Very cool, now the last step, automate the picker. So no humans are required to do this work. Saves a lot of money. And Amazon can be cheaper still.
This is what IT is all about. Automate the humans away.
Now what are we going to do with all those humans that are not capable of doing work that cannot be automated away?
Well, then you have Amazon's automated warehouses, where humans are already reduced to the role of flexible actuator. The only thing they do is take things marked by a laser pointer, put in a proper container and press "DONE" button. Even the actual product search handles itself, a worker doesn't have to move around at all.
I worked as a picker for a few days in a large distribution facility in my home town when I was in high school; this was over 20 years ago. They had rails everywhere through the complex which seemed to do nothing; when I asked what that was, they explained that they, together with the biggest IT company in NL, made software and robots to do our work automatically. It would be put in production the next year. It hasn't still. Why are humans still doing this work? Surely this can be automated, especially as companies have been working on that idea for well over 20 years, probably more?
Automating heavy machinery is a tricky business. The amortized capex can outstrip the costs of the operator by a significant margin. The cost of downtime due to AI failure may be larger than the savings of not having an operator.
If you can replace individual pickers on the other hand...
iPhones are assembled by hand and Amazon uses human pickers over automated warehouses which have been around for 30+ years.
Human labor is both cheap and dependable where automation takes capital and introduces risks. Just look at Tesla who cut back on automation at their factory.
The trend is for companies to do things by hand as they scale, and only automate when it's either required to stay competitive or the business enters a near steady state.
Why can't we just automate the terrible jobs out of existence? There's no good reason why we can't have a machine that cleans the toilet or takes your trash out to the street. Plus a self-driving machine that picks up your trash.
Automating tasks is freeing humanity of some amount of necessary labor to achieve (assuming any task is useful).
This means, in a society were things are correctly organized, more average free time for humans, more things we can achieve. Which is desirable, if we are not achieving self destruction or the destruction of our neighborhood. But I'm optimistic, I'm sure we will be able to figure this out at some point that I hope is not too distant in the future.
This is my feeling.
Also, if people like to do something that can be automated, they will still be able to do that. Just not as a job maybe... Or maybe not. Some people still paint pictures that are pretty close to actual photos. And, in my opinion, in a well organized society, people have enough free time to do what they like to do.
Not automating things we can automate is maintaining useless work for humans.
We should just be sure about what can be automated, which is not so easy.
If you replace a cashier by a machine, you may free this person from risking serious injuries in some cases, and from a task that can be dull and repetitive. You also remove some human interactions that people may appreciate (and maybe even rely on) and that a machine cannot provide. I've already gone out of a shop happier just because I had a nice or funny exchange with the cashier, or even a smile. At the end of the day, this kind of things is useful.
I believe we will always need human interactions, some jobs might not be automatable for this reason.
So cashiers might be better replaced by machines in many places for a lot of good reasons, but human interactions have to be maintained somewhere. This may not have to be part of a job however.
And i agree that sometimes, you just want to buy your stuff and go out without having to expose yourself to any human interaction.
I mean, we've done the same with farming. Is it 100% automated? No, not at all, but we've removed something like 99% of the human labor involved that would have occurred around 200 years ago.
Why don't we first automate the jobs that need to be done, but nobody wants to do anymore? One example: sorting mixed garbage and filtering out recyclable plastics (of various types), cans, paper etc. would be a great application for AI, wouldn't take away anyone's job (at least not in developed countries), and would be good for the environment.
You'll never see a hospital with no humans working in it, but moving patients around, cleaning and sterilization of equipment, patient info processing, analysis of test results, and even diagnosis are among the many tasks that can be automated.
You'll never get a full education without ever seeing a human teacher, but we already live in the day and age where a single instructor can teach thousands of students at a time. Standardized tests were probably the first form of automation any of us personally experienced, and it's not hard to see low hanging fruit that allows for improvement.
There will always be artists, but a lot of what those artists do to pay the bills is automatable. Robo-articles are already a thing, and many things like corporate music are similarly ripe targets. Similarly the tools for artists become steadily more powerful - animations, for example, that would have taken an army just a few years ago can now be made by a single individual.
You need a human face for social work, but there's a lot more to it than just empathy. Whether it is keeping track of paperwork or combing through old documents, technology can allow fewer workers to do more.
Similarly, law is overwhelmingly clerical work. For every hour litigating or meeting with clients, there are many hours spent reviewing case law and processing documents, both tasks well suited to automation.
There have never been more tools for supervisors and similar middle management positions. Tracking KPIs and scheduling are very automatable. Combined with reduced reliance on labor, where once you needed a large bureaucracy to run a place, now a single individual per shift might be sufficient.
I don't think I need to say anything on this site about the abundance of tools for IT automation.
The degree to which automation will affect you depends on what fraction of your time is spent doing automatable tasks. If only 10% of your tasks are automatable, odds are you'll see little change. If 90% of your tasks are automatable, you better hope you're in the top 10% of your field. The idea that your job can't be automated because one thing you spend 20 minutes a week doing is better done by a human is a fantasy.
People think automation will save humanity from the inverted population pyramid, but I think they are mistaken.
Automation is amazingly useful for building identical widgets, and also hopefully doing more unstructured tasks like picking certain fruits, but the cost and maintenance required for robots that can care for elderly people is probably going to be more than young people can sustain.
It's a triumph that we're automating these kind of jobs. Why are we wasting human talent on inane jobs like store checkout or junk food production? Every person in one of those jobs is a wasted mind. If we could put those minds to work on something meaningful think what we could achieve.
I assume some day they will want to use robots for this work. Amazon is already working on it for their warehouses. It is not much of a stretch to imagine they've had conversations about what physical work can be automated. I could be wrong.
The great contempt that computer people have for the skills that every human brings to the jobs that the do is always on display here. We haven't automated driving; we haven't automated picking tomatoes; we haven't automated bricklaying; we can't automate cooking a fucking hamburger. But they are completely convinced that it's just around the corner, because they are full of contempt for the skill and intelligence of ordinary people.
Frank Bardacke in his book, _Trampling out the Vintage_ describes the great skill that agriculture workers bring to the job that they do, from knowing whether something is ripe enough to pick to the dexterity required to pick it without destroying the fragile fruit or vegetable. Some jobs have been automated, but many more have not and most likely never will be.
Please, learn some humility and try to understand the skills that every human possesses and that they bring to their work.
This is what IT is all about. Automate the humans away. Now what are we going to do with all those humans that are not capable of doing work that cannot be automated away?
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