That minimum wage you thought was below your value line may start to look pretty good as Americans slowly learn their real value as a plug-and-play employee is approaching $0. On a long enough time line, someone ends up building a robot. As we’ve reported extensively here at Zero Hedge (Walmart, Google, FoxxConn, KFC, Starbucks), robotics have been the clear go-to decision when one wishes to abolish those pesky employees always looking for timeoff and the proverbial “fair treatment”. But now we bring you the newest member of the robotics club, none other than your every other weekend series X-whatever funding round superstar Uber!
Uber now has a robotic security guard patrolling the lot used to park cars awaiting inspection in the Mission Bay area of San Francisco. Knightscope designed and manufactured the device, which is known as K5. Here is the very exciting company demo…
As Fusion reports, the robot can see 360 degrees, possesses a thermal sensor within its camera, and able to decipher the character of the surrounding environment (weather, distance, sounds, facial recognition). Lest your imagination run wild about how this robot would defend any private or public property, rest assured Uber’s robotic security guard is a glorified mall cop.
Meaning the robot will merely set off an alarm and record everything it can if there is some form of a threat or breach.
As Fusion explained, the robot is keen on what is happening around it:
“The bot was spotted by a friend of Fusion, Alan Sanchez, who stopped to take a photo of the bot and found that when he did, the robot stopped moving around to focus its stare on him”
And the encounters are, at least in this instance, humorous.
“The robots were patrolling at 2 a.m. Some clown came onto the property and was engaging our machine in a way that suggested he was going to attempt damage,” said Stephens. “He was kicking and punching at the machine. It set off all the alarms and sent an alert to the security guard’s mobile device. When that happened, this guy turned white and took off like a little girl. We turned the evidence over to police, who said it made him a suspect in some vehicle break-ins that occurred around the same time in the direction he ran.”
First they came for the parking lots. Now the robots are coming for European delivery jobs. According to Bloomberg, food delivery service Just Eat Plc will be using robots to deliver food. Just Eat will enter an exclusive group using robotic delivery alongside Hermes logistics, Metro AG, and Pronto Technologies.
Beyond Just Eat there is a firm named Starship which will be bringing robotic food delivery into the realm of possibility. Per Bloomberg:
“The little robots, which are designed to operate on sidewalks rather than roads, make deliveries within a two-to three-mile radius. They can carry loads weighing as much as 20 pounds, at speeds of up to four miles per hour. Starship will operate the robots on behalf of the first customers, monitoring their progress remotely and standing by to drive the vehicles remotely if they encounter situations they can’t handle in autonomous driving mode. During test driving, the robots have encountered more than 400,000 people without having a single accident, the company said“
Now that those who felt under paid will likely be unemployed, perhaps the frustration will spur innovation unless this is just a another example of the increasing gap not be between the haves and the have-nots but between those who tell a computer what to do and those who are told what to do by a computer.
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