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Amazon's humanoid warehouse robots will eventually cost only $3 per hour to operate. That won't calm workers' fears of being replaced. - Digit is a humanoid bipedal robot from Agility Robotics. (www.businessinsider.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (3 children)

There's only so many tradesmen that are needed though. You get 20% of the unskilled labour market to specialize and all of a sudden every trades sector is over saturated.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Which means all the salaries go down, and the rich just keep getting richer.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Usually what's happened in the past is that new jobs become economical. If every possible job is replaced then that's the new territory.

I'm highly, highly skeptical this robot doesn't suck, though. They say it won't fully replace their workers, and I suspect that's because it's going to get stuck around a tricky corner or tangled in a loose pieces of packing tape constantly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Then instead of a warehouse full of people, Amazon will end up with a warehouse full of robots, and a few robot babysitters.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Best case, yes exactly. But again, that's happened before many times though (once upon a time, there was no conveyor belts or cranes in a warehouse either, there was guys doing that work) so I'm not too worried. Worst case it just fails.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The difference is that conveyor belts weren't poised to impact 80% of all jobs on the planet, AI is.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Okay, modern agriculture then. Before industrialisation, 98% of people worked in agriculture as basically peasants. Now it's pretty much exactly the opposite, with 2% working in something related.

I agree AI could be a major problem if it gets even a little bit better. This specific story isn't an example though.

[–] possiblylinux127 0 points 11 months ago

That sounds like a justification for not practicing financial literacy.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Then people will find new things to do. The extra man hours can be dedicated towards the manufacture of luxury products, art, and other less utilitarian items.

I do worry about the transition period, however. Mass unemployment isn't a permanent problem, but in the short term it can be a very severe problem.

In the words of my old economics teacher, subsidizing a steel plant just because you don't want to fire people may be inefficient, but do you really want to go walk in and tell a bunch of big steel workers their work is no longer worth it?

[–] possiblylinux127 -1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I don't believe that's how it works. Right now there is a ton of demand for skilled labor and I don't foresee that changing

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

The unskilled labour market is a lot of people. Using Canadian job data, assuming "service" jobs to be "unskilled" and "goods producing" to be "skilled" that's 14M to 3M jobs.

Take just 20% of the unskilled jobs market and turn it to skilled jobs you almost double it to 5.8M

I don't think you can almost double the skilled labour market and not have negative consequences, there's not that much demand.