Monday, December 12, 2022

Humans vs. robots: 

The battle reaches a

‘turning point’

Warehouse robots at companies like Amazon and FedEx 

are finally able to pick and sort things with humanlike finesse

By 
December 10, 2022 
Amazon's sparrow robot in Westborough, Mass. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty Images)

Warehouse robots are finally reaching their holy grail moment: picking and sorting objects with the dexterity of human hands.


Amazon has robotic arms that can pick and sort cumbersome items like headphones or plushy toys before they’ve been boxed. FedEx has piloted a similar system, which it uses in some warehouses to sort mail of various sizes.

And other companies are making progress, too.

For decades, training a robot to be more humanlike has stumped engineers, who couldn’t replicate the ability to grip and move items. But now gains in artificial intelligence technology, cameras and engineering are bearing fruit, allowing robots to see objects of varying shapes and sizes and adjust their grasp accordingly.

The technology, computer scientists say, is finally getting reliable enough that companies find it feasible to deploy.


“This moment is a turning point,” said Kris Hauser, a robotics expert and computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “They’re competent enough at this point.”


But there’s also contentious debate. Critics worry robots will take people’s jobs, though boosters say it’ll just create different ones. Others note more robots could result in higher rates of worker injury, or result in tougher human surveillance to ensure they’re hitting targets.

Beth Gutelius, an economic development professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said the way companies unleash these robots without much testing or regard to worker safety is concerning.

“Shouldn’t we all want these things to work better for more people?” she said.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.

These robots were trained on AI. They became racist and sexist.

Robots have been on the scene for years, but it’s been a slog for scientists to get them to replicate tasks as well as humans — particularly when it comes to hands. Amazon has Kiva robots, which look like Roombas and move packages on the factory floor, but still need humans to pack and sort them.

Elon Musk has notoriously said he would automate Tesla’s manufacturing, but humans are still needed to do work on the assembly line at the company’s Fremont, Calif., factory. He also recently unveiled Tesla’s proto type humanoid robot Optimus, which is aiming to reshape physical work.

Robotic arms install the front seats to the Tesla Model 3 at the Tesla factory in Fremont, Calif., in 2018. (Mason Trinca for The Washington Post)

Google recently unveiled robots that are fueled by artificial intelligence to help humans with everyday tasks. Some robots are even learning how to cook fries.

Despite the advances, the hardest challenge for researchers has been teaching robots to adjust their grips to different sizes and shapes, said Ken Goldberg, an industrial engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

But in the past decade, things have started to change, he said. 3D camera technology, spurred by Microsoft’s Kinect motion sensing cameras, has become better at spotting images. Deep learning, a field of artificial intelligence that uses algorithms loosely modeled on the brain, allows computers to analyze more images. Researchers started better understanding the physics of grasping things, and incorporating that into robotic suction cups and pickers.

The result: modern-day robotic machines that often look like long arms. Their vision is fueled by software that uses machine learning algorithms to analyze what objects look like to instruct robots on how to grip things. The suction cups or claws adjust pressure and control with the finesse humans take for granted

Amazon in particular has been chasing the technology, the industry experts said. As one of the world’s largest retailers, plagued with high rates of turnover and promises to deliver packages quickly, it made strong financial sense to try to automate warehouse processes as much as possible.

In 2012, the company acquired mobile robotics company Kiva for $775 million in cash. In 2014, the company announced a “picking challenge,” challenging scientists to create robots that could pick up assorted items, varying from Sharpies to Oreo cookie packages, from a mobile shelf.

Last month, Amazon unveiled its picking-and-sorting robot called Sparrow, a long robotic arm that can grab items before they are packed in boxes. It’s being researched and developed in Massachusetts and in operation at an Amazon facility in Dallas, officials said. It can sort roughly 65 percent of products in its inventory, according to company officials, but nationwide expansion plans aren’t set yet.

The robot fits into a broader automation strategy, according to Amazon. If mastered, Sparrow could pick products up after they’ve been offloaded from trucks and before they’re wrapped and put onto mobile shelving. Once boxed, Amazon’s robotic system, called Robin, could sort them to their destination. Cardinal, another robotic machine, could put them into a waiting cart, before being loaded onto a truck.

Amazon has consistently said more machines will allow people to find better jobs. Robots are “taking on some of the highly repetitive tasks within our operations, freeing up our employees to work on other tasks that are more engaging,” said Xavier Van Chau, a spokesman for the company.

During a demo, this robot at Google demonstrated its ability to find and pick up items. (Monica Rodman/The Washington Post)

In March, mailing giant Pitney Bowes inked a $23 million deal with Ambi Robotics to use the company’s picking-and-sorting robots to help sort packages of various shapes, sizes and packaging materials. In August, FedEx agreed to purchase $200 million in warehouse robotics from Berkshire Grey to do similar tasks. A few months before that, it launched an AI-fueled mail sorting robot in China.

Although the bulk of the technology started to appear a few years ago, it’s taken time to ensure these systems reduce errors down to less than 1 percent, said Hauser, which is crucial for company bottom lines.

“Each mistake is costly,” he added. “But now, [robots] are at a point where we can actually show: ‘Hey, this is going to be as reliable as your conveyor belt.’”

As Walmart turns to robots, it’s the human workers who feel like machines

Revenue generated by companies making picking-and-sorting robots are skyrocketing, said Ash Sharma, a robotics and warehouse industry expert at Interact Analysis, a market research firm.

The research firm estimates companies that make these products will rake in $365 million this year. Next year, it’s estimated to be over $640 million. It’s a jump from the roughly $200 million last year and $50 million in 2020 these companies generated in revenue, data forecasts show.


A big factor is the labor shortage, he said.


Gutelius, of the University of Illinois at Chicago, said that although the technology proves interesting, it comes with risks. With more robots on warehouse floors, workers alongside them will have to work at a quicker pace, risking more injuries.


The Washington Post has reported that Amazon warehouses can be more dangerous than rivals. Experts say that adding robots to the process can increase injuries.


Van Chau said machines doing repetitive tasks will help workers. “We can take some of that strain away from employees,” he said.


The next generation of home robots will be more capable — and perhaps more social

But Gutelius says companies making claims that these robots will help need to be scrutinized, saying they tend to implement solutions too quickly.


“It’s sort of classic ‘move fast and break things,’” she said. “And in this case, I think ‘breaking things,’ it ends up being people.”



By Pranshu VermaPranshu Verma is a reporter on The Washington Post's technology team. Before joining The Post in 2022, he covered technology at the Boston Globe. Before that, he was a reporting fellow at the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Twitter




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CAPITALI$M IS DEBT

Canadian households now owe $1.83 for every dollar of disposable income they have

Canadians have $2 trillion in mortgage debt and $722

 billion worth of other types of debt

CBC News · 
Canadian families now owe $1.83 for every dollar of disposable income they have, Statistics Canada data shows. (Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press)

Statistics Canada says the amount Canadian households owe relative to their income rose in the third quarter.

The agency says household credit market debt as a proportion of household disposable income increased to 183.3 per cent on a seasonally adjusted basis in the third quarter, compared with 182.6 per cent in the second quarter.

In other words, Statistics Canada says there was $1.83 in credit market debt for every dollar of disposable income that households had in the July-to-September period.

Income gained 0.8 per cent in the quarter, while household credit market debt rose 1.2 per cent.

"Both mortgage and non-mortgage loans grew despite aggressive rate hikes throughout the quarter," Bank of Montreal economist Shelley Kaushik noted, with mortgage debt hitting $2.07 trillion and other forms of debt hitting $722.6 billion.

That $2.8-trillion pile of debt caused the household debt service ratio — the amount of money that households spend on servicing debt, as a percentage of their income — rose to 13.97 per cent in the third quarter, compared with 13.46 per cent in the second quarter.

Wealth takes a hit

While the amount that Canadians owe ticked higher, the value of their assets declined, causing national net worth per capita to fall 3.8 per cent to $438,815.

"This is the first time since the global financial crisis, when wealth fell 8.5 per cent peak-to-trough, that Canada has seen back-to-back declines in household wealth," TD Bank economist Ksenia Bushmeneva said of the data.

"As Canadians dedicate more of their income to debt servicing, hard choices will be made with respect to discretionary spending, which we expect to be very modest next year."

With files from The Canadian Press





Debt: The First Five Thousand Years | The Anarchist Library

https://theanarchistlibrary.org › library › david-graeber-...

by D Graeber2009Cited by 228 — Debt: The First Five Thousand Years ... What follows are a series of brief reflections (part of a much broader work in progress) on debt, credit, and
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Rush to electric vehicles may be an expensive mistake, say climate strategists

Move to replace fossil fuel fleet with EVs is essential, but there are things to do first

Don Pittis · CBC News · 
An electric Canoo LV (Lifestyle Vehicle) at a factory in Livonia, Mich., last month. Quirky new designs can make EVs attractive items of conspicuous consumption for those who can afford them. (Rebecca Cook/Reuters)

With their futuristic designs and new technology, electric vehicles are the seductive consumer-friendly face of the energy transition.

As first incarnated by Tesla, the EV is increasingly seen as sleeker, slicker, faster and more stylish than traditional internal combustion engine cars and trucks that burn those dirty fossil fuels blamed for disrupting weather patterns and killing off species. 

For people with money and a conscience, EVs are doubly satisfying. They allow the affluent to indulge in the time-honoured pleasures of conspicuous consumption while at the same time saving the planet.

Not so fast

But for those who have looked more deeply at how the world can escape its dependence on oil and gas, the rush to replace existing gas guzzlers with a new fleet of clean, silent battery-powered personal transport leaves them uneasy.

Many, including John Lorinc, last month's winner of the 2022 Balsillie Prize for Public Policy for his book Dream States, worry that the dash to go electric has not been well thought out. 

The potential result? Unsustainable costs and unnecessary damage to the environment.

"It's a really important evolution of technology to get away from internal combustion engines, so that part is necessary," said Lorinc in a recent phone interview. But he said the change comes with many caveats, including the fact that a lot of the world's electricity is still made using fossil fuels. 

Even though they are electric, larger trucks and SUVs like this Rivian R1T mean they are not environmentally friendly to manufacture, and their large batteries make them heavier and harder on roads, say urban planners. (Nathan Frandino/Reuters)

"Electric vehicles are large engineered objects that require a lot of metal, they require a lot of components that are shipped all over the place," he said. "There's a lot of mining and processing of minerals required to make the components, so it's not an environmental panacea by any stretch of the imagination."

People who study what they call the energy transition — the move away from releasing hundreds of millions of years worth of carbon trapped deep underground into the atmosphere and, instead, move toward renewable energy sources — insist it must be done strategically. Like Lorinc, they say that while getting all fossil fuel vehicles off the road is essential, it is far from the first step to saving the planet.

Lorinc's new book, a study of the complexity of attempts to building green "smart cities," is stuffed with information and written in an accessible, sometimes humorous style — "What city wouldn't want to be 'smart'?" —  and delves into the thorny problem of urban transportation.

'Horrendously inefficient'

Illustrated with real examples, the chapter "The Quagmire of Mobility Tech," relates how cities have struggled with uncontrolled market forces competing for limited urban space and limited funding. 

Lorinc describes how innovations such as early, inexpensive ride-hailing apps like Uber drove people away from public transit, helping to plug up downtown streets. In one case, he describes how Innisfil, Ont., a small town north of Toronto, experimented with switching away from costly bus services to ride-hailing apps — and how the idea became so popular it blew the municipal budget.

And there's research on how electric self-driving cars could one day transform cities, Lorinc writes, but in a way that just might be flawed. 

 "EVs are here to save the car industry, not the planet, that is crystal clear," said outspoken urban planning advocate Jason Slaughter in a recent email conversation. "Electric cars use batteries instead of gasoline, but they are still a horrendously inefficient way to move people around, especially in crowded cities."

WATCH | Canada does it right, focusing on electric delivery vehicles first: 

Canada’s first full-scale auto plant for electric vehicles has gone into production, bringing promise of new jobs to an industry that’s slipped in dominance in recent years.

A strong advocate of public transportation on his YouTube channel Not Just Bikes, Slaughter insists that in order to make cities people-friendly instead of being dominated by cars, public transportation has to be both comfortable and easy to use.

Slaughter's adopted home, the Netherlands, is one of the most advanced in making its cities walkable and bikeable, thus discouraging the domination of cars. Lorinc, too, describes Dutch urban centres as among those closest to becoming true smart cities.

And there are signs the trend toward fewer urban cars is growing. Last week San Jose, Calif., became the largest U.S. city to abandon parking minimums — the traditional requirement that urban development had to have a certain number of parking spaces. Also last week Paris announced it was paying car drivers to switch to electric bikes.

Outside of financial incentives, there are other ways to entice people to get out from behind the wheel — make the alternatives the easiest option. 

One person and a yogurt

"Using a vehicle to move a person and a quart of yogurt is energy inefficient," said Kate Daley, a climate and energy specialist who works in Waterloo region, referring to the drive many suburban Canadians must make just to pick up an essential ingredient from the nearest shop.

Her community's climate strategy has been to make walking, biking and public transit convenient enough that residents don't have to drive, whether in a fossil fuel burner or an EV. She notes that the move toward large SUVs has already been hard on road surfaces, and the additional load caused by batteries makes the damage worse.

But most important, said Daley, is that a successful energy transition must be done strategically. As those working on fuel switching for heating Canadian homes have noted in the past, one of the advantages of fossil fuels and why we remain addicted to them is that they remain an incredible bargain.

Switching from gas to electric for high-use vehicles including taxis, delivery trucks and car-share vehicles would have a bigger impact on the climate than trading in a car that is seldom used. (Don Pittis/CBC News)

"The reason we want to use less energy first is because if we don't reduce our energy use, [fossil fuel energy is] really expensive to replace," said Daley.

As a Vancouver green building planner has told me in the past, insulating and sealing up homes can cut energy use by 90 per cent, meaning the cost of alternative energy sources becomes less important. 

Daley said the three stages of energy transition, which applies equally to EVs is that "we need to use less energy, we need to use clean energy and we need to generate local clean energy."

Who goes first?

Recently, Canada celebrated the opening of a General Motors factory in Ingersoll, Ont., to build electric delivery vehicles, and according to Colleen Kaiser, low carbon transportation expert with the Ottawa-based Smart Prosperity Institute, they may be on the right track.

"We really want the oldest [fossil fuel] cars off the road ... and we want the ones that drive the most," said Kaiser. "So we can think about taxi kind of vehicles, whether it's an Uber or a traditional taxi, any kind of fleet vehicles."

Effectively, she said, any car or truck that is on the road many hours a day, including buses, delivery vehicles, travelling sales reps, long-distance commuters, car shares such as Communauto or Zipcars, should be the ones to electrify first. 

She agrees that changing the "built urban form of our communities" may be the most important way to reduce total car use, but she said that takes a long time. "That is why we have to start now."

Electric rickshaws are a constant on the streets of New Delhi, often fighting for space outside busy areas, but they are a vast improvement on the previous generation of motors that created choking fumes. (Salimah Shivji/CBC)

"We definitely don't want to replace all the gasoline cars one-for-one with electric vehicles," said Kaiser. "We have an opportunity with the transition to not just repeat the same patterns of the past with a different energy source." 

Kaiser said she thinks that may come with a generational change. Already, young people are more likely to live downtown, take transit more often and are less likely to drive a car. But for the many Canadians who live in rural or suburban areas that may not be possible.

"We're going to have to have electric vehicles because not everyone is going to use some alternative mode of transport," she said.

As Lorinc has noted, the consumer-friendly side of buying and driving a flashy electric car needs to be backed up by many more expensive steps. Those included developing green power sources, transforming our ability to get electricity to where it is needed with "smart grids," building systems for storage and the business of finding, extracting and processing essential battery minerals. That's a lot less sexy and a lot more complicated than picking out a new car.

But as Lorinc observes in Dream States, "Anyone who fails to acknowledge that everything is complicated, simply isn't paying attention."




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