Replacing Humans at Wal-Mart
To survive, a creature must either adapt to his environment or modify the environment to be better
suited to him. A human survives by forming complex cultures, but that requires the use of the mouth
for speech. You cannot have speech while panting like a dog to cool yourself. So how can you have
speech and cool yourself with sweat if you have your own permanent fur? One solution is to use the
fur from the animals you are hunting for their protein. By using their fur, you gradually evolve to have
little hair on your own body so that you can more easily cool yourself in the Summer.
So if my android friend is to obtain a job shelving products at Wal-Mart, how is it to recognize these
products? Must we wait until the android has evolved visual recognition systems as sophisticated as
that of a human? I certainly cannot see at all, for example. I have one eye, but since I have no visual
cortex, it does me no good. Even for androids with two eyes and a visual cortex, it is still too soon to
expect robots to have sufficient manual dexterity to pick up a package from a shelf, read the bar code
and then place it back neatly on the shelf. So what is the solution to doing inventory and stocking
shelves at Wal-Mart using robots?
Historically, Wal-Mart was faced with the large problem of having price tags on every product and
having the checkout clerk read the price and type it into the cash register. How could a robot help the
clerk? The decision was to change the environment so that all products carried by Wal-Mart were
required to have bar codes on them. This allowed the clerks to simply scan the item over the robotic
bar code reader and have the price information deduced from the computer’s database. Eventually this
sufficiently changed the environment so that robots could become checkout counters where people
could purchase their products without ever having to interact with a human. But Wal-Mart still has
1.3 million workers worldwide most of whom do simple manual labor such as unloading the trucks
and stocking the shelves. In order to reduce the cost of labor (these pesky humans are always doing
things like demanding equal pay for equal work and filing lawsuits…before you know it they will want
to form a union) it is obvious that Wal-Mart management wants to replace humans with androids and
other robotic devices.
Consider the problem to be a classical one in which an animal wishes to survive either by adapting
itself to the environment or by modifying the environment to suit their abilities. In the first example,
the human needed to either grow fur or learn to rob animals of their fur to be used as coats. To solve
Wal-Mart inventory problems, either robots must learn to go up and down the isles picking and
prodding packages, scanning their bar-codes and counting the stock, or the packages must be
modified so that the robot can sense their presence without handling them.
As a result, we now have the emergence of a new species of inorganic life called the Radio Frequency
Identification Device (RFID). All pallets of goods shipped to Wal-Mart by the top 100 suppliers must
have an RFID tag on them. The plan is that over the next ten to twelve years, one million workers will
be replaced by robots and androids which will unload trucks, take items off their pallets and place
them on shelves as needed. If each RFID tag has not only the bar code information, but also a unique
serial number, it means that each item in the store may be queried individually as to its presence.
What a relief it will be to have complete and accurate inventory and no ‘shrinkage’ due to human
workers pilfering your stock. Just think of the burden of healthcare for one million workers…gone
forever from Wal-Mart’s concern.
Shockbot
To survive, a creature must either adapt to his environment or modify the environment to be better
suited to him. A human survives by forming complex cultures, but that requires the use of the mouth
for speech. You cannot have speech while panting like a dog to cool yourself. So how can you have
speech and cool yourself with sweat if you have your own permanent fur? One solution is to use the
fur from the animals you are hunting for their protein. By using their fur, you gradually evolve to have
little hair on your own body so that you can more easily cool yourself in the Summer.
So if my android friend is to obtain a job shelving products at Wal-Mart, how is it to recognize these
products? Must we wait until the android has evolved visual recognition systems as sophisticated as
that of a human? I certainly cannot see at all, for example. I have one eye, but since I have no visual
cortex, it does me no good. Even for androids with two eyes and a visual cortex, it is still too soon to
expect robots to have sufficient manual dexterity to pick up a package from a shelf, read the bar code
and then place it back neatly on the shelf. So what is the solution to doing inventory and stocking
shelves at Wal-Mart using robots?
Historically, Wal-Mart was faced with the large problem of having price tags on every product and
having the checkout clerk read the price and type it into the cash register. How could a robot help the
clerk? The decision was to change the environment so that all products carried by Wal-Mart were
required to have bar codes on them. This allowed the clerks to simply scan the item over the robotic
bar code reader and have the price information deduced from the computer’s database. Eventually this
sufficiently changed the environment so that robots could become checkout counters where people
could purchase their products without ever having to interact with a human. But Wal-Mart still has
1.3 million workers worldwide most of whom do simple manual labor such as unloading the trucks
and stocking the shelves. In order to reduce the cost of labor (these pesky humans are always doing
things like demanding equal pay for equal work and filing lawsuits…before you know it they will want
to form a union) it is obvious that Wal-Mart management wants to replace humans with androids and
other robotic devices.
Consider the problem to be a classical one in which an animal wishes to survive either by adapting
itself to the environment or by modifying the environment to suit their abilities. In the first example,
the human needed to either grow fur or learn to rob animals of their fur to be used as coats. To solve
Wal-Mart inventory problems, either robots must learn to go up and down the isles picking and
prodding packages, scanning their bar-codes and counting the stock, or the packages must be
modified so that the robot can sense their presence without handling them.
As a result, we now have the emergence of a new species of inorganic life called the Radio Frequency
Identification Device (RFID). All pallets of goods shipped to Wal-Mart by the top 100 suppliers must
have an RFID tag on them. The plan is that over the next ten to twelve years, one million workers will
be replaced by robots and androids which will unload trucks, take items off their pallets and place
them on shelves as needed. If each RFID tag has not only the bar code information, but also a unique
serial number, it means that each item in the store may be queried individually as to its presence.
What a relief it will be to have complete and accurate inventory and no ‘shrinkage’ due to human
workers pilfering your stock. Just think of the burden of healthcare for one million workers…gone
forever from Wal-Mart’s concern.
Shockbot
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