I used to work at a very large online furniture store. A few years back, they were in the middle of increasing their warehouse automation with smart conveyor belts for picking - instead of having humans grab a box off of the belt, a barcode scanner would read the label and divert it automatically to the right truck bay.
It took a good year to get them really working reliably, but in the end they did work, and enabled the dotcom to run with a much leaner warehouse staff.
Make no mistake, this is the way things are headed, and it will get figured out. Picking random items from a shelf is one of the harder automation problems to solve, but it will be solved, and those terrible jobs will be gone forever.
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I used to work at a very large online furniture store. A few years back, they were in the middle of increasing their warehouse automation with smart conveyor belts for picking - instead of having humans grab a box off of the belt, a barcode scanner would read the label and divert it automatically to the right truck bay.
It took a good year to get them really working reliably, but in the end they did work, and enabled the dotcom to run with a much leaner warehouse staff.
Make no mistake, this is the way things are headed, and it will get figured out. Picking random items from a shelf is one of the harder automation problems to solve, but it will be solved, and those terrible jobs will be gone forever.