buy his junk?
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dan-robertson ◴[09 May 25 17:45 UTC] No.43939348[source]▶
Plenty of people who don’t work for Amazon already buy stuff from there. I guess I mostly see the jobs as exchanging labour for something that society values and so by automating, there is more labour available to do things society values and so society gets more of what it values. And if you think working for Amazon is bad for people then you should be happy if automation is decreasing the number of people suffering that bad thing (though automation won’t always decrease this, eg see rise in number of bank tellers/branches in the US). But that isn’t really the way that lots of people talk about jobs and so if what you want is for people to have somewhere local where they can exchange their time for money to spend on goods and services then I guess automation and efficiency don’t really matter because the point of the job is to ensure the worker has money coming in rather than to ensure that something useful comes out of it. That latter point of view is pretty popular and I think I’m describing it pretty terribly – I’m sure there is a much more reasonable argument for it.
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tw04 ◴[09 May 25 18:35 UTC] No.43939771[source]▶
The ultimate endgame is either a significant reduction in global population, or UBI. You can’t just keep automating every non-knowledge job away and just hope people find something else to do.

All those jobs in Detroit that went away were replaced by…? As best I can tell they were replaced by poverty and crime.

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1. sydbarrett74 ◴[09 May 25 20:50 UTC] No.43940739[source]▶
Judging from efforts in the US to make health care harder and harder to obtain, I'm betting on the former, especially if other countries follow suit. Slowly letting people die from untreated chronic diseases may be seen as more humane than outright mass slaughter.
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2. apercu ◴[09 May 25 21:22 UTC] No.43940991[source]▶
I don’t understand the endgame. If everyone is poor and dying who is buying all the useless/social credit shit until there are 100m “wealthy” people left? And if “they” (whoever they are, I think we all give “wealthy” people far too much credit, many that I’ve known are pretty empty, insecure people lacking any real self awareness) want everyone else dead, why are all “developed” countries pushing for higher birthrates and encouraging immigration from less developed countries?
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3. numpad0 ◴[10 May 25 08:59 UTC] No.43944232[source]▶
The rich wants maximum survival, the poor less so, or that's how "their" world model looks to me.

Most cutting edge technologies like advanced rocketry are not requirements for a century- to millenium-scale survival at all-around medieval technology level.