This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Amazon announced using drones in 2014. In pop culture, drone delivery is like an assumed common practice. Yet fucking nobody gets their packages delivered by drone. It's been over a decade.
These robots are vaporware. Amazon will get a stock bump and that's the whole point.
Yeah, humans regularly deliver stuff wrong on our street. There is no way robots will manage. I get packages for both by neighbours and they get mine more often than correct deliveries and one of my neighbours is a business.
At my old workplace we ended up getting like a thousand toilet seats delivered to us. We were a web publishing firm.
Perhaps it wasn't an accident... 😂
Companies like Amazon would do anything. Except paying living wages
Remember that hitch hiking robot that made it across Canada but only made it to New Jersey (started in NYC) in America? These will 100% get the same treatment everywhere on earth.
Not only Canada, but also Japan and Europe.
The main difference is that these robots kind of deserve it. Not "personally" but for what they represent.
Yep.
Anything to avoid one of the richest people in the world paying his employees a livable wage.
Bro that is so gonna get HitchBot'ed
a photo was tweeted, showing that the robot had been stripped "beyond repair" and decapitated in Philadelphia. The robot was located by some people following its progress on its website. The head was never found.
Also, like... if you wanna replace human workers, fine, just give us the UBI.
Otherwise, riots would be justified.
as someone who has spent time living in Philly what were they THINKING lmfao
I imagine they will scale back robot design and just throw from the truck.
Amazon 1 year after launch: Unfortunately, the space needed for robots in the van means that the van has to return to base 5 times more often to reload with the actual packages and the extra weight of robots more than doubles the weight of the van being lugged around in the form of heavy robots. So that's why we are having to charge more for delivery and why it is taking longer for you to get your packages. But at least we can pay fewer salaries.
Also we don’t pay taxes but will fuck up the roads with the extra weight. Good luck driving over potholes suckers!
I can't wait to throw a Faraday blanket over one of these and jtag some open source firmware on it. What do you mean steal? I didn't steal anything, I just repurposed some garbage left on my front step!
The robot then encounters the entirely unpredictable American rural south
staircases half busted up surrounded by weeds and gravel roads full of holes
robots fucked with by kids who are now tying it to a tree with bungie cords for fun
one being dragged off in the background by a dude with a welding mask on
wageslave.exe has encountered an internal exception and must close
I tend to disbelieve this, mainly because a humanoid robot would be overkill. Custom-purpose robots would be much cheaper to design, build and maintain, with fewer potential failure points.
Be funny if hackers hacked them to kill CEOs.
Amazon still can't even figure out how to reliably get human drivers door passcodes into an apartment building, and then into its mail/package locker room.
The map system it uses for telling drivers how to get around a city to make deliveries is also garbage, can't account for traffic, punishes people for using faster side routes to get to the same place, tells you to park in areas that either have no parking at all, or where parking there would majorly disrupt traffic, or assumes available street parking will always exist in places and times it almost never does.
I once did an Amazon delivery gig where they booked me in for the time slot, I get to the FC, after waiting an hour they tell half of us: 'oops we booked too many drivers, so today you all get $200 for showing up and doing nothing, go home now'
???
Update: It is day 126 and Amazon still can't figure out where my camera is.
I know where it is. Their delivery driver stole it. (Yes, I just charged back my credit card. Their response was to send me an incredibly smarmy and condescending form email asking why, as if they don't already know. And they lost the chargeback dispute, obviously.)
So maybe their robots won't steal your package. They'll just yeet it into a bush 65536 yards from your house in a random direction instead. On the bright side, you might occasionally get a package that belongs to someone else from the other side of town dropped on your lawn.
To both this and that I say no thanks; I don't use Amazon anymore.
They can depreciate these assets over their useful life, because unlike your soggy flesh sack, these are capital expenses, not operating expenses.
... For now. I'm sure there are libertarians that think you should be able to sell yourself as the depreciable asset you are.
Amazons “genius” packing bots will throw a tiny fragile thing with a medium size heavy thing in a box 16x too big along with a shred of packing material.
Can’t wait to have that same “genius” applied to the actual delivery itself.
Seriously, I make maybe 5 or 6 Amazon purchases per year. I would say at least 50% of those disappoint in some way: the item was misleadingly listed, or it was damaged in shipping, or it doesn’t arrive when the promised. I really don’t find it convenient at all.
Not in Philly they won't lol
everyone knows its just going to be indians in a data center in india controlling the bots.
If i see a humanoid robot delivering a package i will throw bricks at it and then pee on it, in the way a 3 year old would during a tantrum.
I, for one, will certainly not loot it for parts, unless it has an unfortunate accident, in which case I'm just recycling trash that someone left out.
No they fucking aren't. That shit would be so much more expensive than a person. Liars, and not even particularly good ones.
Yup, and people seem to frequently underestimate how ridiculously expensive running a fleet of humanoid robots would be (and don’t seem to realize how comparatively low the manual labor it’d replace is paid.)
So, from what little research I did the robots cost from 5000$ to 500000$, as most articles point out the advanced robots cost 200000-300000$. In a lot of places around the world that's like paying a human for 8-10 years. Humans are easily "replaceable", where those robots have maintenance cost additional to the initial "investment". How is that feasible in the eyes of the big money oligarchs? I genuinely don't understand the end goal here.
I don't think they really plan to replace workers with robots. It fulfills two other purposes:
what? they gave up on the drones?
I guess they felt like drones flying over civilian populations was a bit too unsettling in this day and age, so they are shifting to humanoids that will jump suddenly from moving vehicles and dash towards a destination.
They already treat their workers like humanoid robots, so this tracks.
I just stop buying from Amazon
They will train it so well, it will even collapse like a human when overworked! https://youtu.be/6Kp5qrCExps . I recognized that bot from the photo.
Let's count the problems:
Any others?
At first glance it looked like the robot has a tail. That would be cool and seems like it might help somehow. Add a tail!!
