warehouse automation

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Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Tech Insider, “Inside a warehouse where thousands of robots pack groceries (video),” YouTube, May 9, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=4DKrcpa8Z_E. 19. James Vincent, “Welcome to the automated warehouse of the future,” The Verge, May 8, 2018, www.theverge.com/2018/5/8/17331250/automated-warehouses-jobs-ocado-andover-amazon. 20. Ibid. 21. “ABB and Covariant partner to deploy integrated AI robotic solutions,” ABB Press Release, February 25, 2020, new.abb.com/news/detail/57457/abb-and-covariant-partner-to-deploy-integrated-ai-robotic-solutions. 22. Evan Ackerman, “Covariant uses simple robot and gigantic neural net to automate warehouse picking,” IEEE Spectrum, January 29, 2020, spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/covariant-ai-gigantic-neural-network-to-automate-warehouse-picking. 23.

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As robots advance and become more versatile and adept, these environments are sure to be periodically restructured to take advantage of new possibilities and maximize productivity. Within warehouses and factories, the automation endgame will unfold once robots finally do approach human-level capability in terms of their ability to grasp and manipulate objects. Beyond this point, the specter of a fully automated warehouse where employment is limited to a relatively small number of workers who supervise and maintain the machines becomes a realistic scenario. Amazon has clearly demonstrated a keen interest in achieving this milestone; the company has organized a number of highly touted annual contests in which engineering teams from universities around the world have competed to build robots that can perform the tasks now undertaken by the workers who pick items from the shelves in its warehouses.16 While building a robotic hand capable of reliably grasping thousands of different items—all of different sizes, weights, shapes, textures and packaging configurations—has proven to be a daunting challenge, progress along this path is inevitable.

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One result has been protests at distribution centers in both the United States and Europe, complaining that human beings are being treated like robots and that workers are continuously driven to meet unreasonable expectations under the supervision of ever more demanding algorithms.13 It seems to me that if these jobs are increasingly perceived as dehumanizing or even dangerous, and as workers are pushed ever closer to their physical and psychological limits, it will inevitably become a rational for their elimination as soon as the necessary technology arrives. Indeed, within these kinds of enclosed and relatively controlled environments, the ratchet of automation is likely to click forward relentlessly, gradually driving operations to become ever less labor intensive. Amazon is already moving aggressively to automate more aspects of its warehouse operations. A May 2019 report by Reuters journalist Jeffrey Dastin revealed that Amazon has been introducing advanced machines capable of doing the final packaging of products into boxes ready to ship to customers. Because robots still lack the dexterity to reliably pick up highly varied products and place them in boxes, the machines instead almost instantly construct custom-sized boxes around an item as it travels along a conveyor belt.

Billion Dollar Brand Club: How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy by Lawrence Ingrassia

air freight, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, barriers to entry, call centre, commoditize, computer vision, data science, fake news, fulfillment center, global supply chain, Hacker News, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork

It is something that online shoppers never see or even think about, unless their order is late or gets lost. But it’s something that direct-to-consumer brands obsess about, from the speed to the accuracy to the cost. The robots at work in the Massachusetts warehouse are the second generation of robots deployed by Quiet Logistics, founded in 2009 by two industry veterans intent on creating the automated warehouse of the future. Initially, they had used robots from another company, only to be informed that they would no longer be serviced. Their future in jeopardy, Quiet Logistics’ founders—with no robotics experience—scrambled to build their own, better robots under a new company called Locus Robotics.

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The enticement of getting a slice of the billions of dollars in delivery revenue has resulted in a frenzied race to make every step along the way faster or cheaper or better for the consumer. Some start-ups have focused on the shipment of cargo from an overseas manufacturer to a U.S. port; others, on moving goods from the dock to the warehouse; some on building robots and highly automated warehouses to provide the most efficient handling after an order is placed; others, on developing smartphone apps that help truck drivers to fill empty space on their rigs, or apps that allow online shoppers to track an order every step of the way. Many are tackling the last-mile problem, a growing issue as the number of packages delivered to doorsteps is growing exponentially.

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Doing this efficiently is far more complicated. Many orders can be for more than one item—toothpaste, mouthwash, shampoo, and face wash, for example. This requires locating individual items quickly and then making sure every package is filled with the right products and sent to the right address. The automated warehouse that AllPoints helped set up for Drugstore.com in 2000 used a series of conveyors coursing through the warehouse to carry orders to packing stations after workers had picked the items from shelves. Advanced for its time, it still required a lot of manual labor and was prone to bottlenecks if, for instance, a conveyor broke or slowed down.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

This is not a special characteristic of Amazon’s mobile shelving systems, mind you, but a characteristic of all random-access storage systems of its kind, be they digital or physical. The first time I heard of the principle was 4,000 miles away, in an even more automated warehouse in a suburb of London owned by the U.K.-based grocery delivery company Ocado. There, totes of groceries descend into an enormous three-dimensional matrix of goods that are retrieved by robots moving high above, hoisting totes with long cables. The layout and mechanism of Ocado’s and Amazon’s automated warehouses could hardly be more different, and yet both companies had arrived at the same mechanism for organizing them—random stow. Full-time associates rotate through jobs at fulfillment centers, so it’s entirely possible that the person who stowed an item one day could be picking it the next.

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You will learn what technology your cell phone has in common with spacecraft, cruise missiles, and the navigation systems of Polynesian explorers. You’ll also find a (hopefully) accessible explanation of the “thinking” process of the AI (artificial intelligence) that drives an autonomous vehicle. You’ll learn why automated warehouses are like microchips that process stuff instead of bits, and how the two were designed with the same principles in mind. You will be introduced to “Bezosism,” that braiding together of management practices, AI, workplace surveillance, robots, and hard automation that is the engine of Amazon’s success, and possibly the future of all low-skilled labor.

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This is true—she got the flu during her month at Amazon and had to take time off—but also an admission that a reasonably healthy woman in her midthirties can acquire a permanent, if not exactly debilitating, injury by working as an Amazon associate for as little as three weeks. (Workweeks at Amazon typically last four days.) Then there was the matter of the work itself. In its videos and tours, Amazon touts its automated warehouses, the ones with the pick towers and robot floors full of Mick Mountz’s mobile shelves atop Kiva drive units. Look, they say, in so many words, these robots are making everyone’s jobs easier. “The robots change the work so they allow us—people don’t have to walk as far, which is a complaint that we’ve heard in the past,” Jeff Wilke, whose official title at the time was CEO of worldwide consumer at Amazon, told a film crew from the PBS documentary series Frontline in 2019.

Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics and the Coming Robotopia by Frederik L. Schodt

carbon-based life, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, factory automation, game design, guest worker program, industrial robot, Jacques de Vaucanson, Norbert Wiener, post-industrial society, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce

If the larger robots in auto plants look like huge buzzards in the way they swoop and weave, these are nimble sparrows, hunting and pecking, picking up components from supply shoots, inserting them into holes on printed circuit boards, soldering, tightening screws, drilling holes, or feeding parts to more specialized machinery. The assembly lines are supplied by computer-controlled robot carts, or Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV), which bring parts as needed from automated warehouses, following magnetic tape or wires buried in the floor, like dogs tracking a scent. In most of the world, industrial robots are the property of huge corporations. But again, not in Japan. The most heavily publicized factories in Japan are the giant, ultramodern "lights out" plants nearly devoid of people, where machines work around the clock and in the dark of night.

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As if in a Japanese home, visitors to the Casio plant all remove their shoes and don special rubber slippers on entering the spotless manufacturing area. Cleanliness is important, but so is prevention of static electricity—the mortal enemy of microelectronics. On the second floor the calculators are assembled in two production lines, with two people per line. An automated warehouse rotates its racks of parts, rather like the revolving shelves in a jewelry store, and, selecting one out of eight thousand boxes resembling soda pop bottle containers, disgorges it onto a waiting robot cart, or AGV. Tooting a little ditty to warn off humans, the AGV takes the parts to the lines, where seventy robots and other computerized machinery assemble and connect the VLSI (very large scale integration) chips, the LCD display, and the solar battery to a printed circuit board base—in this case a thin carbon film—and package it.

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Tooting a little ditty to warn off humans, the AGV takes the parts to the lines, where seventy robots and other computerized machinery assemble and connect the VLSI (very large scale integration) chips, the LCD display, and the solar battery to a printed circuit board base—in this case a thin carbon film—and package it. Robots using vision systems also test the keypads and displays to see that they function properly, and then discharge the finished calculator at the end of the line to an AGV, which returns it to the automated warehouse. Actual assembly of a calculator takes only 2.8 seconds. Operating day and night, Casio claims to be able to produce 1.5 million calculators per month in these facilities alone. With robots, AGV, and other computer-controlled machinery, the Casio factory is a true FMS system; over sixteen different models of calculators in a variety of different sizes can be produced in virtually any quantity desired.

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It by Brian Dumaine

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AI winter, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, money market fund, natural language processing, no-fly zone, Ocado, pets.com, plutocrats, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

James Bloodworth is a British: James Bloodworth, “I Worked in an Amazon Warehouse. Bernie Sanders Is Right to Target Them,” The Guardian, September 17, 2018. He describes a workplace: Ibid. It opened its Andover: “A 360° Tour of Ocado’s Andover CFC3 Automated Warehouse,” Orcado Technology video, posted on YouTube May 10, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMUNI4UrNpM. Under each square: James Vincent, “Welcome to the Automated Warehouse of the Future,” The Verge, May 8, 2018. In February 2019, a fire: “Ocado Warehouse Fire in Andover Started by Electrical Fault,” BBC News, April 29, 2019. On the day the deal beacame public: Naomi Rovnick, “Ocado Profits Dip as Costs of Robot Warehouses Climb,” Financial Times, July 10, 2018.

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Now tech giants such as Alibaba, JD.com, Tencent, and even Google’s parent, Alphabet—with its smart home devices and self-driving cars—are joining Amazon in its quest to infiltrate every corner of our lives with AI. This has dire implications for the global job market. As these companies automate their warehouses, use drones and self-driving trucks for delivery, many solid blue-collar jobs will disappear. Moreover, as Amazon and other global tech giants move into new industries, they’ll accelerate the digitization of health care, banking, and other sectors of the economy and have an even bigger impact on jobs.

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The company says that when it asked a number of professional musicians to listen to AIVA’s pieces, none guessed the music was composed by a computer. So, what’s an out-of-work composer to do? Train to be a radiologist only to find that that skill, too, has been usurped by a computer? So far, the Amazon Go store, automated warehouses, and self-driving delivery vans are just early warning signs of a wave of new technologies that will make hundreds of millions of jobs obsolete around the world. For most people, the pink-slip-bearing robots haven’t arrived yet. But all signs point to the fact that they’re coming, except for those who exist in certain insulated professions—often ones that are high-touch or have an emotional component.

Amazon: How the World’s Most Relentless Retailer Will Continue to Revolutionize Commerce by Natalie Berg, Miya Knights

3D printing, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, asset light, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business intelligence, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, computer vision, connected car, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, driverless car, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), Elon Musk, fulfillment center, gig economy, independent contractor, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kiva Systems, market fragmentation, new economy, Ocado, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QR code, race to the bottom, random stow, recommendation engine, remote working, Salesforce, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, underbanked, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, white picket fence, work culture

In many ways, the Whole Foods Market acquisition was an admission that the grocery category will always require an element of physical retail, albeit one of a more versatile nature. At the same time, as we’ve already seen with other sectors, technology will dismantle the barriers traditionally associated with buying food online, while continued urbanization will simultaneously drive demand and bring costs down. Automation – from warehouse robotics to driverless delivery trucks – will improve supply chain efficiencies and the rise in third-party delivery services (Instacart and Shipt, for example) will allow more supermarkets to offer speedy delivery without the hefty investment in infrastructure or systems. Meanwhile, the customer value proposition for online grocery is exploding; today, consumers benefit from improved mobile phone interfaces, single sign-ons, greater personalization and site navigation, automated lists, recipe inspiration, delivery passes, voice-activated shopping, simplified replenishment, same-day delivery and alternatives to home delivery such as click & collect or automated lockers.

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However, with a price tag of nearly US $2 billion, Kroger chose to take a 5 per cent stake in Ocado worth $247 million instead of acquiring the company. Kroger made the official announcement of their intent with Ocado on May 15, 2018. According to the press release, Ocado will provide Kroger with various systems to help the company manage warehouse operations, introduce automation, and provide Kroger with an advanced solution for logistics and delivery route planning. The focus of Ocado’s efforts will be on helping Kroger more efficiently fulfil online grocery orders and assembling orders for Kroger’s ClickList curbside service. A total of 20 CFCs are scheduled to be built over a three-year period beginning in 2018.

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Some analysts and grocery executives believe Ocado’s model isn’t suited to the US market, given the fact much of the US population is dispersed across many towns and suburbs with small populations, whereas the UK is densely populated; ideal conditions for online grocery and last-mile delivery. Outside urban areas, many analysts believe it makes more sense to focus on having customers shop for groceries inside stores instead of building high-tech automated warehouses. I voiced similar concerns to Kroger’s executive team about Ocado’s effectiveness in the UK vs the realities Ocado will encounter in the US. However, I recommended a solution to Ocado and Kroger that if adopted, will eliminate the obstacles Ocado will face. The solution will also transform Ocado’s business model, allowing the company to expand into a channel they currently do not serve.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

No one doubts that technology has the power to devastate entire industries and upend specific sectors of the economy and job market. The question I will ask in this book is bigger: Can accelerating technology disrupt our entire system to the point where a fundamental restructuring may be required if prosperity is to continue? Chapter 1 THE AUTOMATION WAVE A warehouse worker approaches a stack of boxes. The boxes are of varying shapes, sizes, and colors, and they are stacked in a somewhat haphazard way. Imagine for a moment that you can see inside the brain of the worker tasked with moving the boxes, and consider the complexity of the problem that needs to be solved.

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Rather than having workers roam the aisles selecting items, a Kiva robot simply zips under an entire pallet or shelving unit, lifts it, and then brings it directly to the worker packing an order. The robots navigate autonomously using a grid laid out by barcodes attached to the floor and are used to automate warehouse operations at a variety of major retailers in addition to Amazon, including Toys “R” Us, the Gap, Walgreens, and Staples.23 A year after the acquisition, Amazon had about 1,400 Kiva robots in operation but had only begun the process of integrating the machines into its massive warehouses. One Wall Street analyst estimates that the robots will ultimately allow the company to cut its order fulfillment costs by as much as 40 percent.24 The Kroger Company, one of the largest grocery retailers in the United States, has also introduced highly automated distribution centers.

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Kroger’s system is capable of receiving pallets containing large supplies of a single product from vendors and then disassembling them and creating new pallets containing a variety of different products that are ready to ship to stores. It is also able to organize the way that products are stacked on the mixed pallets in order to optimize the stocking of shelves once they arrive at stores. The automated warehouses completely eliminate the need for human intervention, except for loading and unloading the pallets onto trucks.25 The obvious impact that these automated systems have on jobs has not been lost on organized labor, and the Teamsters Union has repeatedly clashed with Kroger, as well as other grocery retailers, over their introduction.

Celebration of Fools: An Inside Look at the Rise and Fall of JCPenney by Bill Hare

business climate, fake news, glass ceiling, haute couture, haute cuisine, McMansion, pneumatic tube, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, vertical integration, walking around money, warehouse automation, women in the workforce

Batten identified the emerging shopping-center moguls—the DeBartolos and Simons—and figured they might be interested in an anchor-store partner whose leases they could take to the bank. It became a marriage made in heaven. Committing to the expensive and protracted project of starting a catalog. Batten bought a small catalog operation, the General Merchandise Company of Milwaukee, primarily because of its technology. Its fully automated warehouse made anything at Sears and Wards look archaic. Even farther out was developing a way to recover data at the point of sale in the new stores. Nobody else had ever thought about doing it. Not Federated, not IBM, not anyone—and therein lies a story (coming up). Emotionally at least, the most seismic change of them all: consumer credit.

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They feel like they're part of a progressive organization on the cutting edge of things. Which is of no small value." [2]Twenty years later Batten could not recall the man's name. The Grocery Bag Soon after taking over catalog in 1966, Seibert went to Atlanta to inspect the world's largest, most highly automated warehouse. The building was just being completed, and his driver suggested a sight-seeing approach. Before the warehouse came into view, they turned up a hill and stopped, the young man motioning and saying, "Right up there, Mr. Seibert, for the sight of sights." "Kid's a romantic," Seibert thought as he walked toward the hilltop, the driver several steps behind.

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Penney Shareholders Hammer CEO Reuters Officially, the shareholders meeting was moved to Lenexa in order to emphasize the company's excellent capability in catalog fulfillment. Lenexa was the location of a typically big Penney distribution center (like Don Seibert's original giant in Atlanta). Highly automated, the warehouses supplied stores and processed a stream of catalog orders—and JCPenney Internet sales. Filling orders was a big hang-up for most of the new Internet retailers, and Penney, because of its multibillion-dollar catalog business, found itself fortunately positioned to move as fast as JCPenney dot-com could go.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

At the time it was only a half decade since ENIAC, the first general purpose digital computer, had been heralded in the popular press as a “giant brain,” and just two years after Norbert Wiener had written his landmark Cybernetics, announcing the opening of the Information Age. Shockley’s initial insight presaged the course that automation would take decades later. For example, Kiva Systems, a warehouse automation system acquired in 2012 by Amazon for $775 million, had the insight that the most difficult functions to automate in the modern warehouse were ones that required human eyes and hands, like identifying and grasping objects. Without perception and dexterity, robotic systems are limited to the most repetitive jobs, and so Kiva took the obvious intermediate step and built mobile robots that carried items to stationary human workers.

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While the humans work in one location, the Kiva robots maneuver bins of individual items at just the right time in the shipping process, and the humans pick out and assemble the products to be shipped. Yet Kiva is clearly an interim solution toward the ultimate goal of building completely automated warehouses. Today’s automation systems cannot yet replace human hands and eyes. The ability to quickly recognize objects among dozens of possibilities and pick them up from different positions remains a uniquely human skill. But for how long? It doesn’t take much imagination to see Baxter, or a competitor from similar companies like Universal Robots or Kuka, working in an Amazon warehouse alongside teams of mobile Kiva robots.

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At the beginning of that month, 60 Minutes had aired a segment about Jeff Bezos and Amazon that included a scene in which Bezos led Charlie Rose into a laboratory and showed off an octocopter drone designed to deliver Amazon products autonomously “in 30 minutes.”12 The report sparked another flurry of discussions about the growing role of robots in society. The storage and distribution of commercial goods is already a vast business in the United States, and Amazon has quickly become a dominant low-cost competitor. Google is intent on competing against Amazon in the distribution of all kinds of goods, which will create pressure to automate warehouse processes and move distribution points closer to consumers. If the warehouse was close enough to a consumer—within just blocks, for example, in a large city—why not use a drone for the “last mile”? The idea felt like science fiction come to life, and Rose, who appeared stunned, did not ask hard questions.

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

Permanent positions are few, but they come with some security, slightly higher pay and limited benefits; they are dangled as carrots before temporary workers, encouraging competition and overwork, further fostering a climate of uncertainty and fear. With the help of robots, the average time to fill an order in a warehouse automated by Kiva technology has plummeted from ninety minutes down to fifteen. Working conditions, however, haven’t budged: the work remains as dull and draining as ever, warehouses remain hot, and the pace of work can be absurdly fast, regardless of the level of automation. While workers in automated warehouses stand all day and try to keep up with the robots zooming by, workers in the nonautomated warehouses can expect to walk nearly double the distance on a daily shift of a typical mail carrier.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

Kramer, ‘The Biggest Thing Amazon Got Right: The Platform’, Gigaom, 12 October 2011 <https://gigaom.com/2011/10/12/419-the-biggest-thing-amazon-got-right-the-platform/> [accessed 18 September 2020]. 30 The approach has become de rigueur among other digital cognoscenti, but Bezos’s email should surely be considered as one of the single most important internal communications of all time. 31 Chris Johnston, ‘Amazon Opens a Supermarket with No Checkouts’, BBC News, 22 January 2018 <https://www.bbc.com/news/business-42769096> [accessed 18 September 2020]. 32 Peter Holley, ‘Amazon’s One-Day Delivery Service Depends on the Work of Thousands of Robots’, Washington Post, 7 June 2019 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/07/amazons-one-day-delivery-service-depends-work-thousands-robots/> [accessed 18 September 2020]. 33 Harry Dempsey, ‘Amazon to Hire Further 100,000 Workers in US and Canada’, 14 September 2020 <https://www.ft.com/content/9817aae3-1e89-4383-aa34-742447d5794a> [accessed 18 September 2020]. 34 ‘Netflix Continues to Hire Through the Pandemic, Says Co-CEO Reed Hastings’, Bloomberg, 9 September 2020 <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2020-09-09/netflix-continues-to-hire-through-the-pandemic-video> [accessed 18 September 2020]. 35 ‘Netflix: Number of Employees 2006-2020’, Macro Trends <https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/number-of-employees> [accessed 27 March 2021]. 36 Vishnu Rajamanickm, ‘JD.Com Opens Automated Warehouse That Employs Four People but Fulfills 200,000 Packages Daily’, FreightWaves, 25 June 2018 <https://www.freightwaves.com/news/technology/jdcom-opens-automated-warehouse-that-employs-four-people-but-fulfills-200000-packages-daily> [accessed 27 March 2021]. 37 Reuters Staff, ‘Dish to Close 300 Blockbuster Stores, 3,000 Jobs May Be Lost’, Reuters, 23 January 2013 <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-blockbuster-storeclosings-idUSBRE90M05I20130123> [accessed 7 January 2021]. 38 Daron Acemoglu, Claire LeLarge and Pascual Restrepo, Competing with Robots: Firm-Level Evidence from France, Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research, February 2020) <https://doi.org/10.3386/w26738>. 39 Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets, Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2017) <https://doi.org/10.3386/w23285>. 40 David Klenert, Enrique Fernández-Macías and José-Ignacio Antón, ‘Don’t Blame It on the Machines: Robots and Employment in Europe’, VoxEU, 24 February 2020 <https://voxeu.org/article/dont-blame-it-machines-robots-and-employment-europe> [accessed 10 September 2020]. 41 Till Leopold et al., The Future of Jobs 2018, World Economic Forum <https://wef.ch/2NH6NiV> [accessed 25 September 2020]. 42 Leslie Willcocks, ‘Robo-Apocalypse Cancelled?

…

Britain’s Ocado is widely regarded as one of the most sophisticated grocery retailers in the world. It has huge, wholly automated factories where cuboid robots scuttle around picking up lettuces and ketchup and shampoo, nary a human in sight. But between 2016 and 2020, Ocado’s headcount grew some 43 per cent. Chinese retailer JD.com has also invested heavily in warehouse automation. In 2018, the firm opened a warehouse that could handle 200,000 orders a day – with only four staff.36 Yet the following year, JD.com added 48,000 employees to its payroll, an increase of more than 27 per cent. All this means that we’re left with a slightly different picture of our supposedly jobless future.

Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI by Paul R. Daugherty, H. James Wilson

3D printing, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital twin, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, friendly AI, fulfillment center, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Benioff, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, personalized medicine, precision agriculture, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, software as a service, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telepresence robot, text mining, the scientific method, uber lyft, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

Because the only human interaction with the goods stored at a warehouse is when they’re loaded on and off the trucks, we must ask the question: What happens to the human workers at the warehouse? Caracappa says Symbotic currently retrains many of them. Those who performed maintenance on conveyor belts, for instance, are trained to fix robots. And there are new roles, too. Caracappa says system operators monitor the entire flow of robots. “Those roles are typically not in the warehouse before automation comes in,” he explains, “but we’ll hire them locally and the client will be part of the process.”10 (In part two of this book, we will explore these new types of jobs in depth when we discuss the missing middle in detail.) Supply Chains That Think Smarter warehouses are just the beginning.

…

Those improvements are the types sought by consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble, whose CEO recently stated his goal of cutting supply-chain costs by a whopping $1 billion a year. Part of those savings will come from near-term efforts like the use of AI and the internet of things (IoT) technologies to automate warehouses and distribution centers. And other savings will come from longer-term projects, including the customized automation of product deliveries of up to seven thousand different stock-keeping units. Whether these and other initiatives will enable P&G to save the company $1 billion annually in supply-chain costs remains to be seen, but it’s safe to say that AI will be playing a significant role in those efforts.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

The need for stuff is real: stuff keeps us warm and safe. It allows us to store and prepare food. It helps us attract mates and care for our offspring. And easy stuff is the best stuff, because it consumes less energy and gives you time to do other important things. Without capital-hungry stores, Bezos could invest in automated warehouses. Scale is power, and Amazon was able to offer prices no brick-and-mortar retailer could afford. He offered deals—to loyal customers, to authors, to delivery companies, to resellers agreeing to run ads on their own websites. He drew more and more partners to Amazon. Bezos broke out of the narrow world of books and DVDs and into . . . everything.

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About.com, 147–48, 150–51 Age of Enlightenment, 127 Airbnb, 225–27 Alibaba, 206, 206–10 Amazon, 13–62 agility of, 235 and Alexa/Echo, 9, 31, 45, 50–52, 56 algorithm of, 105, 106 Amazon Marketplace, 25, 41 Amazon Prime, 13, 14, 37, 42, 48, 48–49 Amazon Web Services, 37, 41–42 analog moats of, 91 automated warehouses of, 27, 29–30, 42, 52–54, 91 book sales of, 25–26, 45 brain-based appeal of, 176–77 and brand era, 50–52, 172–73 capitalization of, 3, 32–35, 36, 38–39, 54, 56, 188–89 and competition, 9, 25, 56, 181 consumers’ alliance with, 167–68 consumer trust in, 31, 32, 41, 56 current state of affairs, 3–4 data collection of, 32, 200 effect on retail sector, 24–25, 28–29, 57–59 and failure, 39, 40 frictionless purchases on, 32, 186–87 fulfillment infrastructure, 3, 42, 49, 54, 55, 56, 91, 166, 181, 186 future of, 165–66, 182 global reach of, 190–91, 191 and Google, 60, 188–89 growth of, 27–28, 34, 41, 53 headquarters of, 202 and hunter/gatherer strategies, 14–16, 25–26, 44, 176–77 likability of, 193 multichannel retail, 44–49 and Procter & Gamble (P&G), 194 product differentiation of, 186–87 and product searches, 8, 189 profits/revenue, 17–18, 34–35 and Quidsi, 46 and rational decision making, 170 risk taking, 35–39, 40 scalability, 24–25 sellers’ joining of, 166 stock appreciation of, 28, 28 and stores, 30, 31, 36, 43–45, 55, 56 and taxes, 34, 193 vertical integration of, 195 and Walmart, 228 Whole Foods acquisition, 44, 54, 55–56, 59 zero-click ordering, 31–32, 56 See also Bezos, Jeff analog moats, 10, 90–91, 92 Android, 155, 178 Apollo Project, 267 Apple, 63–95 algorithms of, 105 analog moats of, 90–91, 92 behavioral data of, 200 and competition, 9, 67, 90–91, 92, 179–81 computers, 69, 73–74, 132, 161, 180 Cook’s leadership of, 68–69, 87 current state of affairs, 4 and download piracy, 68 and education market, 93–95 and failure, 39 genitalia-based appeal of, 178–79 global reach of, 190, 191 headquarters of, 202 innovator status, 64, 67, 68, 161 intellectual property theft, 161, 166 iPod, 67–68, 74, 79 likability of, 193 low-cost production of, 88–89 luxury status of, 69–72, 74–76, 78–79, 80–86, 87, 88, 92 privacy issue, 63–64, 136 product differentiation of, 186 profits/revenue, 4, 69, 70, 85 risk taking, 68 secular worship of, 66–67 stores, 80–81, 82–83, 89, 91, 195–96 strategy for success, 57 and taxes, 83, 193, 197 vertical integration of, 195–96 vs.

Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions by Temple Grandin, Ph.D.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, air gap, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apple II, ASML, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, defense in depth, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, GPT-3, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, hallucination problem, helicopter parent, income inequality, industrial robot, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, ransomware, replication crisis, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert X Cringely, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, TaskRabbit, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, US Airways Flight 1549, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, web application, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

But the part of the conveyor industry where the United States stopped excelling is in highly automated systems. The company Robins founded to produce conveyor belts is now owned by an Indian multinational conglomerate. In general, automated conveyor systems are an area where Europe now excels. The German-based Kion Group is a leader in manufacturing automated warehouse systems. The company is developing a workforce trained in the skilled trades to improve supply-chain conveyor systems for maximum efficiency. In the most highly automated systems, there will always be a need for highly skilled people to install and repair the machines, the service that makes rapid delivery to your doorstep possible.

…

Minneapolis Star Tribune, February 13, 2015, B3–B5. Robertson, S. M. “Neurodiversity, Quality of Life, and Autistic Adults: Shifting Research and Professional Focuses onto Real-Life Challenges.” Disability Studies Quarterly 30, no. 1 (2010). “A Robot Maker Fetches $2.1 Billion as E-Commerce Warehouse Automation Grows.” Bloomberg News, June 22, 2016. Rubin, S. “The Israeli Army Unit That Recruits Teens with Autism.” Atlantic, January 6, 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/01/israeli-army-autism/422850/. Sales, B. “Deciphering Satellite Photos, Soldiers with Autism Take On Key Roles in IDF.”

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

It is not perfect, but because the system can learn on its own, it is improving at a far faster rate than machines of the past.42 Thus, while robots are still far from having human-level capabilities when it comes to perception and manipulation tasks, they are becoming sufficiently sophisticated to handle gripping tasks in a structured warehouse setting, like picking items and parcels off a pallet and placing them into cartons or boxes. Just as robots entered the factories, they are gradually making an appearance outside manufacturing. Warehouse automation today is probably where factory automation was in the 1980s. It is true that many of the AI technologies discussed above are still imperfect prototypes. But it is important to remember that just about every technology was imperfect in its early days. To most observers, for example, the first telephones seemed ridiculous.

…

See mass production American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), 315 annus mirabilis of 1769, 97, 148 anti-Amazon law, 290 Antikythera mechanism, 39 Appius Claudius, 37 Archimedes, 30, 39 Aristotle, 1, 39 Arkwright, Richard, 94, 101 artificial intelligence (AI), 5, 36, 301–41, 228, 342; Alexa (Amazon), 306; AlphaGo (Deep Mind), 301, 302; Amara’s Law, 323–25; artificial neural networks, 304; autonomous robots, 307; autonomous vehicles, 308, 310, 340; big data, 303; Chinese companies, 313; Dactyl, 313; data, as the new oil, 304; Deep Blue (IBM), 301, 302; deep learning, 304; -driven unemployment, 356; Google Translate, 304; Gripper, 313; internet traffic, worldwide, 303; JD. com, 313; Kiva Systems, 311; machine social intelligence, 317; Microsoft, 306; misconception, 311; multipurpose robots, 327; Neural Machine Translation, 304; neural networks, 303, 305, 314; pattern recognition, 319; phrase-based machine translation, 304; Siri (Apple), 306; speech recognition technology, 306; Turing test, 317; virtual agents, 306; voice assistant, 306; warehouse automation, 314 artisan craftsmen, 8; in domestic system, 118, 131; emigration of, 83; factory job, transition to, 124; fates of, 17; full-time, 34; middle-income, 11, 16, 24, 135; replacement of, 9, 16, 218 Ashton, T. S., 94–95 atmospheric pressure, discovery of, 106 Austen, Jane, 11, 60–61, 69, 337 automation: adverse consequences of, 11, 240; bottlenecks to, 234; next wave of, 339; social costs of, 349; winners and losers from, 343 automobiles: cheapening of, 18, 167; industry, 202; invention of, 166; production, 165 autonomous vehicles, 308, 310, 340 Autor, David, 225, 234, 243, 254 Babbage, Charles, 119–20, 134 baby boom, 221 Bacon, Francis, 94 Bacon, Roger, 78 Baines, Edward, 111, 119–20, 124 barometer, 52, 59 Bartels, Larry, 273–75 Bastiat, Frederic, 338 Bauer, Georg, 51 Bayezid II, Sultan, 17 Benedictines, 78–79 Benjamin Franklin Bridge, 167 Benz, Karl, 148, 166 Berger, Thor, 259, 284, 359 Bessen, James, 105, 136, 247 biblio-diversity, promotion of, 290 bicycle, 165 Biden, Joseph, 238 big data, 303 Black Death, 67, 75 Blincoe, Robert, 9, 124 blue collar aristocracy, 239, 282 blue-collar jobs, disappearance of, 251, 254 Blue Wall, 284 Bohr, Niels, 298 Bostrom, Nick, 36 Boulton, Matthew, 107, 379 Boulton & Watt company, 107, 109 bourgeois virtues, 70 Bracero program, 204 Braverman, Harry, 229–30 British income tax, introduction of, 133 British Industrial Revolution: great divergence, 137; human costs of displacement, 192; machinery riots, 103, 219; path to, beginnings of, 75; reason for beginnings, 75; significance of, 8; technological event, 149; textile industry, 100.

…

Government Printing Office, 151 Usher, Abbott, 40, 45 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 208 Varian, Hal, 328 Versailles, 84 Vespasian, Roman Emperor, 10, 40 Victorian Age, machinery critics of, 119 Vietnam War, 185 virtual agents, 306 Vitruvius, 38 Voltaire, 84 Voth, Hans-Joachim, 131, 337 wage insurance, 355 wages, American, leveling of, 211 Wall Street, depression suffered by, 211 warehouse automation, 314 washing machine, 27, 158, 160 waterwheel, 38, 44 Watt, James, 94, 106, 147, 317, 329 wave of gadgets, 30, 79, 179, 330 web designers, 248 Weber, Max, 47, 78 Wedgwood, Josiah, 127 weight-driven clock, 45 welfare capitalism, 198, 200 welfare dependency, 253 welfare programs, 240 welfare state, emergence of, 145, 221, 272 welfare system, tax-financed, 276 Wellesley, Arthur (1st Duke of Wellington), 9, 109–110 Westinghouse, 155 wheel, invention of, 35 White, Lynn, 42, 78 white-collar employment, 197, 218 Whitney, Eli, 74, 149 Whitworth, Joseph, 150 Wiener, Norbert, 230 Williamson, Jeffrey, 68, 207, 211 William the Conqueror, 44 Wilson, William Julius, 250, 252 windmill, 44 Wolfers, Justin, 336 women: college-graduated, 242; entering the workforce, 161 Word War II, 143, 230, 334 worker-replacing invention, 54 working class: as cultural phenomenon, 278; identity of, 280 World Trade Organization (WTO), 281, 286 World War I, 89, 108, 209 Wright, Gavin, 16 Wyatt, John, 101 Yang, Andrew, 291 Young, Arthur, 75 Zonca, Vittorio, 51–52 zoning, housing and, 361–62

Lessons from the Titans: What Companies in the New Economy Can Learn from the Great Industrial Giants to Drive Sustainable Success by Scott Davis, Carter Copeland, Rob Wertheimer

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, airport security, asset light, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Boeing 747, business cycle, business process, clean water, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Elisha Otis, Elon Musk, factory automation, fail fast, financial engineering, Ford Model T, global pandemic, hydraulic fracturing, Internet of things, iterative process, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, low cost airline, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, Michael Milken, Network effects, new economy, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, software is eating the world, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, value engineering, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy

Other notable transactions were Norcross Safety Products and Metrologic, both in 2008. Not only was Metrologic a great acquisition for Honeywell, but Darius Adamczyk, Honeywell’s current CEO, came over with that deal. In 2015, Honeywell bought Elster (gas metering), followed by Intelligrated (warehouse automation) in 2016. (See Figure 5.8.) It also kept up a steady pace of smaller deals that boosted revenue in the slower periods. When prospective deals were too expensive, Cote put the spare cash into buying back stock. Honeywell’s share count fell 10 percent from 2002 to 2017, all while revenues and profits compounded.

…

We’ve seen companies that were once firmly planted in the industrial world migrated elsewhere. For example, Danaher pivoted from a legacy tools company to a healthcare company through bold spin-offs and opportunistic deals. Honeywell tossed aside its best-known business line, thermostats, to focus on warehouse automation and software. Roper transitioned from pumps to software. But these weren’t pie-in-the-sky transitions. In each case, cash flow was deployed to a higher-growth, higher-margin, more defensible, and higher-return plan, executed over a long enough time period to better manage risks inherent in big change.

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

When these projects are successful, they usually informate and create better employee and customer experiences and drive companies to be more successful, grow and hire. When these projects fail, heads roll, customer and employee experiences fall and headcounts are reduced. Amazon Loves Robot Workers Projects that purely automate are far fewer and can also be seen as creating more jobs than they displace. An interesting example is that of a warehouse automation solution called Kiva Systems. Kiva Systems was founded in 2003 by Mick Mountz after his experience with the failed online grocery delivery service Webvan. Webvan was going to put all grocery stores out of business. Mountz believed Webvan failed because the high cost of warehouse operations meant that each order was too expensive to fulfil using traditional material handling and warehouse management solutions (WMS).

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Mountz believed Webvan failed because the high cost of warehouse operations meant that each order was too expensive to fulfil using traditional material handling and warehouse management solutions (WMS). Mountz decided to create a better way to pick, pack and ship products and Kiva was born. Teaming up with Peter Wurman and Raffaello D’ Andrea, experts in robotics and engineering, the Kiva three created an entirely new way to automate the traditional warehouse. The traditional model includes receiving products into a receiving dock and having workers put away the products on shelves using forklifts and carts. Then those same workers would go into the warehouse and pick the products to fulfil the orders that needed to be assembled, packed and/or shipped.

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Even with advanced WMS software automation systems like Manhattan Associates, HighJump or RedPrairie that can optimise the efficiencies of the workforce, order fulfilment costs remained stubbornly high, especially in low margin, high product mix orders like groceries. Kiva’s solution was groundbreaking and simple, and spawned from the answer to the question: Why have people deliver products to and from shelves if the shelves can come to them? Figure 4.6: Kiva’s automated guided vehicle system for warehouse management (Credit: Kiva/Amazon) Kiva created robots that locate the closest automated guided vehicle (robot) to the item that needs to be moved and directs the bot to retrieve the item. The mobile robots drive around the warehouse by navigating a series of barcode stickers on the floor.

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

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.

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Steven Levy, “A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge,” Wired, October 24, 2014, https://backchannel.com/a-spreadsheet-way-of-knowledge-8de60af7146e. 2. Nick Statt, “The Next Big Leap in AI Could Come from Warehouse Robots,” The Verge, June 1, 2017, https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/1/15703146/kindred-orb-robot-ai-startup-warehouse-automation. 3. L. B. Lusted, “Logical Analysis in Roentgen Diagnosis,” Radiology 74 (1960): 178–193. 4. Siddhartha Mukherjee, “A.I. versus M.D.,” New Yorker, April 3, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/ai-versus-md. 5. S. Jha and E. J. Topol, “Adapting to Artificial Intelligence: Radiologists and Pathologists as Information Specialists,” Journal of the American Medical Association 316, no. 22 (2016): 2353–2354. 6.

The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black-Scholes formula, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, credit crunch, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, full employment, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, pattern recognition, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, technological singularity, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

Keep in mind that automation offers cost benefits beyond simply eliminating wages. There are also payroll taxes, benefits, vacation time, management issues (and if you eliminate workers, you can in many cases also get rid of the first line managers), etc. There are also safety and liability issues; consider the safety advantages of a fully automated warehouse. The need for technical and economic flexibility may also tend to hold back automation for a time. If a business invests heavily in specific machines to produce a particular product and then that product does not sell well, it may be stuck with equipment it does not want. The obvious answer to that is that, in the future, automation technology will be more flexible and easy to adapt to different products.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

Ure was one of the first futurists; he conjured a nineteenth-century vision of fully automated factories, producing goods around the clock. “Central to Ure’s book is a social fantasy of autogenesis—machines that produce without workers,” as one design historian put it. Entrepreneurs, factory operators, and executives have been chasing that fantasy ever since. In the twenty-first century, Amazon touts plans for fully automated warehouses, high-tech companies aspire to “dark” factories—factories emptied of humans and automated to such an extent that they can be run without the lights on—and robotics and enterprise software firms pitch a battery of automation services and products to clients afraid of being left behind. Now, as then, we’re made to believe that we are in an uncomfortable but necessary transitional period, right before technology will inevitably solve all our woes.

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By the time someone leaves the fulfillment center—perhaps one that stretches out like an enormous brutalist shoebox across the Southern California desert or New York hinterlands—they might realize they had applied, attended orientation, taken a drug test, and been given a job at Amazon without ever once speaking directly to anyone who worked there. Of the major tech companies, Amazon has the largest labor force. It has the most pointed interest, and largest investment, in mass automation. The company has said it aims to have its warehouses fully automated by 2030, when Bezos hopes a menagerie of sorting, picking, and transport robots will do what human workers do now. Until then, Amazon will continue to be one of the largest employers in the United States, with 1.6 million workers on its payroll as of 2022—second only to Walmart. Analysts at MarketWatch estimate that for every job Amazon itself created, it has probably destroyed two or three others, thanks to its ultra-efficient business model and its wresting of market share from brick-and-mortar retailers.

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

Kiva produces robots which collect goods on pallets from designated warehouse shelves and deliver them to human packers in the bay area of the warehouse. Amazon paid $775m for the nine-year old company and promptly dispensed with the services of its sales team. Re-named Amazon Robotics in August 2015, it is dedicated to supplying warehouse automation systems to Amazon, which obviously considers them an important competitive advantage. Secretaries Most of the examples of automation given above involve manual work. There is one occupation which depends almost entirely on cognitive skills which has been largely automated out of existence: secretaries.

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Good data wasn't available for MGI to study the sector as a whole, so they focused on a small, important subsector, pharmaceutical wholesaling. It's technologically advanced, and it's Hkely to be emulated by other sectors. Its strong productivity performance, MGI concluded, was the result of warehouse automation, better organization of work tasks, consoHdation among retailers (fewer, bigger chains are cheaper and easier to service), consolidation in wholesale trade itself, and a shift to higher-value drugs— in other words, consolidation, better ways of picking and packing, and more "blockbuster drugs."

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

There are 3.5 million professional truck drivers in our country, and about 8.7 million people employed in the trucking business.26 Many of them will be displaced. If just one-quarter of them are, that’s more than 2 million jobs.27 No doubt autonomous vehicles will also drive down the costs of delivery services. The business model for groceries, retail stores, and many commodity products will consist of large automated warehouses that deliver products ordered over the Internet to the customer’s home or to a convenient location for pick-up within a few hours. Some stores will disappear; others will be transformed into showrooms. Approximately 15.7 million Americans currently work in the retail sector.28 By making delivery more convenient and cost-effective, the autonomous vehicle will spur the growth of virtual retailers, which need only about a third as many employees as brick-and-mortar stores to generate the same volume in sales.29 So, every 10 percent increase in market share by virtual retailers will eliminate on the order of 1 million traditional retail jobs.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

These are tasks that computers are perfectly suited to accomplish once a programmer has created the appropriate software, leading to a drastic reduction in the numbers of routine manual and cognitive jobs over the past four decades.22 The result has been a polarisation of the labour market, since many middle-wage, mid-skilled jobs are routine, and therefore subject to automation.23 Across both North America and Western Europe, the labour market is now characterised by a predominance of workers in low-skilled, low-wage manual and service jobs (for example, fast-food, retail, transport, hospitality and warehouse workers), along with a smaller number of workers in high-skilled, high-wage, non-routine cognitive jobs.24 The most recent wave of automation is poised to change this distribution of the labour market drastically, as it comes to encompass every aspect of the economy: data collection (radio-frequency identification, big data); new kinds of production (the flexible production of robots,25 additive manufacturing,26 automated fast food); services (AI customer assistance, care for the elderly); decision-making (computational models, software agents); financial allocation (algorithmic trading); and especially distribution (the logistics revolution, self-driving cars,27 drone container ships and automated warehouses).28 In every single function of the economy – from production to distribution to management to retail – we see large-scale tendencies towards automation.29 This latest wave of automation is predicated upon algorithmic enhancements (particularly in machine learning and deep learning), rapid developments in robotics and exponential growth in computing power (the source of big data) that are coalescing into a ‘second machine age’ that is transforming the range of tasks that machines can fulfil.30 It is creating an era that is historically unique in a number of ways.

Winning Now, Winning Later by David M. Cote

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, business logic, business process, compensation consultant, data science, hiring and firing, Internet of things, Parkinson's law, Paul Samuelson, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Toyota Production System, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation

New products and services helped us win 75 percent of the aerospace contracts we pursued during my last seven years, and they also helped boost our non-US sales as a percentage of total sales. On the strength of our new technologies, we’ve taken leadership positions in numerous markets—from small jet engines to commercial cockpit avionics, security systems to barcode scanning, warehouse automation to refinery and petrochemical technologies. And we achieved this growth without having to blow up our quarterly results. You can achieve similar results in your business, but only if you’re willing to think critically about how your organization can create new products and services, and how you might do it more swiftly and better.

Big Data Analytics: Turning Big Data Into Big Money by Frank J. Ohlhorst

algorithmic trading, bioinformatics, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, create, read, update, delete, data acquisition, data science, DevOps, extractivism, fault tolerance, information security, Large Hadron Collider, linked data, machine readable, natural language processing, Network effects, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, RFID, sentiment analysis, six sigma, smart meter, statistical model, supply-chain management, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application

With the newer database solutions, there are automated ways of detecting data and triaging systems that appear to have data they shouldn’t. Once you begin to map and understand the data, opportunities should become evident that will lead to automating and monitoring compliance and security through data warehouse technologies. Automation offers the ability to decrease compliance and security costs and still provide the higher levels of assurance, which validates where the data are and where they are going. Of course, automation does not solve every problem for security, compliance, and backup. There are still some very basic rules that should be used to enable security while not derailing the value of Big Data: Ensure that security does not impede performance or availability.

The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World by Paul Gilding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, BRICs, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, data science, decarbonisation, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fear of failure, geopolitical risk, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuclear winter, Ocado, ocean acidification, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, systems thinking, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, University of East Anglia, warehouse automation

How’s that? Today’s “megamarts,” with so much retail display space, open refrigerators, and the like, have huge physical and environmental footprints. They are designed to encourage you to purchase more, not for operational efficiency. By basing their entire operation out of a centralized, automated warehouse, Ocado has completely eliminated this impact. Given that most people don’t walk to the supermarkets anyway because such stores tend to lie on the edge of town surrounded by huge parking lots, a single delivery van can take countless cars off the road. Aside from their green credibility, their state-of-the-art logistical system will do some neat things, too, like allowing you to choose a delivery time down to the hour and then sending you a reminder on your phone a couple of hours before with the driver’s name and license plate number.

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

As an added benefit, a warehouseless distribution system would eliminate the risks created by having a fulfillment center as a single point of failure. In February 2019, as executives of UK online grocery chain Ocado reported quarterly earnings figures to a roomful of investors in London, the company’s automated warehouse in Andover was burning to the ground, its 600-strong android workforce trapped inside. It took more than 200 firefighters, who were forced to cut holes in the structure’s roof to fight the blaze, some three days to fully extinguish the flames. The widespread use of robofreight will, however, create new systemic risks.

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets by Thomas Philippon

airline deregulation, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, commoditize, crack epidemic, cross-subsidies, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flag carrier, Ford Model T, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, law of one price, liquidity trap, low cost airline, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, price discrimination, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

In general merchandise (representing 16 percent of the TFP growth acceleration), the study found that “Wal-Mart directly and indirectly caused the bulk of the productivity acceleration through ongoing managerial innovation that increased competitive intensity and drove the diffusion of best practice.” Similarly, the wholesale trade sector contributed a lot to productivity growth after 1995. In pharmaceuticals wholesaling, the study found that “half of the acceleration was driven by warehouse automation and improvements in organization.” b  Suzanne Kapner, “Sears reshaped America, from Kenmore to Allstate.” Wall Street Journal, October 15, 2018. CHAPTER 3 The Rise in Market Power IN 1998 JOEL KLEIN, who ran the antitrust operation at the US Department of Justice, declared in a January 29 address before the New York State Bar Association that “our economy is more competitive today than it has been in a long, long time.”

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

This new sort of retail job involves the human element and requires more skill and knowledge, while the boring, repetitive stuff is left to machines. Further up the supply chain, Ocado, the British internet supermarket, is reinventing itself as a supplier of warehouse services to retailers around the world. It has recently landed a contract with the Canadian grocer Sobeys which will launch an online shop with orders picked from an automated warehouse in the Toronto area. There won’t be many jobs for humans in the warehouse. Battery-powered robots are at the center of Ocado’s model. Mind you, robots are still not very good at picking things from the shelves. As a result, warehouses are now using “the Jennifer Unit,” which is a headset that tells human workers what to do.

Invention: A Life by James Dyson

3D printing, additive manufacturing, augmented reality, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, coronavirus, country house hotel, COVID-19, electricity market, Elon Musk, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Indoor air pollution, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, lockdown, microplastics / micro fibres, mittelstand, remote working, rewilding, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, uranium enrichment, warehouse automation, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

James project, Gordon shipped in a prefabricated steel frame from England, raising this on substantial concrete foundations and then wrapping the frame with grand and civic architecture. Inside, the lofty spaces of the well-lit building are on the scale of a cathedral. It seemed exactly the right base for us in Singapore. Opened in 1927, the coal-fired power station was decommissioned in 1976. At first it became an automated warehouse for the Port of Singapore and then, from 2006, a nightclub complex run by Dennis Foo, known as Singapore’s “Nightlife King.” On a typical weekend, between 15,000 and 20,000 clubbers raved the nights away here. Again, the building was a powerhouse, with new Thai bands making their names here alongside clubs dedicated to disco.

No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea by James Livingston

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bear Stearns, business cycle, collective bargaining, delayed gratification, do what you love, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, Internet of things, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, obamacare, post-work, Project for a New American Century, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, warehouse automation, working poor

That principle of productivity has been more or less incongruent with reality for a hundred years; but then cultural revolutions typically take about a century. The relation between goods produced and income received has been totally unintelligible for that long, anyway, since the “human element” could be eliminated from the factories, and now from the banks and the stores and the warehouses, by electrification, automation, instrumentation, cybernation, computerization. So, what is to be done? The first thing we do is kill all the bankers. Just kidding; we need them to keep the books. No, the first thing is, we think through what it means to detach income from work. Then we invent practical means of doing so.

eBoys by Randall E. Stross

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, deal flow, digital rights, disintermediation, drop ship, edge city, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , high net worth, hiring and firing, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job-hopping, knowledge worker, late capitalism, market bubble, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, PalmPilot, passive investing, performance metric, pez dispenser, railway mania, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Y2K

Borders matter-of-factly defined his chosen corner of the market as “the U.S. retail market,” which happened to be $2.3 trillion as of 1995. When he joined Benchmark, Beirne had said he wanted to pursue a go-big strategy, and this one certainly qualified. But he did not accept the whole vision. He wanted instead to start with groceries only, use Borders’s ideas about hub-and-spokes with an automated warehouse and neighborhood depots to replenish local delivery vans, but drop the idea of retail storefronts, which entailed unnecessary cost and complexity. Would Borders accept a less ambitious vision for this new company’s start? When Dave Beirne met with Borders for the first time, he shared his own thinking about MyStore, with conviction and details that showed it was not something he had cooked up to pander to Borders.

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future by Orly Lobel

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital map, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Grace Hopper, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, iterative process, job automation, Lao Tzu, large language model, lockdown, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, microaggression, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, occupational segregation, old-boy network, OpenAI, openstreetmap, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, randomized controlled trial, remote working, risk tolerance, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, work culture , you are the product

Diversifying and ethically curating the public representation of our communities are, as we’ve seen, both inevitable—there is no choice-free public space—and a moral mandate. Female robots are booming in the sex industry and almost every industry that is witnessing the integration of robots. Around the world, robots are being created to support or replace humans in their work and daily lives. Robots first started revolutionizing work outside the home, from automated warehouses and manufacturing plants to medical procedures. Nowadays, robots are being designed to tackle the invisible work that we (particularly women) perform around the house. Robots are set to revolutionize domestic work, care work, and the work of educating the next generation. These robots, who will be most intimately integrated into our family lives, are looking quite humanoid.

Competition Demystified by Bruce C. Greenwald

additive manufacturing, airline deregulation, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, book value, business cycle, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fault tolerance, intangible asset, John Nash: game theory, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, PalmPilot, Pepsi Challenge, pets.com, price discrimination, price stability, revenue passenger mile, search costs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, vertical integration, warehouse automation, yield management, zero-sum game

Target and the other discounters used the machines. So whatever benefits Wal-Mart achieved from its investments here did not account for its advantages over its competitors. The same was true of other sophisticated systems it introduced, like software to plan the merchandise mix in each store or machinery to automate warehouse operations. Wal-Mart was a purchaser of these technologies, not a developer of them. Anything it bought, its rivals could buy as well. Its progressive stance may have given it some short-term leads over the others, but they may have benefited by hiring the same consultants to do the installations, who now had Wal-Mart’s experience, including the inevitable mistakes, on which to draw.

The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin

banking crisis, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, cashless society, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, general-purpose programming language, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, prudent man rule, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, strikebreaker, technoutopianism, Thorstein Veblen, Toyota Production System, trade route, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

As we noted in chapter 7, retailers like Wal-Mart are now bypassing wholesalers altogether, preferring to deal directly with manufacturers. With computerized monitoring and scanning equipment at the point of sale, retailers can transmit shipping orders directly to manufacturers' warehouses by way of electronic data interchange (EDI). At the other end, automated warehouses staffed by computer-driven robots and remote-controlled delivery vehicles fill orders in a matter of minutes without the assistance of human physical labor. An increasing number of warehouses are operated by "silicon supervisors" and overseen by a skeleton human workforce whose primary task is to monitor the equipment and serve as traffic controllers.

The Billionaire and the Mechanic: How Larry Ellison and a Car Mechanic Teamed Up to Win Sailing's Greatest Race, the Americas Cup, Twice by Julian Guthrie

AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Benchmark Capital, Boeing 747, cloud computing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, fear of failure, Ford paid five dollars a day, independent contractor, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Maui Hawaii, new economy, pets.com, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, warehouse automation, white picket fence, Yogi Berra

Webvan, the Foster City–based grocery home-delivery service created by executives who had no experience in supermarkets—yet attracted funding from companies including Goldman Sachs, Benchmark Capital, Sequioa Capital, and Yahoo—filed for bankruptcy in 2001 after burning through hundreds of millions of dollars to buy a fleet of trucks, build automated warehouses, and expand aggressively nationwide. “The bubble went on and on and my confidence was beginning to waver,” Larry said. He had begun to think perhaps he was wrong: Maybe profits didn’t mean a thing. Maybe it was all clicks and eyeballs and maybe he should retire. “The companies were saying it was a new economy, that making money wasn’t the thing,” Larry said to Catz.

The Best Business Writing 2013 by Dean Starkman

Alvin Toffler, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, computer vision, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fixed income, fulfillment center, full employment, Future Shock, gamification, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, late fees, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Parag Khanna, Pareto efficiency, price stability, proprietary trading, Ray Kurzweil, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, tail risk, technological determinism, the payments system, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, wage slave, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y2K, zero-sum game

Graves’s warehouse installed a German system that automatically stores and retrieves cases of food. That led to the elimination of 106 jobs, roughly 20 percent of the work force. The new system was initially maintained by union workers with high seniority. Then that job went to the German company, which hired nonunion workers. Now Kroger plans to build a highly automated warehouse in Tolleson. Sixty union workers went before the City Council last year to oppose the plan, on which the city has not yet ruled. “We don’t have a problem with the machines coming,” Mr. Graves told city officials. “But tell Kroger we don’t want to lose these jobs in our city.” Some jobs are still beyond the reach of automation: construction jobs that require workers to move in unpredictable settings and perform different tasks that are not repetitive; assembly work that requires tactile feedback like placing fiberglass panels inside airplanes, boats, or cars; and assembly jobs where only a limited quantity of products are made or where there are many versions of each product, requiring expensive reprogramming of robots.

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population

The basic idea here is that as long as humans can complete a certain task at very low cost, there is no need to invest in the development, installation, and maintenance of innovative machines. As The Economist’s Ryan Avent puts it: [T]he abundance of labour, and downward pressure on wages, reduces the incentive to invest in new labour-saving technologies. Until pressed, firms don’t overhaul and automate their warehouse or swap out some wait staff for touchscreens. So productivity within sectors grows more slowly than it other- wise might. There are dynamic effects as well: when you don’t deploy new technologies because labour is cheap, you don’t get all the tweaks and knock- on innovations and accumulation of intangible capital that contributes to still more productivity growth down the road.73 There is plenty of evidence to support this claim, both historically and more recently.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

But what can we call Amazon but an on-demand company, when increasingly its products are delivered same-day (sometimes even by a network of on-demand drivers in their own cars rather than by traditional package delivery companies)? What does on-demand become when companies around the world are experimenting with delivery by autonomous drone, and when Amazon’s automated warehouses require only a minute of human labor per package, with most of the work being done by a complex ballet of software and machines? On-demand delivery is an example of how WTF? services introduced by tech companies become, like Tom Stoppard’s unicorn, “as thin as reality,” the stuff of ordinary life.

Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America's Eyeballs by Gina Keating

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, company town, corporate raider, digital rights, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Netflix Prize, new economy, out of africa, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, recommendation engine, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Superbowl ad, tech worker, telemarketer, warehouse automation, X Prize

Dillon was tall and burly and had snow-white hair, as well as a gruff demeanor that masked a mischievous sense of humor. Randolph and Hastings initially hesitated in hiring him, worried about both the small salary and that Dillon, who had run international operations for Seagate, would not be hands-on enough in the Netflix vault warehouse, which lacked automation and had a tiny staff. Dillon, then fifty-five, assured them he wanted to be around smart people who were doing something fun and interesting, and Netflix looked like the perfect opportunity. He signed a contract at a third of his normal pay rate as a show of good faith, and officially was hired the same day as McCarthy.

…

Although most customers ordered three disks at a time, gathering and shipping each order in a single mailer proved so time-consuming that Dillon’s analysis showed it was cheaper to ship each disk separately, as it became available, instead of waiting to accumulate complete orders. Dillon improved on Cook and Meyer’s software program, which assigned each order to a numbered mailbag based on its extended zip code in order to speed up the distribution of orders without costly automated postal sorters. The warehouse staff, then numbering about twenty, used a handheld supermarket scanner to read a bar code on the order form and then dropped the mailers into the correct bag. The system was rudimentary, but it soon cut total delivery costs below the two dollars per disk that Dillon had targeted.

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

“I’ve worked in the logistics industry for more than sixteen years and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Peter Puchwein, vice president of Knapp, an Austrian company that had long provided automation technology for warehouses and helped develop and install the Covariant technology in Berlin. It showed that robotic automation would continue to spread across the retail and logistics industry in the years to come, and perhaps across manufacturing plants, too. It also raised new concerns over warehouse workers, losing their jobs to automated systems. In the German warehouse, the jobs of three humans were done by one robot. At the time, though, economists didn’t think this kind of technology would diminish the overall number of logistics jobs anytime soon.

…

Navy, 15–19 and machine learning, 48 single-layer network design, 36–37 Perceptrons (Minsky and Papert), 25, 33–34, 44, 194 pharmaceutical industry, deep learning’s ability to help the, 181–83, 271 photo manipulation, 209–11 photo-realistic faces, 210 Pichai, Sundar, 216–17, 241, 243, 263–65 Pinker, Steven, 266–67 Pomerleau, Dean, 43–44, 49, 137, 256–57 pornography, 231 Poulson, Jack, 249, 250 Principles of Neurodynamics (Rosenblatt), 22–23 privacy concerns GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), 248 medical data from the Royal Free NHS Trust shared with DeepMind, 188 Progressive GANs, 210 Project Mack Truck, 138–39 Project Marvin, 83 Project Maven building a system for identifying drone strike targets, 240 contract with Google, 243 Google employee petition against, 247–50 meeting with Google, 240–43 Puchwein, Peter, 284–85 QSAR (quantitative structure-activity relationship), 182–83 Quake III (game), 295–97 Raji, Deborah, 230–32, 236–38 RankBrain, 139 Ranzato, Marc’Aurelio, 89, 124–27 Rashid, Rick, 130 Rebooting AI (Marcus), 270 Redmond, Michael, 174 reinforcement learning, 111–12, 113, 280, 309–10 research expense of recruiting and retaining the talent pool, 132 freely traded building blocks based on Linux, 131 immigration policies’ effect on foreign talent, 207–08 increased investments in, 136, 138–40 open research concept, 127–28, 129–32 Research in Motion (RIM), 75 robotics ABB robotics contest, 283–84 Amazon contest for warehouse picking, 278–79 the Arm Farm, 279–81 Google Brain robotics group, 279–81 learning human movement, 279–81 programming behavior and skills, 277 robots using dreaming to generate pictures and spoken words, 200 Rubik’s Cube demonstration, 276–78, 281, 297–98 use of Covariant’s automation technology in a Berlin warehouse, 284–85 Rosenblatt, Frank criticism of backpropagation, 38 death, 26–27 education and training, 17 Mark I machine development, 18 Perceptron machine demonstration, 15–19 research efforts, 25–26, 34, 36 rivalry with Marvin Minsky, 21–22, 24–25 Rubik’s Cube demonstration at OpenAI, 276–78, 281, 297–98 Rumelhart, David, 37–39, 97 Sabour, Sara, 208, 305 Salakhutdinov, Russ, 63 Schmidhuber, Jürgen, 59–60, 141–42 Schmidt, Eric, 173, 182, 216, 217, 220, 225, 242 Schroepfer, Mike (“Schrep”), 120, 123, 126, 167–69, 254–55, 257, 258–60 Science (journal), 105 Scott, Kevin, 85–86 security concerns adversarial attacks, 212–13 “air gap” systems, 246–47 medical data from the Royal Free NHS Trust shared with DeepMind, 188 Sedol, Lee, 171–72, 174–78, 216 Segal, Adam, 208 Segura, Marc, 284 Sejnowski, Terry, 29, 39–40, 49–50, 65 self-belief, 293–94 self-driving vehicles ALVINN project, 43–44, 53 Chauffeur project, 137–38, 142 China’s ability to develop, 226–27 exaggerated claims about, 271 Qi Lu’s proposal to Microsoft, 197–98 at Tesla, 155–56 using deep learning, 137–38 Sequence to Sequence paper on machine translation, 183 Shanahan, Patrick, 246 Silicon Valley scale, 293–94 self-belief and conviction, importance of, 293, 306–07 venture capital firms, 160–61 Silver, David AlphaGo project, 171, 173–74, 175, 198 artificial intelligence research, 104–05 as cofounder of Elixir, 103 and Demis Hassabis, 101–02, 103, 104–05 Simon, Herbert, 22, 288 Singhal, Amit, 83–84, 139 the Singularity Summit, 107–09, 325–26 SNARC machine, 21 speech recognition and Android smartphones, 77–79 deep learning and neural speech recognition, 67–68 Google Duplex technology, 265–66 Li Deng’s research on, 66–67, 218 speed of technological progress, 60 SRI (Stanford Research Institute), 20, 24 Stanford University, 57, 85 StarCraft (game), 296–97 statistical translation, 55–56 Suleyman, Mustafa (“Moose”), 107, 115–16, 157–58, 186–88, 244, 248, 294–95, 300–01 superintelligence, 105–06, 153, 156–60, 311 Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Bostrom), 153 surveillance.

Lifestyle Entrepreneur: Live Your Dreams, Ignite Your Passions and Run Your Business From Anywhere in the World by Jesse Krieger

Airbnb, always be closing, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, commoditize, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, do what you love, drop ship, financial independence, follow your passion, income inequality, independent contractor, iterative process, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, search engine result page, Skype, software as a service, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, warehouse automation

All of our orders are handled this way, including wholesale and distributor orders which come in through a private trade-only website. My companies are largely structured on a fabric of technology. The system I have set up is heavily dependent on automation, outsourced labor and the internet. Our stock is managed in real-time, and crosschecked with the warehouse, again, using automated software. When we find ourselves running low on any item, an email is sent to me by the system with a stock report. Using algorithms we can take into account lead times and sales performance before these warnings are sent. From here I can create a purchase order with our manufacturers in China, the USA, or the UK.

Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks

autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deindustrialization, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, housing crisis, Housing First, IBM and the Holocaust, income inequality, job automation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, payday loans, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sparse data, statistical model, strikebreaker, underbanked, universal basic income, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, zero-sum game

See Indiana, Committee on Welfare Privatization Issues creative economy in Los Angeles in Pennsylvania criminalization and automated decision-making and digital poorhouse and homelessness and poverty and welfare reform Crouch, Suzanne Culhane, Dennis Cullors, Patrisse cultural denial Cunningham, Mary Dalton, Erin Daniels, Mitch Dare, Tim data analytics, regime of mining and right to be forgotten security warehouse decision making automated and big data human and inclusion revolutionary change in and scientific charity tracking of and transparency Declaration of Independence deindustrialization in Indiana in South LA Denton, Nancy A. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) dependency digital decision-making.

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It by Mark Thomas

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banks create money, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, circular economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, creative destruction, credit crunch, CRISPR, declining real wages, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, gravity well, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-truth, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, warehouse automation, wealth creators, working-age population

Currently, for example, around 13 per cent of the US population are employed in the Retail and Transportation industries.25 There are signs that many of these jobs will not exist in a few years’ time – we have self-service checkouts in supermarkets; some fast food restaurants have introduced screen-based ordering; driverless trains are a reality today; driverless cars have already reached a high level of technical proficiency, and cars with some degree of autonomy (e.g. motorway driving) are already on the market; warehouses increasingly use automated picking and packing technologies. In these areas alone, we could see tens of millions of jobs disappear. But this is just the beginning. Another team at Oxford has been taking a close look at the possibilities for automation in the US. Carl Frey and Michael Osborne examined over 700 occupational categories and for each one assessed the probability that jobs in that sector would be automated within the next twenty years.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

On Amazon's ongoing implementation of robotic systems in its warehouse and distribution chain, see Sam Grobart, “Amazon's Robotic Future: A Work in Progress,” Bloomberg Business Week, November 30, 2012, 2012 http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2012-11-30/amazons-robotic-future-a-work-in-progress and Sarah O’Connor, “Amazon's Human Robots: They Trek 15 Miles a Day around a Warehouse, Their Every Move Dictated by Computers Checking Their Work. Is This the Future of the British Workplace?” Mail Online, March 1, 2013, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2286227/Amazons-human-robots-Is-future-British-workplace.html. Amazon also purchased Kiva Systems, a leading manufacturer of warehouse automation systems. See Scott Kirsner, “Amazon Buys Warehouse Robotics Start-Up Kiva Systems for $775 Million,” Boston.com, March 19, 2012, http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2012/03/amazon_buys_warehouse_robotics.html. 65.  Stowe Boyd, “If Amazon Is the Future of Work, Then Be Afraid,” Gigaom Research, February 22, 2013, http://research.gigaom.com/2013/02/if-amazon-is-the-future-of-work/. 66. 

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth by Jeremy Rifkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, book value, borderless world, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, decarbonisation, digital rights, do well by doing good, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, failed state, general purpose technology, ghettoisation, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, megacity, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, prudent man rule, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

This will ensure that all the carriers are fully loaded in their trailers at all times and that shipments are sent along the most efficient path en route to their final destination. The Internet of Things platform will provide real-time logistical data on pickup and delivery schedules, weather conditions, and traffic flows, with up-to-the-moment information on warehouse storage capacities. Automated dispatching will use Big Data and analytics to create algorithms and applications to ensure the optimization of efficiencies along the logistical routes and, by doing so, increase productivity and reduce the carbon footprint while also reducing the marginal cost of every shipment.

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

In a sweeping study of election results across fourteen Western European countries between 1993 and 2016, researchers led by Massimo Anelli at Bocconi University in Milan found that not only were people living in areas where automation was taking place fastest significantly more likely to feel marginalised, disconnected from and dissatisfied with government, but the greater the level of ‘automation exposure’ in an area the greater the probability the people living there would vote for a nationalist or far-right party.88 This makes the scenario we are currently facing – in which automation is ramping up at the same time as we’re experiencing significant levels of unemployment – especially concerning. No one will be spared Many of the people we’ve already met in this book will be first in the line of fire when it comes to these building waves of automation: delivery warehouse workers like Reynalda; the millions of cashiers who will no longer be needed when more and more of us shop in staff-free Amazon Go-style stores (in the US nearly 3.5 million people work as cashiers); or bakers like Eric, the right-wing populist voting Frenchman, who will soon face competition from robots like BreadBot, the recently launched robot baker which can mix, form, prove and bake 235 loaves of bread a day.89 These are people who already feel disproportionately alienated and disenfranchised, many of whom are also of course the ‘essential’ workers we all so relied upon during lockdown.90 But whilst those of us in ‘knowledge economy’ jobs tend to think we’ll be spared, telling ourselves there’s no way a robot could possibly do what we do, it’s important to realise that the story is more nuanced.

Digital Accounting: The Effects of the Internet and Erp on Accounting by Ashutosh Deshmukh

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AltaVista, book value, business continuity plan, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, currency risk, data acquisition, disinformation, dumpster diving, fixed income, hypertext link, information security, interest rate swap, inventory management, iterative process, late fees, machine readable, money market fund, new economy, New Journalism, optical character recognition, packet switching, performance metric, profit maximization, semantic web, shareholder value, six sigma, statistical model, supply chain finance, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, telemarketer, transaction costs, value at risk, vertical integration, warehouse automation, web application, Y2K

Searchspace functionalities Anti money laundering Financial fraud Searchspace •Check fraud •Debit card fraud •Electronic payment fraud •ATM deposit fraud •Identity theft •Financial service industry •Insider trading •NYSE rules 92 and 97 •Market manipulation •Anti money laundering Compliance Operational risk •Business risk •Policy enforcement Customer relationship management Exhibit 18. Searchspace operations Data manager Collect data from operational systems of the business Adaptive profiling engine Use the collected data to develop different profiles or patterns Operational data store Collect the different profiles in a central data warehouse Sentinels Automated software agents that monitor the profiles and look for anomalies, exceptions, and aberrations Action manager Based on the finding of sentinels appropriate actions are taken Reports to the user Copyright © 2006, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.

AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, active measures, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital map, digital rights, digital twin, Elon Musk, fake news, fault tolerance, future of work, Future Shock, game design, general purpose technology, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, language acquisition, low earth orbit, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, mirror neurons, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, OpenAI, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, smart transportation, Snapchat, social distancing, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, trolley problem, Turing test, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

Today robots already pick up, move, and manipulate many objects. Later they will be able to coordinate among multiple robots, handle complex planning tasks, and deal with errors and unusual situations. Full automation of factories and warehouses will take a long time, because some tasks require human manual dexterity, precise hand-eye coordination, or dealing with new situations and environments. But by 2041, warehouses should be virtually automated, while factories will be mostly automated. Agriculture is a surprising low-hanging fruit. While manufacturing a phone, a shirt, or a shoe are completely different, fertilizing, spreading insecticide, and seeding are relatively similar for many types of crops.

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy by Pistono, Federico

3D printing, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, future of work, gamification, George Santayana, global village, Google Chrome, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, illegal immigration, income inequality, information retrieval, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, longitudinal study, means of production, Narrative Science, natural language processing, new economy, Occupy movement, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, post scarcity, QR code, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, Rodney Brooks, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, slashdot, smart cities, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, technological singularity, TED Talk, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce

What about the value added that only a human employee can offer?” Have you ever worked at a mall? If so, how motivated were you, and how long did that last? “But you need human workers to place the products on the shelves, that much you do!” Actually, even that technology is already available, though it is more recent than the others. Some warehouses are already completely automated, and require only operators to work and handle the entire task. Pallets and product move on a system of automated conveyors, cranes and automated storage and retrieval systems coordinated by programmable logic controllers and computers running logistics automation software. Their accuracy and productivity is far greater than any human could ever dream of.

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

DJI had the feel of a Silicon Valley start-up mashed together with the work ethic and tradecraft of the factories the group had been visiting. The tour also visited a very high-end, top-tier mobile phone factory that made millions of phones. All of the parts were delivered by robots from a warehouse that was completely automated. The processes and the equipment were the top of the line and probably as sophisticated as at any factory in the world. Then there was the tiny shop that could assemble very sophisticated boards in single-unit volumes for a price comparable to a typical monthly cable TV bill, because they make them by hand.

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

Digging deeper into e-commerce, JD.com has embarked on a strategy to provide technology and logistics smarts as a retail service for its merchants and other retailers. This new initiative includes robotics-operated fulfillment centers, big-data analysis of merchandise sales, and supply-chain management. The company’s logistics operation, which I saw at work in a Beijing warehouse, is pioneering with full automation. The operation spans to drones to reach rural areas, autonomous delivery vehicles on Beijing university campuses, and self-driving trucks on select routes. Tencent has likewise begun digging into e-commerce too in China. Tencent bought into Alibaba’s main rivals, purchasing 20 percent stakes in e-commerce giant JD.com and two hot startups that went public in 2018: Meituan and Pinduoduo.

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

The Amazon Example—Trimming the Blanket Amazon has deployed an army of white-collar robots to speed up what they call the “click to ship” time—the amount of time that elapses between the time you hit the “buy” button on your screen and the time the item actually leaves the Amazon warehouse closest to you. This automation has meant faster Amazon delivery, which in turn is helping Amazon and other online retailers undercut brick-and-mortar stores. With this e-commerce booming, Amazon is hiring. In 2017, almost a million people worked in warehousing in the US—that’s up by over four hundred thousand workers, according to Bloomberg.15 In the UK alone, Amazon created 2,500 new permanent jobs in 2016.

Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness by Frederic Laloux, Ken Wilber

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, different worldview, driverless car, Easter island, failed state, fulfillment center, future of work, hiring and firing, holacracy, index card, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kenneth Rogoff, meta-analysis, ocean acidification, pattern recognition, post-industrial society, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, radical decentralization, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the market place, the scientific method, Tony Hsieh, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

Society could be entering a new phase—one in which fewer and fewer workers are needed to produce and distribute all the goods and services consumed. Take retail: we already purchase many items from websites whose algorithms, with no human intervention, suggest what we might like. Soon the warehouses might be fully automated, and one day self-driving trucks could deliver the parcels. Some people lament the loss of jobs, but that perspective fails to see the possibly revolutionary implications. Up until now, the vast majority of human population has had to perform less-than-exciting work to make a living.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

And even though the USPS took pride in the automation of its sorting and handling systems, once praised as the most advanced in the world, it is now facing near-extinction as more of its letter-carrying business is shifting over to e-mail.22 Automation is replacing workers across the entire logistics industry. Amazon, which is as much a logistics company as a virtual retailer, is adding intelligent automated guided vehicles, automated robots, and automated storage systems in its warehouses, eliminating less efficient manual labor at every step of the logistical value chain with the goal of getting as close as possible to near zero marginal labor costs. That goal is now within sight with the introduction of driverless vehicles. The prospect of eliminating human driving with the substitution of driverless vehicles operating on smart roads, once relegated to the realm of science fiction, will soon be operational.

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing by Kevin Davies

23andMe, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, bioinformatics, California gold rush, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hype cycle, imposter syndrome, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, phenotype, QWERTY keyboard, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rolodex, scientific mainstream, Scientific racism, seminal paper, Shenzhen was a fishing village, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, traumatic brain injury, warehouse automation

He divulged his plans to Collins in the United Airlines lounge at Washington Dulles airport, and then to the world via the front page of the New York Times. His new company, Celera Genomics, vowed to cut through years of government inefficiency and bureaucracy to compile the sequence faster and cheaper using a warehouse full of the latest automated sequencing machines—each named after a sci-fi character—plus a massive Compaq supercomputer to crunch the data. As a consolation prize, Venter said Collins could sequence the mouse genome instead. Almost overnight, the tables had been turned: the “Darth Vader” of genomics had the weaponry and momentum; Collins and his allies were the plucky overmatched rebels with their backs against the wall.

Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, Niall Richard Murphy

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, business intelligence, business logic, business process, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive load, combinatorial explosion, continuous integration, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, database schema, defense in depth, DevOps, en.wikipedia.org, exponential backoff, fail fast, fault tolerance, Flash crash, George Santayana, Google Chrome, Google Earth, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, information asymmetry, job automation, job satisfaction, Kubernetes, linear programming, load shedding, loose coupling, machine readable, meta-analysis, microservices, minimum viable product, MVC pattern, no silver bullet, OSI model, performance metric, platform as a service, proprietary trading, reproducible builds, revision control, risk tolerance, side project, six sigma, the long tail, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, web application, zero day

As mentioned earlier, our evolution of turnup automation followed a path: Operator-triggered manual action (no automation) Operator-written, system-specific automation Externally maintained generic automation Internally maintained, system-specific automation Autonomous systems that need no human intervention While this evolution has, broadly speaking, been a success, the Borg case study illustrates another way we have come to think of the problem of automation. Borg: Birth of the Warehouse-Scale Computer Another way to understand the development of our attitude toward automation, and when and where that automation is best deployed, is to consider the history of the development of our cluster management systems.6 Like MySQL on Borg, which demonstrated the success of converting manual operations to automatic ones, and the cluster turnup process, which demonstrated the downside of not thinking carefully enough about where and how automation was implemented, developing cluster management also ended up demonstrating another lesson about how automation should be done.