[bmj]

It would be no different than if a thousand companies banded together to source labor below minimum wage by paying per task, and sharing that labor around rather than employing each laborer in a "job" (eg in a metro area with high population density). Those companies would be paying for net full time labor, while evading the minimum wage responsibility.

This is not the sort of disruption we want in the marketplace. Let's say someone rolls this out, with moderate success. What's to say a company like Wal-Mart wouldn't crowdsource stocking shelves? We already see some people taking advantage of low-income workers (giving less than 36 hours to avoid health insurance coverage, etc). This would be another opportunity to lower costs all around without much of an upside for those doing the work.

[marshallp]

That sounds like a pretty good idea, walmart crowdsourcing shelf stacking. Startups might be able to offfer that as service smaller stores right now.

Also, the possibility for automation is then great as well. Companies could offer assistive devices and software to the freelance shelf stackers for increasing their productivity, all they way to full blown robots.

Can also apply this to other tasks such as crowdsourced burger flippers and crowdsourced cleaners.

There's a lot of opportunity in automation of service businesses such as retailer and restaurants, but it seems like the industry does not take much interest in applying robotics to the task. This crowdsourcing system would be a way for nimbler companies to introduce more technology into the system without going through the management.

[krschultz]

Robotics is not as cheap as you think. I've brought systems in to factories to do seemingly simple things that cost easily $250k without batting an eye. You can pay someone more than minimum wage for many years for that kind of money.

What would robots capable of stocking shelves cost? $500k? It's just not worth it. McDonalds has how many thousands of stores - and they don't bother automating that much. Amazon.com still uses people to pick their orders (for the most part). The companies aren't stupid, someone has run the numbers and figured out that robots are too expensive.

It's not even Moore's law thing. Computer are plenty powerful. You can make a robot do these things. But by the time you buy good quality motors, batteries, and sensors, it gets expensive no matter how cheap the computer is.

[marshallp]

Industrial robots are heavy and thus expensive because they lack visual servoing. Heartland robotics plans to bring out a lightweight low cost robot this year. Also, the predator algorithm invented last year can do real time visual servoing that wasn't possible before. Add in a person to cover in the gaps and you might be golden.

If the above is true, why hasn't it been done you might ask.

I might be wrong, but you could have the said the same thing about why a search engine that didn't suck wasn't around in 1997 - why didn't microsoft, or yahoo, or ibm have that, or even buy it from sergey and larry?