Thinking inside the box

[cjsmith]

Amazon’s new(ish) automated boxing machines. 5 times faster than humans and can do 700 boxes/hr.

https://youtu.be/U1yw05mWnXw

(NB: since I saw this at work, I do not know whether it has sound or if so what the sound is like.)

Comments

[siliconshaman]

I wonder how long before Amazon becomes fully autonomous, with no humans involved other than the customers..

[cjsmith]

If I were running it I'd sure want to head that direction. Keep pushing the button, keep printing money.

[metahacker]

With Alexa and refills and subscriptions, the customers don't need to be human, either; just need access to *some* bank account...

[siliconshaman]

and now I've had the totally creepy thought of someone automating their life, so stuff is delivered on schedule, bills are paid and so on... without them needing to do anything...

and keeps on keeping on, despite them being dead for years...

[cjsmith]

Back to the Future...

[siliconshaman]

???

[cjsmith]

I'm thinking of the scene where the teenager goes to the mad inventor's house and finds him gone but an automated system faithfully putting a can of dog food in a bowl each morning (for a dog who's also gone, so the bowl is truly repulsive).

[siliconshaman]

Oh god yes!! Now I remember that, it was like the first thirty seconds of the film too... Doc had automated filling Einstein's bowl and forgotten to turn it off before taking off with him...

[cjsmith]

that's the one! :-D

[metahacker]

I am 100% sure this has already happened to some family, given how many things continued after my father's death. :-/

One imagines the credit/assets are frozen for the Will or Probate, but...maybe not.

[cjsmith]

I wonder if credit doesn't get frozen while assets do. That would be... pessimal but sort of expected.

[cjsmith]

Postapocalyptic scenario: humankind is gone, but refills on Amazon are still going strong...

[siliconshaman]

Yeah... I think there was a story like that...

[eichin]

One of the more iconic ones was "There Will Come Soft Rains", Ray Bradbury (written in 1950 so the scene of automation continuing to operate in the wreckage was set in the vastly distant future of... 1985)

[eichin]

I saw the article, if anything I'm surprised at amazon rolling them out this *late* (double checking https://www.cmcmachinery.com/our-history/ shows that this really is the fancy new 2014 version, but they've made this sort of thing for decades... and there were at least 3 companies with hardware at Promat 2017 that had custom-sized-box-on-demand hardware...)

It looks like the interesting part is that they're finally fixing the "you ordered 3 SD cards, here's a 2 cubic foot box" problem :-)

[cjsmith]

Nice! Yes, large boxes for tiny items is a nice thing to optimize out.

As for the timing, yeah, I'm always several years late to catch the interesting stuff. Nobody ever tells me anything. ;-)

[eichin]

Amazon *using* them was apparently just announced in a Reuters article 2 days ago https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-automation-exclusive-idUSKCN1SJ0X1 ... it's just a little odd that a 5 year old marketing video is all they had to work with.

(A lot of my home project organizing would be easier if I had an efficient custom-size box-printer, much more useful than a general 3d printer, but I'd want at least one side clear, and the industrial space is mostly all-cardboard...)

[cjsmith]

That thing does seem like quite the space hog.