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Below, billionaire Amazon owner Jeff Bezos chats up technology at his re:MARS conference.
Many reports from attendees centered around all the sparkly new automation and A.I. advances, so it was a relief to find one that addressed the coming threat to human employment from smart machines. Author Kyle Wiggers (linked below) even included a list of dire predictions near the end of his article, somewhat similar to my collection in the following paragraph:
The point is that the automated future is bearing down on us with little attention from our political leaders — what’s to be done when significant numbers of American workers become unemployed because of robots, automation and artificial intelligence?
Some tech experts estimate that serious automation is only a few years off, as indicated by the chart below from a 2017 PwC report, How will automation impact jobs?
As we see from the re:MARS event, the tech community is industrious, goal-oriented and cares little about upending the existing economic order of wages for human work that has sustained our civilization for millennia.
Today marked the end of Amazon’s inaugural re:MARS event in Las Vegas, where roughly 3,000 engineers, academics, programmers, astronauts, artists, entrepreneurs, and NBA players from over 40 countries gathered to glean insight from luminaries in machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotics, and space travel. It didn’t disappoint with respect to sheer breadth of content: Roughly 100 breakout presentations, workshops, and a technical showcase doomed this writer’s mission to cover everything on hand.
Robert Downey Jr., channeling his inner Iron Man, on Wednesday announced the Footprint Coalition, which seeks to significantly “clean up” the planet within the next 11 years. Rohit Prasad, Amazon VP and head scientist for Alexa, introduced Conversations, a deep learning-based way to create Alexa skills with multi-turn dialogue that can interconnect with other Alexa skills. Zoox CEO Aicha Evans detailed the hardware and software underpinning the company’s custom-designed and shuttle-like driverless vehicles. And that was just the tip of an enormous iceberg.
But what stood out most were perhaps the advancements in robotics and what they could mean for the workforce of the future.
During the first re:MARS keynote, Brad Porter, head of robotics at Amazon, unveiled two platforms bound for Amazon’s hundreds of fulfillment centers around the world. The first is Pegasus, an item-categorizing system that cuts down missorted goods by 50%. The other is Xanthus, a modular drive system that quickly adapts to new applications. Both make up a portion of the over 200,000 machines that now work alongside the 300,000 human workers in Amazon’s warehouses — up from 100,000 machines a year ago.
“Customer expectations for convenience, selection, costs, and especially delivery speed continue to increase, and we realize we need step function changes in robotics,” said Porter.
During that same keynote address, Amazon worldwide consumer CEO Jeff Wilke revealed a new six-propeller, electric, and fully autonomous Prime Air delivery drone that will soon begin delivering packages to customers as part of pilot tests. Amazon is aiming to fulfill deliveries of packages weighing up to five pounds within 30 minutes for shoppers who are within 7.5 miles (up to a maximum of 15 miles) of its warehouses.
And on the penultimate day of re:MARS, Amazon chief technology officer and vice president Werner Vogels highlighted RoboMaker, the company’s cloud robotics service designed to expedite developing, testing, and deploying intelligent machines at scale. “We’re now getting lots of attention and interest [in this],” said Vogels. “If we do this right, we will see the next generation of explorers working on the next generation of robotics technology.”
Amazon’s increased investment in robotics — which arguably began in earnest with its $775 million acquisition in 2012 of Kiva Systems, a Massachusetts-based company that manufactures mobile robotic fulfillment systems — accelerated with its recent purchase of Canvas Technology. The Colorado-based startup is developing a fully autonomous cart system. Even more recently, in warehouses in Seattle, Frankfurt, Milan, Amsterdam, and Manchester, Amazon has doubled down with $1-million-per-unit machines — CartonWraps and SmartPacs — capable of packing up to 700 products in an hour.
The moves are doubtless reducing operations costs — the savings with CartonWraps and SmartPacs are so substantial that each robot is amortized in less than two years. And they will likely further Amazon’s ambitious plan to reduce its free shipping option for all Prime subscribers from two days down to one.
But it’s a less encouraging development for the human workers whose jobs are at risk due to partial or complete automation.
A 2017 analysis published by Quartz found that Amazon’s investment in automation and robotic employees will cause the combined employment at the company and related retailers to decline by a net 24,000 in 2018. Separately, Forrester found that AI could eliminate 10% of U.S. jobs in the coming months, and in the past year, analysts at the World Economic Forum, PricewaterhouseCoopers, McKinsey Global Institute, and Gartner have predicted it could make redundant as many as 75 million jobs by 2025. (Continues)
Amazon has presented its re:MARS conference in Las Vegas over the last few days, discussing new tech advances in robotics, AI and other topics. For example, actor Robert Downey Jr. announced a project to clean up the environment using robots which he thinks could largely do the job within ten years or so.
Jeff Bezos — who became a billionaire by skillfully adding robots to his online Amazon store — opined at re:MARS that advanced robotic hands will be achieved in a decade. That techno advance would be a serious game-changer as far as replacing humans in the workplace, because manual dexterity has been much harder to create than basic functional intelligence of the sort that is often used in business machines now.
For example, Amazon warehouses are run by a big computer brain that keeps track of stock, individual orders and where items are located on various racks of merchandise. But the little orange robots deliver the customer orders to workers to pack them up for shipment. When robot hands reach human-like dexterity, then Bezos can get his desired totally automated warehouses.
Below, Amazon’s Kiva warehouse robots are wired in to a computer system that tracks customer orders as well as where everything is located on the floor.
The basic Kiva warehouse robot will be getting an assist from a new smart machine called Pegasus that moves individual parcels from packers to sorting chutes. Note how the robot is characterized as a helper to workers rather than a future replacement for them in the company video below:
Finally, here’s a report about Bezos’ plan for dexterous robot hands to come in the automated future:
LAS VEGAS (Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said on Thursday he expects there will be commercial robots in the next 10 years that can grasp items as reliably as humans, a development that could lead to the automation of warehouse jobs around the world.
The remark, made on stage at Amazon’s “re:MARS” conference in Las Vegas, underscored how companies and university researchers are rapidly developing technology to perform human tasks, whether for elder care in the home or for the picking and stowing of goods in retail warehouses.
“I think grasping is going to be a solved problem in the next 10 years,” he said. “It’s turned out to be an incredibly difficult problem, probably in part because we’re starting to solve it with machine vision, so (that means) machine vision did have to come first.”
Bezos did not discuss any Amazon deployments of the technology, which it has tested from the Boston-area startup Soft Robotics, for instance, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters previously here
The company has said it views automation as a way to help workers.
Still, Amazon is known for its drive to mechanize as many parts of its business as possible, whether pricing goods or transporting items in its warehouses. It employs hundreds of thousands of people, many of whose primary task is grasping, scanning and placing customer orders.
A variety of companies other than Amazon have also rolled out robotic hands for limited warehouse pilots. (Continues)
A major reason why Amazon honcho Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world ($132B in 2018) was his early adoption of robots in his warehouses — see my 2016 article Amazon Robotics in The Social Contract for background.
Below, the Kiva robots of Amazon scoot under the appropriate rack of merchandise and bring it to a human packer for shipment.
Therefore it’s not surprising that knock-off machines have been designed to fill the desire of business owners to run their warehouses as cheaply as possible. One is from the GreyOrange company of Asia:
Keep in mind that whenever robots become less expensive than workers, the humans will be replaced. So it makes no sense to continue importing low-skilled foreigners via immigration when it has become clear that the future will be operated by smart machines. In fact. . .
Automation makes immigration obsolete.
Here’s a story about the knock-off warehouse robots:
Padmanabhan Raman, chief production manager, shows off charging station at Project Verte in McDonough, Georgia, on May 2.
ATLANTA — Tephnee Usher stands in a McDonough, Georgia, warehouse, separated from the stored goods by a black chain-link fence, and waits for robots to deliver the goods to her.
Human workers are confined to opposite edges of this 17-acre roofed space: delivery bays and shipping bays about a football field apart. The vast concrete area between them belongs to 225 electric powered, eerily silent robotic Butlers that perform tasks people used to do.
E-commerce, growing at 15 percent a year, is driving a second boom in Georgia’s robust warehousing and logistics industry, which employs about 118,000 packers and material handlers across the state. Companies setting up ready-to-ship warehouses here last year included Target’s furniture line, Wayfair home furnishings and Dynacraft bikes and scooters. Amazon has four “fulfillment” centers scattered from Braselton to Macon.
It’s clear the industry is changing. What’s less clear is how much that will translate into a jobs boom or bust as automation and artificial intelligence increasingly take over the work.
The robot-powered warehouse in McDonough just south of Atlanta will begin operations in June after test runs. It belongs to Verte, a Sandy Springs, Georgia, start-up aiming to compete with Amazon. Verte targets mom-and-pop to midsize sellers, offering to help them track, keep inventory, sell and move their goods ranging from shoes to cosmetics from manufacturer to home.
The low-slung Butlers are manufactured by GreyOrange in Alpharetta, Georgia, the American headquarters of the Singapore company. It can retrofit any warehouse with a flat floor into a roboticized one that can endlessly reconfigure its movable shelves for maximum efficiency. Products that arrive at one door can be stocked and on their way to buyers in as little as two hours, touched by human hands only two or three times.
The Butlers at the McDonough warehouse look like giant Roombas, the disc-shaped robotic vacuum cleaners. They glide among 6,000 refrigerator-size shelving units lined up in rows 85 deep between the delivery and shipping bays. They roll precisely under a unit holding an item someone has ordered, jack it up with enough electric power to lift more than 3,000 pounds, and move it to the waiting Usher, a human picker.
Usher then grabs the item out of one of its bins, scans it and hands it to team members who pack it and label it for shipping to a customer’s home.
The warehouse is cutting edge when it comes to automation. But it isn’t alone. E-commerce giant Amazon is adding highly roboticized warehouses across the nation similar to Verte’s. The closest one to Georgia is in Jacksonville, Florida, which uses movable shelving units and scooter-like robots that look like GreyOrange’s.
Repetitive work, like warehouse jobs, is widely predicted to be among those more vulnerable to disappearing thanks to robots and artificial intelligence.
At the same time, new jobs are created through the industry’s growth and adoption of technology.
Programmers and robot mechanics are now on staffs, but they typically take more education or skills. There is unsettled debate about whether continuing technological and social changes will create as many jobs as those shorn off.
“I think there’s definitely going to be fewer workers in warehouses, but warehouses are also experiencing labor shortages,” said Nancey Green Leigh, a Georgia Tech professor who studies robots and works with a National Science Foundation grant.
Packing goods for shipping is often tedious work at low pay, which has led to employee turnover and unfilled jobs. With the unemployment rate below 4 percent, there also are fewer available workers. Indeed.com lists more than 6,000 warehouse jobs in Georgia, the bulk of them paying $25,000 a year or less.
“On the one hand, we can be concerned about the job loss, but on the other hand, many of the jobs are not great jobs,” said Green Leigh.
Georgia long has been a logistics and warehousing center.
Atlanta has the sixth-most warehousing space among metro areas, with 683 million square feet. It is home to companies such as UPS and Manhattan Associates and has major operations for big global logistics providers such as XPO.
Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport is a cargo hub and Savannah is the fourth-busiest U.S. container port in the U.S., connecting Georgia businesses to the world. The state boasts excellent rail and interstate access.
Verte, backed by $45 million in venture capital, is hoping to leapfrog larger and older competitors with the help of GreyOrange’s robots. GreyOrange, also a startup, has received more than $170 million in venture capital.
“Anybody who built five or 10 years ago was too early,” said Verte founder Julian Kahlon, in reference to fast-changing technology.
Kahlon added that he wanted to build a warehouse capable of doing Black Friday business volumes every day, to keep up with the explosion in demand as consumers increasingly opt to have goods shipped directly to their homes.
Low-skilled warehouse work is not well paid, the average job paying about $13 an hour, according to the Georgia Department of Labor. And the work can be arduous. Before mobile delivery robots, pickers could walk up to 12 miles a day finding and moving items, said Green Leigh, the Georgia Tech professor.
But the drive for efficiency means companies also are searching for additional ways to replace humans with robots. Both Amazon and GreyOrange say they have built and are perfecting picking robots — the same job that Usher is currently doing at Verte’s McDonough warehouse.
Amazon also has a test delivery program in Washington state, where a wheeled robot traveling on sidewalks is delivering packages to doorsteps, and has made investments in self-driving vehicles, including shipping trucks. (Continues)
Jeff Bezo’s incorporation of automation into online shopping has made Amazon the world leader in e-commerce by utilizing the technology of robots. His business acumen has also made him the richest man on earth, worth around $150 billion.
Now the holiday sales statistics are in, and the system is working well: there were more items ordered and shipped worldwide than ever before — with fewer human workers.
It has long been a talking point among businesses going big on automation that they were adding the machines to “help” human workers, not replace them. Of course it make no sense for a business to invest heavily in modern robotics just to make work easier for the humans — the long term plan is large scale replacement, such as has taken place in automotive manufacturing.
Below, humans have largely disappeared from some aspects of building cars.
The jobs economy is booming now — thanks to Trump’s economic policies — but when machines become cheaper than human workers, replacement will happen. Amazon is a leading indicator of robotic trends, which we should watch closely.
Finally, it goes without saying that low-skilled immigrants are totally obsolete in the future automation economy.
The day after Christmas, Amazon celebrated its own annual holiday tradition: announcing record-breaking sales in a very long press release that affirms its status as the largest retailer in the known universe. As such, Jeff Bezos’s Big Store said that in 2018, it surpassed its own sales records with “More Items Ordered Worldwide Than Ever Before.” Of course, Amazon announces some version of that milestone just about every year, as it continues to upend brick-and-mortar stores and march into new digital markets around the globe.
What is notable, though, is that this time, Amazon hit its record with fewer seasonal employees than, yes, ever before. As Alison Griswold reported in Quartz at the beginning of the holiday hiring season, Amazon brought on 20,000 fewer part-time workers than in 2017 or 2016. And it still managed to moved more products than any time in its history. More items shipping, fewer people shipping them—the equation’s pretty clear. Amazon’s embrace of automation is beginning to show itself, and it’s beginning to bear fruit for Bezos and co.
Amazon bought Kiva Systems, a company that built warehouse robots, back in 2012, and has long been integrating automation into its supply chain. It is experimenting with autonomous delivery vehicles. Last year, Amazon expanded its cashier-less grocery store chain. And Amazon has pursued more fantastical autonomous visions, from its ever-ephemeral delivery drones to robot-proof worker cages employees might use to navigate a heavily autonomous environment. It even automates its top-tier white collar jobs.
But it’s only now that it looks like the company’s initiatives are poised to seriously impact hiring—the company had been expanding and growing at such a rapid clip (sometimes upwards of 40 percent revenue per quarter) and so had been hiring (especially in its fulfillment centers) like crazy too. There was room for both, and Amazon, ever sensitive to claims that it is automating jobs away, stressed that its robotics augmented work, not eliminate it.
In September 2017, the New York Times ran a short documentary about Amazon’s palletizer robots, which the company claimed had not led to any job cuts. “Amazon has preserved job growth at its factories so far,” the Times wrote. “Whether it can continue to do so is a subject of debate.” A year later, the answer seems to be that it will not. With the company’s growth rates currently expected to slow and to settle in the 20-30 percent range, and its automation technology maturing, the smart money says we’ll see it chip into job availability.
“We’ve seen an acceleration in the use of robots within their fulfillment centers, and that has corresponded with fewer and fewer workers that they’re hiring around the holidays,” Citi analyst Mark May told CNBC last November. This was, he said, the “first time on record” that Amazon planned to hire fewer holiday workers than it did the previous year, in the company’s 20-year lifespan. (Continues)
Companies usually deny that they incorporate automation to take the place of humans, saying instead that the machines are there to “help” workers or something similarly misleading. But obviously, businesses don’t invest millions of dollars without an eye to saving money in the long run. And Amazon is a top example of how smart machines can fundamentally change how a company performs its functions and become amazingly profitable.
Without owner Jeff Bezos’ decision of buy the Kiva robot system in 2012 to automate Amazon, he wouldn’t now be the world’s wealthiest man with a net worth of $150 billion as of this year.
Below, Kiva robots bring ordered items from the warehouse to human workers who pack customers’ articles for shipment.
There’s not a lot that can be done about the approaching automated future, although it makes no sense to continue low-skilled immigration when those jobs will be mostly done by machines in the near future.
Recent news shows that Amazon is continuing to utilize automation to save money by eliminating human workers.
Amazon is staffing up for the holiday rush with around 100,000 additional hires. As big as that number sounds, it’s actually fewer people than the e-commerce giant added in either the 2016 or 2017 holiday seasons, when it brought in 120,000 additional workers.
Citi analyst Mark May says he thinks the reduction in seasonal hiring is strong evidence that Amazon is succeeding with plans to automate operations in its warehouses.
“We’ve seen an acceleration in the use of robots within their fulfillment centers, and that has corresponded with fewer and fewer workers that they’re hiring around the holidays,” May told CNBC on Nov. 2. He added that 2018 is the “first time on record” Amazon plans to hire fewer holiday workers than it did the previous year.
“Since the last holiday season, we’ve focused on more ongoing full-time hiring in our fulfillment centers and other facilities,” Amazon spokesperson Ashley Robinson said in an email, adding that the company has “created over 130,000 jobs” in the last year. “We are proud to have created over 130,000 new jobs in the last year alone.”
Amazon bought robotics company Kiva Systems for $775 million in 2012, and began using its orange robots in warehouses in late 2014. By mid-2016, it had become clear just how big a difference those robots were making. The little orange guys could handle in 15 minutes the sorting, picking, packing, and shipping that used to take human workers an hour or more to complete. In June 2016, Deutsche Bank predicted Kiva automation could save Amazon nearly $2.5 billion (those savings dropped to $880 million after accounting for the costs of installing robots in every warehouse).
Robinson said Amazon has added 300,000 full-time jobs since 2012. ”It’s a myth that automation replaces jobs and destroys net job growth,” she said by email. “Our teams work alongside more than 100,000 robots at over 26 fulfillment centers worldwide and we are excited to continue increasing the technology we use at our sites while growing our global workforce.” (Continues)
China says it has the world’s first totally robotic warehouse although the machines are made in Japan. What’s noticeable about the ‘bots is how much the little floor scooters look like knockoffs from Amazon’s Kiva machines. Often when a large company purchases a smaller one (Amazon buying Kiva for $775 million in 2012), it then leases out that property, but the Bezos company has held its robots close, so there has been scramble for similar machines to be produced. And technology companies have responded with various machines to meet the perceived need.
The warehouse robots of JD.com in Red China look similar to Amazon machines.
Warehouse jobs used to be a possibility for low-skilled persons, but that occupation is one of many that are being disappeared by automation. That trend bodes poorly for the future of human employment.
And given that most immigrants and aliens coming to the US are low-skilled, we shouldn’t continue to admit them like they’re going to be employable in a decade or so. They won’t.
• Mujin, a start-up spun out of Tokyo University, has developed robot controllers that can fully automate warehouses and fulfillment centers.
• Its customer, JD.com, has what it calls the world’s first fully automated e-commerce warehouse in China equipped with Mujin robots.
• The Japanese start-up wants to help automate warehouses in the United States.
At a recent technology show in Tokyo, a large robot arm reached into a full-sized mockup of a shipping container and began unloading boxes from it. Set on a platform that moved back and forth, the robot was doing a job usually carried out by warehouse workers and forklift operators. The goal of the company that’s developing it, Mujin, is total automation.
The system, still a prototype, doesn’t work perfectly — it accidentally damaged a box during the demo — but it’s going to be trialed in warehouses in Japan this year.
“Lifting heavy boxes is probably the most backbreaking task in warehouse logistics,” said Mujin’s American co-founder and CTO, Rosen Diankov. “A lot of companies are looking for truck unloading systems, and I believe we’re the closest to commercialization.”
The Tokyo-based start-up is aiming to be a leader in automating logistics processes. To do that, it’s building robot controllers and camera systems and integrating them with existing industrial robot arms. The key product here is the controllers — each about the size of a briefcase, one for motion planning and one for vision — that act as an operating system that can control the hardware from any robot manufacturer. If a goal such as grasping an object is input, the controllers automatically can generate motions for robots, eliminating the traditional need to “teach” robots manually. The result, according to the company, is higher productivity for users.
Simply put, the technology — based on motion planning and computer vision — makes industrial robots capable of autonomous and intelligent action.
Mujin turned heads when it showed off its transformation of a warehouse operated by Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com. The 40,000-sq-m facility in Shanghai began full operations in June. It was equipped with 20 industrial robots that pick, transfer and pack packages using crates on conveyor belts, as well as camera systems and Mujin robot controllers. Other robots carted merchandise around to loading docks and trucks.
Below, the little orange Kiva robots scoot under racks of merchandise and deliver them to humans who fulfill the orders.
Today, many people find it easier to shop online than to spend hours to drive through traffic to a store that may not have what they want. Amazon’s recent record-breaking Cyber Monday following Thanksgiving illustrates its increasing success, along with Jeff Bezos’ ascent to becoming the richest man in the world.
The universe of work is undergoing a fundamental transformation because of automation and computers, and we’re just beginning to see how the future may function. Massive job destruction is a given, according to numerous tech experts. Oxford researchers forecast in 2013 that nearly half of American jobs were vulnerable to machine or software replacement within 20 years. Rice University computer scientist Moshe Vardi believes that in 30 years humans will become largely obsolete, and world joblessness will reach 50 percent. The Gartner tech advising company believes that one-third of jobs will be done by machines by 2025. The consultancy firm PwC published a report earlier this year that forecast robots could take 38 percent of US jobs by 2030.
Amazon may be adding employees now, but the company’s long term plans are to replace workers in their function of filling and packing customer orders as shown by the company’s annual Picking Challenge competition for robots.
And plenty of other industries from agriculture to accounting are incorporating more smart machines to save money.
So it makes no sense for America to continue importing millions of immigrants who expect to work here, right?
Amazon employs over half a million workers. In the past year alone, the online retailer has added roughly a quarter of a million employees to its headcount, and 238 cities across the country are competing to become the location of Amazon’s second headquarters, which is estimated to create 50,000 more Amazon jobs.
But according to Dave Edwards and Helen Edwards at Quartz, Amazon may be killing more jobs than it creates. Quartz found that there are 170,000 fewer retail jobs in Amazon-related industries — like bookstores, grocery stores and clothing stores — in 2017 than the year before.
According to their calculations, even if Amazon maintains an impressive 43 percent personnel growth for another year, the total number of workers employed in Amazon-related industries would still decrease by 24,000.
So where are the jobs going? Quartz suggests that an increase in robotic workers could be to blame. They estimate that Amazon added 75,000 new robots to their workforce in 2017 for a total of roughly 100,000. By these approximations, machines constitute 20 percent of all Amazon “employees.”
More robots don’t always mean fewer jobs, but it may in the case of Amazon. Edwards and Edwards write, “While it may be difficult to prove causality, it’s not difficult to see the correlation between a decline of 24,000 human employees and an increase of 75,000 robot employees.”
Amazon attests that the investment in technological workers has improved efficiency. CNBC reports it takes 90 minutes on average for a human Amazon employee to find a product and package it, but with the help of robots, a product can be found and packaged in as little as 13 minutes.
Plus, automation has played a big part in Amazon’s success. The online shopping behemoth couldn’t process the millions of products without computerized warehouses and the little orange Kiva robots that move items to human workers who package the orders.
A lot of the automation revolution takes place out of the public eye in factories and other workplaces. Nevertheless the effect on employment is real and will certainly have an increasing reach. The future economy will be very different as smart machines become more commonplace.
Below, Amazon purchased Kiva Systems Inc. for $775 million in 2012 to acquire its factory robots in order to replace workers pushing carts around warehouses.
There’s a not that government can do to mitigate the negative effects of automation, although Bill Gates has suggested that robots should be taxed. For sure, the government’s practice of importing foreign workers to work cheap (aka immigration) should end as being totally obsolete, given the automated future.
The tech giant said on Wednesday that Cyber Monday was its single biggest shopping day of all time. The announcement comes just months after it reported unprecedented sales on Prime Day, its special shopping event is for Prime members.
Amazon (AMZN, Tech30) said customers ordered “hundreds of millions of products” from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday. Not surprisingly, the best-selling product on Cyber Monday was an Amazon-branded product: the Echo Dot smart speaker. . .
Cyber Monday was also the biggest sales day ever for small businesses and entrepreneurs selling items on the platform. Customers ordered almost 140 million products from small businesses globally in the five-day period following Thanksgiving. . .
Beyond Amazon, a record $6.59 billion was spent online overall by the end of Cyber Monday, a 16.8% jump year-over-year, according to Adobe Analytics data. It was the largest online shopping day in history.
As part of Wal-mart’s competition with Amazon, the store chain is utilizing Amazon’s technology strategy by moving forward with automation to up its e-commerce game.
Naturally, the efficiency and cost-savings are emphasized, rather than the inevitable job loss.
CHICAGO (Reuters) – Wal-Mart Stores Inc is rolling out shelf-scanning robots in more than 50 U.S. stores to replenish inventory faster and save employees time when products run out.
. . . “If you are running up and down the aisle and you want to decide if we are out of Cheerios or not, a human doesn’t do that job very well, and they don’t like it,” Jeremy King, chief technology officer for Walmart U.S. and e-commerce, told Reuters.
The company said the robots would not replace workers or affect employee headcount in stores.
The robots are 50 percent more productive than their human counterparts and can scan shelves significantly more accurately and three times faster, King said. Store employees only have time to scan shelves about twice a week.
The idea of installing robots to automate retail is not new. Rival Amazon.com Inc uses small Kiva robots in its warehouses to handle picking and packing, saving almost 20 percent in operating expenses. . .
Even more futuristic are the drone robots that fly around warehouses to do inventory, as the BBC recently reported:
Flying drones and robots now patrol distribution warehouses – they’ve become workhorses of the e-commerce era online that retailers can’t do without. It is driving down costs but it is also putting people out of work: what price progress? . . .
What price progress indeed? A viable economy requires shoppers as well as products, but nobody in government seems concerned about the shrinkage of the demand side of the equation. Wouldn’t preparing for the automated future make more sense than pretending it isn’t coming?
Certainly America shouldn’t import more immigrant workers, since they won’t be needed. The remaining jobs should go to Americans, period, because:
Amazon warehouses depend on the little orange robots to bring racks of merchandise to human pickers who pack the boxes with the customers’ orders.
The contest used to be called the Amazon Picking Challenge, but the big management brains may have thought it was time for a classier name. I see the earlier Url for the event, AmazonPickingChallenge.org has been transformed into AmazonRobotics.com.
“Picking” is the term for pulling items from the warehouse inventory to be packed into boxes for customers’ orders. But as the video below shows, packing may be the harder challenge. The robot sucks up objects well enough and then drops them into a large box, with no attempt to use space efficiently. Amazon may have to order a lot of extra large boxes if this sort of machine is adopted.
I’ve blogged about this competition over the last three years and can report no stunning breakthroughs. For example, the robots in the video following aren’t able to pick up the objects on every try:
Below is the winner, from Australia, Robot Vision’s Cartman, that does the basic grab-and-drop pretty well, but no human pickers need to be worried about their jobs just yet.
The upshot is the amazing dexterity of the human hand coupled with our brains is very hard to recreate in a machine. However, the machines are going gangbusters in many other areas of work, from farms to factories, so the fact remains that America should seriously reduce the number of immigrant workers imported by the government. We have plenty of them already.
It only needs to see seven images of a new object before it can reliably spot and grab it.
A robot that owes rather a lot to an annoying arcade game has captured victory in Amazon’s annual Robotics Challenge.
E-commerce companies like Amazon and Ocado, the world’s largest online-only grocery retailer, currently boast some of the most heavily automated warehouses in the world. But items for customers’ orders aren’t picked by robots, because machines cannot yet reliably grasp a wide range of different objects.
That’s why Amazon gathers together researchers each year to test out machines that pick and stow objects. It’s a tough job, but one that could ultimately help the company to fully automate its warehouses. This year the task was made even harder than usual: teams had only 30 minutes for their robots to familiarize themselves with the objects before trying to pick them out of a jumble of items. That, says Amazon, is supposed to better simulate warehouse conditions, where new stock is arriving all the time and pallets may not be neatly organized.
The winner, a robot called Cartman, was built by the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision. Unlike many competitors, which used robot arms to carry out the tasks, Cartman is distinctly inhuman, with its grippers moving in 3-D along straight lines like an arcade claw crane. But it works far, far better. According to Anton Milan, one of Cartman’s creators, the device’s computer-vision systems were crucial to the victory. “One feature of our system was that it worked off a very small amount of hand annotated training data,” he explained to TechAU. “We only needed just seven images of each unseen item for us to be able to detect them.”
That kind of fast learning is a huge area of research for machine learning experts. Last year, DeepMind showed off a so-called “one-shot” learning system, that can identify objects in a image after having only seen them once before. But the need to identify objects that are obscured by other items and pick them up means that Cartman needs a little more data than that.
Wired’s video below, sketching out the automated future vis-a-vis jobs, uses the idea that smart machines are helpful collaborative robots, or “co-bots” that allow humans to work more efficiently. But that relationship will end when the machines become able to replicate human abilities and perform them far more cheaply.
One of the bumps along the road for roboticists is the amazing human hand, which allows Amazon’s pickers to pack boxes to be shipped to customers. Interestingly, Amazon has scheduled another picking challenge, where robot technology teams will compete for a big cash prize and a possible deal with the company.
Below, Amazon’s orange Kiva robots scoot under appropriate racks of merchandise to bring the ordered items to a human picker who packs the boxes for shipping.
Below are details about Amazon’s Robotics Challenge which will take place July 27-30 in Japan. The search is for a machine that “can recognize objects, grab them, execute tasks, detect errors and recover as needed” which sounds a lot like the picker job. Clearly Amazon’s goal is to find a machine that can at least partially replace the company’s human pickers.
With robotics technology advancing so rapidly, it seems unwise for the US government to continue importing immigrant workers. They will soon be unneeded, if they aren’t already.
Amazon is offering $250,000 to teams who invent robots that could potentially work in their massive fulfillment centers, and it has chosen 16 finalists for a tournament it is organizing later this year, the company said on Wednesday.
The e-commerce giant is running its third annual Robotics Challenge this year in July in Japan and has picked finalists from across the world. There are competitors from major U.S. institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton and Carnegie Mellon University.
Participants will need to show that their robot software and hardware can recognize objects, grab them, execute tasks, detect errors and recover as needed. The robots will be scored by how many items are successfully picked and stowed in a fixed amount of time, Amazon said. Continue reading this article
Warehouse robots are a big part of the revolution transforming a growing portion of consumer shopping from stores to online. Amazon led the way by purchasing the Kiva system and then keeping it for itself so other competitors could not spring up easily. (See my 2016 Social Contract article, “Amazon Robotics: A case study of how smart machines transformed an internet store.”)
Below, Kiva robots operate from a computer system that tracks and moves everything in the warehouse. The robots scoot under mobile racks of merchandise and move needed items to human-run packing stations for shipment.
But technology designers have been catching up with different sorts of robots that do the same work as the Kiva models.
The loss to society is a large sector of jobs in retail, and they are disappearing from the semi-public space of stores to private areas of warehouses where we don’t see humans replaced by machines. The “death of retail” is now a grim topic on the financial pages, as major retail companies are closing some or all of their stores. In January, Time reported “Department Stores Are in a Death Spiral” with the example that Macys planned to close 100 stores with the loss of 10,000 jobs. Other big-name retailers are cutting back severely as well. The story notes that as online outlets improve shipping time, shoppers increasingly use brick and mortar stores less.
The long-term outlook for jobs is dismal throughout the economy because of smart machines, yet Washington continues to import human workers as if there will be a need for them in the automated future, which there won’t. Oxford researchers forecast in 2013 that nearly half of American jobs were vulnerable to machine or software replacement within 20 years. Rice University computer scientist Moshe Vardi believes that in 30 years humans will become largely obsolete, and world joblessness will reach 50 percent. The Gartner tech advising company believes that one-third of jobs will be done by machines by 2025. Forrester Research Inc. has a more optimistic view, that there will be a net job loss of 7 percent by 2025 from automation. The recent PwC forecast was only slightly less severe than the Oxford numbers. So every automation expert thinks the technology will decrease jobs which is why business is investing big money to switch away from wage earners.
It remains to be seen how many jobs President Trump can raise in America: there is certainly repressed business energy to be tapped after eight years of Obama policies. But long term, many human jobs are being replaced by machines, and we should act accordingly. Step one should be slashing immigration because America won’t need a million new workers per year.
Automation makes immigration obsolete.
Washington needs to wake up to the technological future. It will be very different.
Amazon’s Robot War Is Spreading, Bloomberg, April 5, 2017 A slew of new automation specialists appear on the warehouse battlefield.
It was Amazon that drove America’s warehouse operators into the robot business.
Quiet Logistics, which ships apparel out of its Devens, Mass., warehouse, had been using robots made by a company called Kiva Systems. When Amazon bought Kiva in 2012, Quiet hired scientists. In 2015 it spun out a new company called Locus Robotics, which raised $8 million in venture capital. Last year, Locus unveiled its own warehouse robotics solution called the LocusBot—first using it for its own business, then selling them to companies that ship everything from housewares to auto parts.
Now, Locus has landed a bigger fish: It’s selling its robots to DHL Supply Chain (a unit of Deutsche Post DHL Group), the world’s largest third-party logistics company. DHL will use the machines at a Memphis, Tenn., location to help ship surgical devices to operating rooms across the country.
To do that, Locus’s software directs a LocusBot to a shelf where the specific item is located. A human worker meets it there, reads a description of the item off an iPad, and drops it into a plastic bucket mounted on the machine. The idea is that the robot does the majority of the traveling, while the worker simply patrols a specified zone.
“The first trend was to try to replace humans,” said Rick Faulk, chief executive of Locus. “Now it’s about humans and robots working collaboratively.” The sticker price on a LocusBot is $35,000.
Locus isn’t alone. Amazon’s acquisition of Kiva set off an arms race among robot makers and shippers across the U.S. who scurried to keep up with the e-commerce giant. That includes 6 River Systems, a Waltham, Mass.-based company founded by former Kiva employees, which this week is showing its robot at ProMat, an industry trade show in Chicago. There’s also Fetch, a company in San Jose, Calif., whose robot scuttles around warehouses and also does the walking for workers. Continue reading this article
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