I was an order picker once in a grocery warehouse, it helped put me through school. I was also a paperboy, a film projectionist, and a bike messenger. All automated now or will be soon. Later I became an editorial illustrator, and when the smartphone hit critical mass I lost 80% of my running gigs over a couple months, print media collapsed very suddenly: that hurt.<p>So when Uber drivers complain about self driving cars I just cackle maniacally.
This is what fascinates me about discussions on subjects such as basic income. BI may not be the right answer and it may not even be viable. However, the writing is on the wall and big changes are coming sooner than we expect.
Interesting. The video doesn't show the mechanism by which the little mobile units grab and load a case of something from the racks. That's the classic hard problem with automated storage and retrieval systems. Most of them use special pallets or totes. This one doesn't. That's a big win. Everything else in that video is off the shelf technology.<p>This is a wholesale warehouse; pallets go in and pallets with different mixes of boxes go out. It's not a fulfillment center where small customer orders are picked. Amazon is working on that, but so far they're only semi-automated. Kiva robots bring the racks to a human picker, who takes an object out of one bin and puts it in another. Amazon has a competition for robots to do that.
"... There aren’t enough young people coming into the workforce who really want to work in warehouses."<p>Interesting comment, passing the blame to people. A better comment would have been, "we don't want people to do these type of jobs because we're building a better utopia of the future ..."
Mrs Clinton and/or Mr Trump had better figure something out this time round, or next time this country is going to have a large group of grumpy blue collar workers out of a job and a new crop who never got the chance to have one, if they don't figure out quick how to address these structural changes. It won't be one made up of largely rustbelt blue collar workers whose jobs got outsourced overseas or across the border.<p>This is cutting unskilled and low-skilled labor at the knee. The only bastion left is one that domestic workers are loath to do and that is harvesting and meatpacking --but those will likely fall to automation as well.<p>This time the giant sucking sound wont be coming from south of the border but rather from the army of robotic workers.
Everyone thinks it's the blue collar jobs that will be lost to automation, but I guess a lot of office jobs will be too.<p>Especially jobs where the data is easily machine readable, processes can be online, and the work doesn't require human negotiation.
I don't know why you would complain about it.<p>1. Automate all low skilled jobs.<p>2. Create technocratic city-states. Maybe seasteading, maybe something else.<p>3. Robots won't be able to vote on things like Trump or Brexit.