Arriving Today by Christopher Mims

Author:Christopher Mims [Mims, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-07-10T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

The Unbearable Complexity of Robotic Warehousing

It’s at this point in the story that a reasonable person asks why, in a company that has deployed so many robots, so many humans must perform the many Sisyphean tasks at the heart of Amazon’s sorting of goods in its warehouses. The world’s first industrial robot was installed in a factory owned by General Motors in 1961; the underlying technology was patented in 1954. Why have we not by now created robotic arms dexterous enough to take over a task as elementary as picking up an object and placing it in a soft-sided cubby?

The short answer to that question is that this task only seems elementary because humans are so incredibly good at it. The longer answer is that this is in fact a task so difficult that, alongside language, intuition, higher-order cognition, and everything else that humans are better at than any other organism in the known universe, achieving it should rank as one of our most astonishing accomplishments.

It took evolution almost 4 billion years, from the first self-replicating molecules to the advent of modern humans, to stumble into a system of manipulative digits of sufficient precision and flexibility—two things any good roboticist will tell you are diametrically opposed—attached to a brain with enough capacity for planning and spatial reasoning, to do what Amazon stowers, pickers, and packers do hundreds of times an hour without even having to think about it. The things we can do with our hands—pick a flower, brandish a weapon, cradle an infant—are an unqualified miracle.

In the early days of pitching the Kiva system, people would ask Mick Mountz why he didn’t just use a robotic arm in the stowing and picking stations. “And the answer was, you’d need a NASA-size research budget to come up with a robot that could do what the human was doing,” he says.

This is not to say that many, many companies, including Amazon itself, aren’t trying to replace humans in these processes. In chapter 19, I dive into their efforts, their limitations, and what they can tell us about the future of all manual labor, from manufacturing and logistics to the service industry. But the thing to know about all predictions about an imminent future of “lights-out” warehouses in which there are no humans at all is that no one knows when or even if that future will arrive. It’s certainly not going to be anytime soon.

The problem of reproducing the dexterity of the human hand and the capabilities of the nervous system directing it even has a name among engineers and academics: Moravec’s paradox.

Hans Moravec is an adjunct professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Here’s how he described the observation that bears his name in his 1988 book, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence: “It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult-level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.

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