Amazon Picking Challenge

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To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'Connell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cosmological principle, dark matter, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, double helix, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Extropian, friendly AI, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, impulse control, income inequality, invention of the wheel, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Lyft, Mars Rover, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, profit motive, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Skype, SoftBank, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge

Already, we had become comfortable with automated checkouts at supermarkets, with touchscreens and instructions from computerized voices where previously there would have been a human being, earning a paycheck. Earlier that week, in Seattle, Amazon had held a robotics competition of its own. The Amazon Picking Challenge set companies the task of developing a robot capable of replacing its human stock pickers. And you could see how this would make sense for Amazon, a company that had long been known for its poor treatment of its warehouse workers, and for its monomaniacal focus on the elimination of every kind of middleman—of booksellers, editors, publishers, postal workers, couriers.

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb

Abraham Wald, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Black Swan, blockchain, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, fulfillment center, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, high net worth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, information retrieval, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Levy, strong AI, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

As a result, Amazon alone employs forty thousand human pickers full-time and tens of thousands more part-time during the busy holiday season. Human pickers handle approximately 120 picks per hour. Many companies that handle high-volume fulfillment would like to automate picking. For the past three years, Amazon incentivized the best robotics teams in the world to work on the long-studied problem of grasping by hosting the Amazon Picking Challenge, focused on automated picking in unstructured warehouse environments. Even though top teams from institutions such as MIT worked on the problem, many using advanced industrial-grade robotic equipment from Baxter, Yaskawa Motoman, Universal Robots, ABB, PR2, and Barrett Arm, as of this writing they have not yet solved the problem satisfactorily for industrial use.

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

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I don’t want to burst Blair’s bubble, so don’t mention that Amazon is one of the world’s biggest drivers of automation technology and that robots are getting exponentially better at overcoming their limitations. When I get home, I look up whether there’s a picking world record; there actually is an annual Amazon Picking Challenge that awards $80,000 in prizes. Grand prize goes to the designers of the robot that comes closest to, essentially, being able to recognize chiffon by its look and feel and pick up dildos without sending them bouncing across the floor. The robots are getting really good at it. Two Weeks to Christmas It’s 6:45 a.m., and I groan—actually groan out loud—as I log in to my scanner and find myself assigned to the fourth floor.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

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He tried to appeal directly to Bezos but didn’t get anywhere. Instead Bezos, Mountz recalled, was mostly fixated on the potential of robotic arms in the FCs. As a way to indulge the CEO’s interest and stimulate research in the field, his Kiva cofounder, Peter Wurman, proposed a competition among universities called the Amazon Picking Challenge to try to find a robot that could do a better job than humans lifting items off a shelf. The contest, with a meager top prize of $20,000, lasted three years and probably attracted more media hand-wringing about the potential of robots to steal human jobs than actual advancements in robotics.