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Tuesday, July 6, 2021

Grocery Robots


How many robots does it take to run a grocery store?
Tom Scott

On one hand, this is great. Tell the world (or Alexa) you want a box cheeze doodles, and presto, a few minutes later a box shows up at your door without anyone actually having to do anything, except the delivery driver, and that's just until they get the automated drone delivery system going.

On the other hand, all those people who were employed picking and packing groceries are out of a job. But all the people who are designing and building robots have got all the work they can handle. That would be okay if it took as many people to design and build the robots as the number of grocery pickers they were replacing, but probably not. I suspect it's more like one to ten.

Yes, all these fancy machines and automated processes are eliminating the drudgery from many people's lives, but we aren't giving them anything else to do. If you want to be a part of society, you need to have a stake in society, which means owning something of real value, and that means real estate. It doesn't have to be much, an eight foot square shop might be enough. But being on the dole, playing video games and protesting aren't going to get you there. Makes me think we might be due for some land reform

Via IAman

1 comment:

  1. After the robots load the bins I can't figure out if they are to be picked up or delivered.
    Frozen foods and produce must be handled separately, so 2500 robots will do half the job.

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