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Fears of employee displacement as Amazon brings robots into warehouses
(www.theguardian.com)
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I would have thought that building an automated warehouse starts with designing robots and warehouses that complement each other. Using humanoid robots seems strange - I doubt that evolution gave us the optimal shape to work in a warehouse.
Sure thing. As if Amazons endgame isn't always to reduce costs and increase profits. They don't give a shit about their employees or people in general.
Ultimately we will absolutely want warehouses and bots designed for eachother to maximize efficiency and output but in reality today all existing infrastructure is designed around human bodies so it makes alot of economic sense to invent a humanoid bot to work with existing infrastructure first.
I worked for a company that did automated warehouses once. Their development over many years went something like this:
So as you see the thing is moving from one model to another is really complicated and requires rebuilding everything. They have tons of warehouses optimized for people so it makes more sense for them to build humanoid robots than rebuild all the warehouses.
Thanks for the insight!