{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"a2eab101-adfc-4a0d-8142-63a4d11cee02","title":"人工智能和资本主义的未来","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780745338613","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"a2eab101-adfc-4a0d-8142-63a4d11cee02","id":"a2eab101-adfc-4a0d-8142-63a4d11cee02","uuid":"a2eab101-adfc-4a0d-8142-63a4d11cee02","title":"人工智能和资本主义的未来","normalized_title":"人工智能和资本主义的未来","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780745338613","isbns":["9780745338613","9780745338606","9781786803955","9781786803979","9781786803962"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":225,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/a2eab101-adfc-4a0d-8142-63a4d11cee02","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/%E4%BA%BA%E5%B7%A5%E6%99%BA%E8%83%BD%E5%92%8C%E8%B5%84%E6%9C%AC%E4%B8%BB%E4%B9%89%E7%9A%84%E6%9C%AA%E6%9D%A5","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/a2eab101-adfc-4a0d-8142-63a4d11cee02/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/a2eab101-adfc-4a0d-8142-63a4d11cee02/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/a2eab101-adfc-4a0d-8142-63a4d11cee02","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/a2eab101-adfc-4a0d-8142-63a4d11cee02/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/a2eab101-adfc-4a0d-8142-63a4d11cee02/search"},"page":{"printed_page":84,"pdf_page":92,"physical_index":92,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"277b02acbf149cc439e475c5a6498bb28373261189bcc0974b4cf884e242aee2"},"chapter":"Digital Barricades: Interventions in Digital Culture and Politics","content":"Automated transport will move goods to and from warehouses that are themselves already automated by AI. Amazon’s ‘fulfilment centres’ are the paradigm case. Amazon is a company that has made ML its ‘flywheel’ (S. Levy 2018) and has deployed it in the corporation’s algorithmic recommendation system, online purchases, smart home devices and cloud computing empire. It is also in the cavernous fulfilment centres where orders are received, picked from shelves, packed, and loaded to trucks, by notoriously poorly paid, speeded-up, stressed-out and electronically monitored workers. Demonstrating Marx’s thesis that capital’s machinery intensifies rather than diminishes exploitation, the heightened pressure on human ‘ambots’ has accompanied the deployment of real robots (Greenmeier 2008; Abdelrahman 2017). Amazon acquired robotics company Kiva Systems (renamed Amazon Robotics) in 2012 for \\$775 million, inspired by the discovery that ‘fulfillment center workers were spending more than half their time walking around the warehouse to find items and put them in their tote’ (Agrawal, Gans and Goldfarb 2018: 145). Large-scale deployment of its round, low automata followed a Christmas crisis during which the corporation failed to meet promised delivery dates. By 2017 Amazon had more than 100,000 Kiva bots in select fulfilment centres worldwide (Wingfield 2017). Where these bots are used, they are directed by a constantly updated computerized inventory system and guided by motion sensors to bring goods to pickers stationary on a work platform. The robots have reduced the time to complete an order by a fifth. They save Amazon space – their squat profile allows fitting 50 per cent more inventory in a given area – and power bills; Kivas work in the dark and do not need air conditioning to prevent the heatstroke that regularly brought ambulances racing to fulfilment centres (Tam 2014).\n\nAmazon’s fulfilment centre automation still has major gaps. One is the ‘picking’ of items from the robot-propelled mobile shelves. This may seem a routine task easily mechanized, but an Amazon warehouse, unlike an auto assembly line, deals with an ‘almost infinite variety of shapes, sizes, weights and firmness of items’ (Agrawal, Gans and Goldfarb 2018: 144). This has made picking an intractable automation problem. For several years an Amazon Picking Challenge invited major robotics companies to find a solution, without success. One recent line of research uses a ‘a mix of automated software and a human controller’, with the robot automatically navigating to a shelf where the human – wearing a virtual reality helmet, possibly in a remote location – guides its arm to grip and move the item; the long-term aim is to use a machine-learning artificial intelligence ‘trained on many observations of human grasping via teleoperation to teach the robot to do that part itself’ (Agrawal, Gans and Goldfarb 2018: 145).\n\n84\n\ninhuman power","previous_page":83,"next_page":85}