[surfingdino]

I consulted for three different large organisations over the last 14 months. All of them chose to let their workforce know that the management are "looking into using AI". In all three cases one of the first questions during all-hands town halls was "are we getting replaced by AI?" People are freaking out and managers are loving it, because they have shifted people's attention from how little they are getting paid to fearing being replaced by a hallucinating algorithm. So, based on my limited experience, I would argue that AI is a wage rise suppression tool, not a labour replacing tool.

[janice1999]

My townhalls have been very different. My company introduced a harsh policy against AI, even local LLMs. The main fears were leaking IP & confidential information and contamination of code bases with poor or copyrighted code. That policy may loosen in future but I think it was the right move.

[alexwhb]

I think in the short term that definitely makes sense, but long term… I think we’ll see more and more jobs be automated away. Look at what Amazon is doing with their new wheelhouse robots. In 2 to 5 years that’s going to become mainstream. Maybe sooner.

[bradknowles]

Wheelhouse robots? Could you be more specific?

Amazon has been using robots in their fulfillment centers for years now, and there are plenty of public videos out there on those processes. But I don't see how this would replace the use of humans in other critical aspects of fulfillment center operations.

[alexwhb]

Sorry autocorrect. i meant warehouse. Have you seen these? https://youtu.be/ZWonAz7Kczs?si=a0yF-YRRmXYsYj-Q

They are not the robots I assume you’re referring to that move the crates of orders around that roll on the ground.

[bradknowles]

I had not seen those, no. I had seen the robots shown at https://youtu.be/0MCMB53jlIk?si=QwWegssGG_d6utJL and https://youtu.be/G-WdDeQ4TKw?si=b3IJF2OMcFYKEIRt which I think are likely to be much more useful and practical in a warehouse setting.

IMO, human-style robots are not a good solution for automating a warehouse. They're too limited in terms of how much they can pick up and move, and they're too small. They can't do the highly dexterous operations that currently require real humans, and they can't replace what the big robots can do.

IMO, anyone who is pitching human type robots today is just spinning a bunch of of smoke and mirrors. The real success will come from completely redesigning the whole system around the new robots that will be much more effective and efficient.

[HeatrayEnjoyer]

Their new robots are dexterous and able to automate much more complex tasks than the existing bots.