People hear the word “robot” and assume that there’s some level of intelligence involved. Often, that isn’t the case. A robot is usually just a sophisticated machine following a painfully specific set of instructions.
If something unusual happens that an engineer hadn’t written a thousand lines of code to deal with, it could shut down the entire line.
I’m dealing with these specific issues right now in a distribution center, and it’s just with shelf moving robots that Amazon has had for 10-15 years already. It’s amazing how dumb they are and how poorly they are programmed to handle exceptions, and they aren’t even doing puts and picks.
Eventually someone will figure out how to make robots that can handle the more complicated tasks that humans currently do. I figured we were still a decade or 2 away from that point, but if anyone can figure it out quicker, it’s Amazon. I kind of hate the possibility that they might have already figured it out, but I’m very skeptical of a simple announcement.
People hear the word “robot” and assume that there’s some level of intelligence involved. Often, that isn’t the case. A robot is usually just a sophisticated machine following a painfully specific set of instructions.
If something unusual happens that an engineer hadn’t written a thousand lines of code to deal with, it could shut down the entire line.
I’m dealing with these specific issues right now in a distribution center, and it’s just with shelf moving robots that Amazon has had for 10-15 years already. It’s amazing how dumb they are and how poorly they are programmed to handle exceptions, and they aren’t even doing puts and picks.
Eventually someone will figure out how to make robots that can handle the more complicated tasks that humans currently do. I figured we were still a decade or 2 away from that point, but if anyone can figure it out quicker, it’s Amazon. I kind of hate the possibility that they might have already figured it out, but I’m very skeptical of a simple announcement.