
Walmart Launches Small Army of Autonomous Scanning Robots - jonbaer
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/03/20/walmart-launches-autonomous-scanning-robots/?href=
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chrischen
> “Wow, so it’s like taking somebody’s job?” Espinoza asked.

I don't understand why some people propose this as inherently a bad thing. A
robot taking a job means that a human can be freed to do other things; things
that we can't easily automate or have robots to do (like curing cancer). These
jobs/problems exist whether or not the robot is there to take the human's job.
Otherwise why wouldn't we simply regress to the stone ages and have way more
jobs for everyone.

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VikingCoder
We don't have Universal Basic Income. We don't have Progressive Taxation. We
don't have free food, housing, clothing, education. We don't have single payer
healthcare.

People need jobs to survive in this country.

They aren't "freed" to do other things, not in this country.

And yes, you're right, this isn't new.

But if you look at the amount of debt we are all in - education and housing in
particular - those are very symptomatic that people are living beyond their
means. And the educational debt is indicative that people at least believe
they need to be in that much debt to find a reasonable job.

Hooray that unemployment is so low right now. But will it stay there?

The FED is increasing interest rates. What will happen next?

Hopefully just more cycles, and not something new.

It's entertaining watching economists state as law that people will always
find work, just because it's always happened before. It's fine at making
predictions with statistical confidence, but that's poor consolation when your
prediction fails at something so incredibly important.

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chrischen
So instead of getting those things which you are saying we need, you're
proposing we artificially impede progress? I'm sure that cancer patient is
ecstatic that we're focusing on keeping people doing unnecessary jobs rather
than progressing with technology...

If you can argue that a robot that makes a certain manual human work obsolete
is not good for society, then you may as well argue against all technology
that reduces unnecessary manual work in order to create more jobs for the less
capable.

The whole point of technology is to reduce the amount of work we need to do so
that we can do more complicated things. If you're artificially impeding such
progress in order to create useless busy work for people, then you're avoiding
the main issue: we have too many useless people. However in my opinion people
aren't useless and can always be repurposed for higher order tasks that robots
or AI cannot master yet.

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lghh
The issue though is that the person whose job this is taking likely is not
going to be the same person that is going to help the cancer patient. If that
was the case, they would have already been helping the cancer patient and not
scanning things at Walmart.

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chrischen
Of course not, but cancer research is not the only society benefitting line of
work that can't be automated yet. I used it as an extreme example of something
that clearly isn't automated yet and that which resources (overall in society)
can be freed up for to pursue.

If you use a bit of imagination, robots at the lowest level can free up jobs
so that the lower level say coal worker or walmart worker can be freed to
pursue something slightly higher level, which can free up options for jobs at
an even higher level, and so on and so forth, until pressure is relieved to
allow for more cancer researchers.

Imagine if we had automated cars that could drive us anywhere. The decreased
costs of transit would make everyone else wealthier as we can do more things
in the workday, go to new places, get more done. Former Uber drivers can now
go back to school or training for less menial tasks, and the ability to train
for jobs that can improve society even further (in the same way that automated
driving did). Such improvements would make the job of a cancer researcher
easier in and of itself, but also the labor force that is now relieved of
duty, but more importantly now forced to pursue more useful tasks, will lead
to further improvements in society that ultimately benefit the cancer
researchers at the top of the pyramid.

Over 600 million people in developing countries have to walk miles to get
fresh water. Arguing that automation should be impeded to save jobs is the
same as arguing that these people should continue walking so they don't lose
their jobs walking for water. It's pretty clear if you look at that that
before any of those developing country citizens can cure cancer, they'd have
to solve their water problem first (by automating it with pipes and
filtration), fix their mosquito and public health issues, and other things
that should be solved/automated away so that no more manual labor is required.

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lghh
Sorry to respond so late, but I want to get things clarified.

> If you use a bit of imagination, robots at the lowest level can free up jobs
> so that the lower level say coal worker or walmart worker can be freed to
> pursue something slightly higher level, which can free up options for jobs
> at an even higher level, and so on and so forth, until pressure is relieved
> to allow for more cancer researchers.

I don't understand this connection. They are already "free" to do those things
but can't for varying socioeconomic reasons or simply because they don't want
to. Suddenly losing their job isn't going to free them into making their life
better.

> Over 600 million people in developing countries have to walk miles to get
> fresh water. Arguing that automation should be impeded to save jobs is the
> same as arguing that these people should continue walking so they don't lose
> their jobs walking for water.

I, and I assume most people, are not arguing that. What we are arguing is that
when these things happen they are painful and hurt people and that often their
lives don't get better. When we, as people in tech, automate out a career we
also have a responsibility to help those people whose life we ruined.
Collecting water to survive != working at walmart making some goober in a suit
a ton of money. Of course when people's basic needs are met better their lives
get better. We are taking away their ability to meet their needs (income), not
freeing them from those needs to improve their lives.

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bruceb
so out of curiosity I submitted the same story from the same source first:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16649362](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16649362)

with the url: [http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/03/20/walmart-
launches...](http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/03/20/walmart-launches-
autonomous-scanning-robots/)

then this post is submitted with same url but with /?href= added
[http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/03/20/walmart-
launches...](http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/03/20/walmart-launches-
autonomous-scanning-robots/?href=)

and it hits the frontpage.

Is that all it takes to resubmit the same story?

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dspillett
_> Is that all it takes to resubmitted the same story?_

They _are_ different URLs, so a simple "same URL is a re-submission" check is
going to let them both pass.

No automated system is going to be able to reliably tell the difference
between two similar URLs that point to different articles on the same source
or similar URLs that reference the same content, without pulling the content
for both and analysing the differences (and even if they are the same
resource, the requests might be slightly different if they include things like
timestamps, per-request varying advert include markup, and so on).

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Isamu
Bossa Nova robotics in Pittsburgh.

[http://www.bossanova.com/](http://www.bossanova.com/)

Scanning the shelves is tedious, slow and prone to error. The robots are not
error-free but they are a bit faster.

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lawlessone
Hmm i wonder will we end up with supermarkets being run by many different
specialist bots, like an ecosystem.

Another bot could be used just for stacking.

Others would just be for cleaning etc.

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Animats
That's in line with WalMart's real edge - "move data, not stuff". With humans,
you take shelf inventory maybe once a week. With a robot, at least once a day.
Going to a store and finding something out of stock is now unacceptable to
customers. They'll never place an order for it. If they wanted to order
something, they use Amazon.

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smoyer
Please mark this as having auto-play video - I just disrupted a quiet room at
work (and always read the transcripts instead of watching the video anyway).

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bargl
I had the same thing. You can turn autoplay off in chrome.

[http://osxdaily.com/2017/11/20/stop-autoplay-video-audio-
chr...](http://osxdaily.com/2017/11/20/stop-autoplay-video-audio-chrome/)

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mkirklions
The comment we needed

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JohnJamesRambo
Is there a photo of these Daleks?

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lotu
It is in the video

