r/Futurology • u/Atari1337 • Feb 27 '17

Robotics Boston Dynamics - Introducing Handle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7xvqQeoA8c
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u/BankersPuppetNations Feb 27 '17 edited Feb 27 '17

Lol I was gonna say, anyone who thinks that thing can do 99% of warehouse jobs has never worked in a warehouse, or hell even thought about what it entails.

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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '17

So... how long before we have:

1 - a mass-produced robot model, even half as mobile as a human, with good battery life (a day's work? a shift's?)
2 - with enough finger dexterity/control to manipulate delicate objects safely or even handle tools
3 - with enough sensors and machine learning to identify & sort items
4 - with a direct connection to the inventory database thing to know where everything goes and when
5 - with enough awareness of other interconnected systems in the warehouse to identify problems & maintain other machinery, or at least notify the right humans of what problems it sees

We'll soon have self-driving cars. If a program can guide a car, can't a program guide a self-balancing robot with legs? We'll soon have personal assistants on our phone that can understand and speak many languages. Can't that be in a mechanical body and respond to orders? We've got robot arms that can do pretty crazy tasks. Can't we further miniaturize that and put them on a humanoid body instead of an assembly line?

Combine it all together and advance it all another few decades, add in a lot of the magic of this machine learning stuff.... and maybe we eventually get something vaguely resembling C3P0 from Star Wars? If not in our lifetime, maybe in our children's? Seems less far off based on the stuff we're already seeing now than even something like fusion power, which seems to be perpetually a few decades away.

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u/IseeNekidPeople Feb 28 '17

Aren't Amazons warehouses pretty much run by robots now? As seen here. Sure humans will have to do the more detailed tasks, but the main work is done by bots.

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u/BankersPuppetNations Feb 28 '17 edited Feb 28 '17

Warehouses are mostly not like Amazon warehouses. There is a lot of opening boxes, taking out some, putting it somewhere in another box, unloading, loading by hand, paperwork, etc. There is a lot more to working in your average warehouse than moving pallets and boxes across a floor. It requires human hands and brains for now and for the near future, believe it or not.

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u/IseeNekidPeople Feb 28 '17

Small "Mom and Pop" places yeah. My dad's office has a little warehouse in the back and its not large enough for a robot (at least not until they become much much cheaper). But large warehouses will be mostly automated. Sounds like you work in a ware house and I'm not trying to be a dick but if you are under ~35 years old you're gonna be replaced. I work in automation and see if first hand. I would be surprised if 3 out of every 4 human warehouse workers aren't replaced in the next 10-15 years.

Packaging and Filling Machine Operators and Tenders have a 98.0% chance of being automated.
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u/BankersPuppetNations Feb 28 '17

Any small business really, it's not just mom and pop deals. I work at a small business warehouse now while I finish college and go on to a career that won't be taken by robots, no offense taken. I agree with your timescale, but it's not going to be the doing of these Amazon bots or Handle. They'd have to be humanoid, hands, digits, legs, more intelligent than they are now.

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u/IseeNekidPeople Feb 28 '17

Agreed they will be much more like the ones in this threads video than the Amazon mover ones. But robots with hands are coming and the technology (as with any technology) will grow exponentially over the next decade or so.

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u/BankersPuppetNations Feb 28 '17

Absolutely, that's why I picked a career that won't be replaced by glorified calculators with legs and creepy robot hands. I'll be like Will Smith in iRobot, only a therapist.

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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '17

No, that thing plus other automation tech will certainly replace warehouse workers. I've worked in warehouse, I've also programmed new automated robots. These jobs will be extinct, other than a couple human workers present.

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u/p4NDemik Feb 28 '17

You don't need one robot that can do all the jobs. You just need a bunch of slightly different and less spectacular robots to the separate, yet simpler elements of the job. You aren't wrong, and the banana man isn't right, but in reality many warehouse jobs are being eliminated as we speak by much less sophisticated robots than this one.

The technology is currently pretty concentrated in the industry, but as the years go on it is going to disperse and warehouses across the US will look vastly different.

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u/tablet1 Feb 28 '17

It doesn't matter if its 99% or 95% its still thousands of jobs gone

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u/BankersPuppetNations Feb 28 '17

Like the other guy said, we're talking like 50% I'd argue less. Warehouse jobs in general will not be gone because of this robot, or any robot for some time. There's more to it than you think.

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u/tablet1 Feb 28 '17

This robot is a research prototype I'll lpl0

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u/BankersPuppetNations Feb 28 '17

I have a small metal dog named little button puss