I wish that programs like VEX and FLL would do away with the "tele-operated" portions of their competitions. Kids may enjoy it, but too many of them fall into the trap of treating it all like a remote controlled toy and never get very deep into the programming aspect.

Packages would arrive along a conveyor belt and get put on a tray in a big train of trays (like a roller coaster for boxes).

A scanner would read a bar code on the package (sense).

The bar code would correspond to a particular loading bay where a truck was waiting that the package needed to be put on. (think - match code with loading bay).

When the tray went around and reached the chute for that loading bay it would tilt up and slide the box down to where it could be loaded (act).

Of course even with the requirement of mechanical motion, you could still argue a toaster is a robot. It's hard to define robot: http://robohub.org/robohub-roundtable-why-is-it-so-difficult...

However, FTC, supposedly the grown up version of FLL, had both teleop and autonomous, and with the way it was scored, all you really needed was a solid teleop to crush regional competitions, so we ended up doing way less programming than in middle school FLL. I believe VEX worked the same way, but I only did it one year, so my memory of it is fuzzy.

It’s kind of simplistic to say all you need is a good teleop period. In many competitions some teams that had worse teleop were picked because they could consistently score in autonomous, which is pretty good EV.

For example, a phone isn't a robot, not unless you give it wheels and the ability to act.

Mostly because it is so different from what some people naively imagine when you asked them to think of a design for a robot to wash dishes.

Also, reminds me of this:

   Status: Alive

Ahem: https://youtu.be/AKCpqqhe-S4?t=1m

An argument against the thesis that "robots" will lead to catastrophic loss of jobs, is that the concept of "robot" in a strict sense (intended as a sudden similarity to human intelligence/capacity) doesn't really exist, because "robots" are simply a form automation - and civilization has been incrementally developing automation for 250 years by now.

sorry, this was what I was looking for,

https://www.theincomparable.com/robot/

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_traffic_light

Or, said another way, if the article had said the companies collectively raised $700 million, I don’t think I would’ve been surprised.

Can someone provide context?

So expect something like 4-10 new robot platforms coming out as a result of this. In a market where there's not a plethora of vendors, that's respectable.

If anyone has more direct experience I'd be happy to be corrected.

Some of the Chinese systems even use the same Kiva-style modules to do other tasks like package mail sorting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6a0HROB054

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QndP_PCRSw

https://www.righthandrobotics.com/

Humans have better things to do than grueling warehouse jobs.

Sadly, they also need to eat, and the only way they can do so now is by doing soul- and body-crushing work at Amazon "fulfillment centers."

Even better, the warehouses are revitalizing parts of the country that have been blighted for decades.

For instance, I used to live in San Bernardino, and these warehouse jobs have created opportunities in that city that simply didn't exist a decade ago. Instead of spending two hours a day commuting to a retail job, people are actually working in the cities that they live in.

That's clearly a big problem for our societies which seem to collapse when unemployment raises. It's also clear that not everybody will end up as a software engineer or neurosurgeon. So what's the solution? That's left as an exercise for the reader.

What would a society where only a tiny portion of the population needs to actively work to provide for everybody look like? An utopia for some, hell on earth for others.

Paralegals, sports reporters, basic web coders...

> An utopia for some, hell on earth for others.

"We" could farm the "others" for nutrients and trace elements (until "we" become "others" thanks to future automation), or the "others" could kill "us," or the species as a whole could find a different arrangement than trading labor for food. I'm betting on mass extinction followed by thousands of years of bare survival by humans and a small number of similarly cockroach-esque species, but maybe we'll do better.

Thanks for changing my viewpoint!

Good to know you only have the ability to read two sentences.