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WalMart Shelves Its Robot Inventory Clerks
These costly experiences are helping businesses better understand when automation works and when it just doesn’tThe WalMart automation project started in 2017, as part of an effort to compete with Amazon: Walmart, which posted record online sales in its recent quarter, now has more workers walking the aisles to package online orders, extracting new data on inventory problems, people familiar with the situation told the Wall Street Journal, which was the first to report this news. Reuters Staff, “Walmart drops plans to use robots for tracking inventory” at Reuters Here’s some background: Walmart ended the partnership because it found different, sometimes simpler solutions that proved just as useful – something that came to light during the coronavirus pandemic as more shoppers flock to online delivery and pickup, forcing Walmart to have workers physically walk store Read More ›
Autonomous Vehicles Are Not a “Rich Person’s” Technology
A transportation expert tells Jay Richards, alternative transport may disrupt the transportation industry but only in the short termJay Richards talked recently with Tom Alberg, Founder of the Madrona Venture Group and Co-chair of the ACES Northwest Network, about ACES’ efforts to bring Automated, Connected, Electric, and Shared vehicle technologies to the Puget Sound region: The Benefits of ACES Vehicle Technology A partial transcript follows: Jay Richards: Well, you were chairing the panel on autonomous vehicles and you’re part of an initiative here in Seattle. What do you think is the most important takeaway from that? Tom Alberg: I think that it’s really a combination of technologies. It’s both new technologies and it’s changed business models. So we formed a group here in Seattle called ACES, Autonomous, Connected, Electric, and Shared. “Shared” is really kind of the Uber Read More ›
Beware of Geeks Bearing Formulas—It’s Often Pseudoscience
Pseudoscience based on data without theory and theory without data undermine the credibility of real science, which is the key to human progressElsewhere I have warned of the perils of making decisions based on data without theory. For example, the patterns discovered by data-mining computer algorithms are often nothing more than meaningless coincidences. It is also perilous to go to the opposite extreme—to make decisions based on theory without data. Once upon a time, for example, economists were fond of sketching labor demand and supply curves and assuming that the economy was at their intersection. That is, labor demand is equal to supply, so that everyone who wants to work is working. The unemployed have chosen to be unemployed because they value leisure more than income. True believers were fond of this theory and little troubled by reality. Between 1929 and 1933, Read More ›
Does Automation Target Women’s Jobs?
The assumption that women need special protection from robots underestimates their creativity and versatilityA number of studies have come to the conclusion that automation will hit women harder than men. Some proposed fixes assume that women who lose repetitive jobs to robots would be happier as administrators or dependents. That’s not clear.
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Remember the Luddites!
The Luddites became famous for breaking machinery during the Industrial Revolution. Were they entirely wrong?
STEM EDUCATION 1. Pursuing Nerd Quality Over Nerd Quantity
Reducing math and science to practice is what engineers do. Scientists didn’t put a man on the moon. Engineers did.
Is AI Creating the Conditions for Marxist Revolution?
An analyst looks at the conditions then and now
Is the Future of Work Relentlessly Urban?
Amazon’s new combined New York and Washington headquarters may provide an unintended test
Meet the everyday people behind AI
Not famous, not lone geniuses, usually not even well-paid. Without them, ambitious systems would gather dust.