Do the robots work with or for the human workers or are the human workers reacting to the demands of the robots, and so being forced to be more like robots themselves? The humans are starting to work more like the robots while some robots (not these) are getting more human. Hmmm.. Anyway, its an interesting video, they have huge logistics problems.

Also I can’t help noticing what looks like a lost and confused robot endlessly circling at 0:24 near the top of the video.

Robots Podcast did an interview with the founder of the company back in October of 2008, which is worth checking out.
http://www.robotspodcast.com/podcast/2008/10/robots-warehouse-robots.html

In regard to Zool’s comment, as the system settles in, so do the people, I think. If you’ve ever been in a traditional warehouse, you know just what the guy in the Magic Shelf vid is experiencing. Wandering up and down grey towering isles just plain sucks. I worked in a manufacturing plant as a temp for a single summer in my 20s, and even though I had responsibility for just a tiny section of floor, it really bites having to inventory parts.

The Kiva sysyem has got to be a major breakthrough as far as shipping and recieving and handling goes. People have a workstation, not unlike an office worker’s cubicle. If you get the same workstation daily, you start to customise it to make it “yours”. That brings up morale. And of course, the little orange bots are efficent at bringing you what you need. Productivity increases. And of course as the software gets better for the bots, the system knows how to respond to the day to day pace. I personally would love to work in a Kiva based warehouse now!

@Joey1058: I found your post interesting. (I also know what its like as my father was for some years a warehouse manager, but that was back in the truly analogue days before office PC desktop computers (office computers filled rooms back then so most people only saw their printouts) but anyway I have lots of memories as a kid being in the vast warehouses and I’ve also worked in manufacturing stock room departments in big companies).

But I think you are missing the bigger picture. You won’t be needed to work in future Kiva or other based warehouses. The robots will do ever more of the work until they do it all, but what is it going to be like for the remaining workers during this transitional phase before they are made redundant by their bosses (who are ultimately acting out of their need for ever more profit, even though they will keep using the robots and competitors as an excuse for redundancy). I strongly suspect ever more workers are going to find themselves corralled into ever less responsibilities by their bosses and so they will be forced to have less need to think, plus they will find themselves being forced to keep up with the robots (as this video is showing). That’s great for productivity and the business owners but the remaining human workers can’t work like machines, so it’ll get worse for ever more of them.

In the longer term (I guess about 30-40 years from now), I’m utterly convinced in time it will be possible for robots to do every job leaving humans free to choose what jobs they enjoy doing (out of choice rather than necessity) and so humans will be able to act like team leaders delegating tasks to the robots. However business people will not stop there. Many business owners will happily give every job to robots as it means ever more money for them and so their inherently self-centred position will inevitably force huge social changes onto the world. Changes the world is not yet set-up to deal with, especially the need to support ever growing numbers of people out of work. Ultimately it comes down to resource allocation. We have a planet with finite resources and a population with needs that need to be met, which up until now have been achieved by work. Without work the planetary resources will still need to be shared out, but the big problem is our current transitional phase into such a world.

Personally I would greatly welcome finally being freed from being a wage slave, (and freed from being endlessly dictated to, by a series of greedy bosses) provided the quality of life, free from work, was good enough and I was still able to pursue my hobbies and interests. But we are a long way from this kind of world and quality of life and so understanding the social implications of this transitional phase is something I think is extremely important to understand. If its handled badly by governments and businesses we could easily slip into revolutions and civil wars, where ever more people suffering having nothing, end up fighting back to gain any kind of fairness from a world that is currently extremely unfairly hierarchical in its resource allocation.

Survival 101 – Don’t do work that a robot can do better.

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