Robots running a grocery store

Todd Walter said:
Brave new world, eh? It's what customers are pushing for, though. The government is going to have to figure out how to charge a robot income tax.
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When we get there let us know because we are a long way off. The salient point you are choosing to ignore.

I seen many a piece of automation go in place at the factory that employees me. What I haven’t seen is full automation anywhere. Despite this being a concern when I started there back in 93.

What tends to happen is lateral movement and advancement opportunities. Natural attrition works well if not back filling spots.

But the fact remains there’s very little if any fully automated places despite our quest for it. Amazon isn’t fully automated yet.

You know of any company that is? Fully automated where the owner just opens his bank account to see how much he’s made.

Not to worried what government does as that will sort itself out.
 
Gavv said:
When we get there let us know because we are a long way off. The salient point you are choosing to ignore.

I seen many a piece of automation go in place at the factory that employees me. What I haven’t seen is full automation anywhere. Despite this being a concern when I started there back in 93.

What tends to happen is lateral movement and advancement opportunities. Natural attrition works well if not back filling spots.

But the fact remains there’s very little if any fully automated places despite our quest for it. Amazon isn’t fully automated yet.

You know of any company that is? Fully automated where the owner just opens his bank account to see how much he’s made.

Not to worried what government does as that will sort itself out.
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A company with a fully dark production line is TCL. Otherwise, the reason you don't see it very often was that it was cheaper to have humans shuttle the WIP from station to station and vision systems were primitive. Now, with minimum wage being raised and tech being much cheaper, customers are now looking at eliminating those positions and investigating how to make it end-to-end. It's a race and the first company to get there wins, basically.
 
Todd Walter said:
A company with a fully dark production line is TCL. Otherwise, the reason you don't see it very often was that it was cheaper to have humans shuttle the WIP from station to station and vision systems were primitive. Now, with minimum wage being raised and tech being much cheaper, customers are now looking at eliminating those positions and investigating how to make it end-to-end. It's a race and the first company to get there wins, basically.
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Being creative in how we word things. I'd like to see that to believe it. Now I believe it is automated in a sense, but I also willing to bet there is human interaction at some point in that process. From either orders, ordering material, repairs on machines, to research and development, etc. But its one thing to say a process is automated. I get that. It's totally another to say everything is. When we have machines researching and doing that sort of thing for a company. I'll start to worry.
 
Gavv said:
Being creative in how we word things. I'd like to see that to believe it. Now I believe it is automated in a sense, but I also willing to bet there is human interaction at some point in that process. From either orders, ordering material, repairs on machines, to research and development, etc. But its one thing to say a process is automated. I get that. It's totally another to say everything is. When we have machines researching and doing that sort of thing for a company. I'll start to worry.
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Well, the discussion was started about unskilled labour; you were the one who moved it into the office. That's somewhat automated there too, though, (orders via EDI drive the ERP which issues POs and WOs) so headcount is less than it used to be but I seriously doubt either management or the lawyers will allow things to go through unchecked. Once AI is robust enough to handle outliers I bet we can slim down there as well.
 
I find it interesting that [H] has no Robotics Category or did I just fail to find it?
 
Todd Walter said:
rave new world, eh? It's what customers are pushing for, though. The government is going to have to figure out how to charge a robot income tax.
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Example:

Back in the 80's analytical chemistry using liquid chromatography was a slow, manual process. Chemists had to pack their own columns, manually pour samples through them and wait for hours for the analysis to complete.

Since then lots of automation has happened in the analytical chistry lab. A single chemist can remotely control tens or even hundreds of HPLC machines with auto feeders that automatically inject the next sample when they are done. This has drastically reduced the labor intensity of chemical analysis.

The chemists that remain do less of the manual drudgery and instead can focus their time on machine setup, method validation and other more skilled tasks.

So, are there fewer analytical chemists today than in the 80's? Absolutely not. We have the complete opposite. The high level of automation has made the analysis affordable to the point where it is used in so many places it was never possible before. Analytical chemistry labs hire many more chemists than ever before, despite each individual test requiring a fraction of the work it did before.

Not to mention, jobs, thousands of them, have been added in plants that design and manufacture lab equipment to support the explosion in analytical chemistry.

The lesson here is automation leads to higher productivity. What happens with that productivity is not certain, but it is not all doom and gloom. In many cases it can anctually cause explosive job growth.

A common theme - however - is that the jobs rhat remain or do grow explosively require higher qualifications. We are removing the unskilled portions of the labor from the equation. This can be a problem if someone is unwilling or unable to get themselves training or an education, but in general it is positive, as the unskilled poorly paying jobs get replaced by skilled jobs with higher pay.
 
HAL_404 said:
I find it interesting that [H] has no Robotics Category or did I just fail to find it?
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I mean, robotics and PC Hardware Enthusiasm are not the same thing, but I can see where there might be a natural crossover.

Personally I have never gotten into robotics though, other than validating some systems professionally.
 
Enocerous said:
Humans will still be necessary to pick up the pieces. Three robots collided and started a fire yesterday...
Ocado robot fire
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Fires do suck, less chance of a person catching on fire then a complex device using batteries. The grid system, small compartment robots to me seems strange, how much damage to the product do these robots cause would be interesting to know as well? Some businesses are making strange moves, local McDonalds ( monthly punk/diarrhea routine) walkin orders can only be done on the Kiosk and not the registers. Yes on the plastic surface where sometimes you can have a fresh booger to doge, bubble gum, other strange substances left behind from someone else. Of course you also have a McDonalds person there to help out and if you have cash only, well you get to go to the register - duh. The experience is utterly different then ordering from a professional (loosely here) smiling face or a different personality on the different times going. The friendliness, human type interaction, connecting to the restaurant workers/business becomes more or less you are just a number, pay, shut up and take your order. The small talk or chatter or not is no longer possible, a joke does nothing being told to a Kiosk. I can see, having three registers with 3 people going to 1 person 4 Kiosk machines maybe appealing to McDonalds but it may not be that appealing to their customers.
 
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