Amazon has unveiled its latest warehouse robot. It says "Sparrow is the first robotic system in our warehouses that can detect, select, and handle individual products in our inventory." The robotic arm uses AI and computer vision to recognize and handle millions of items, according to Amazon. The company says that, by employing robots in its warehouses, it can conduct operations more efficiently and safely. "Sparrow will take on repetitive tasks, enabling our employees to focus their time and energy on other things, while also advancing safety," Amazon said.

Amazon's new robotic arm is capable of handling and sorting millions of unique items - a major milestone for the ecommerce giant - and a sign that it could one day replace a large number of its human warehouse workers. The robotic arm, dubbed Sparrow, is powered by a combination of artificial intelligence, computer vision and suction cups. It is able to deftly pick up and move items that vary in shape, size and texture. Although the company has long featured a range of different automation in its gigantic fulfillment centers, Sparrow is the first Amazon robot able to discern so many items and, as such, could render many warehouse workers obsolete in the future. Amazon's new robotic arm is capable of handling and sorting millions of unique items - a major milestone for the ecommerce giant The robotic arm, dubbed Sparrow, is powered by a combination of artificial intelligence, computer vision and suction cups.

Amazon's newest robot could one day take the place of many human workers across its giant fulfillment network, generating apprehension among some of the company's more than 750,000 US warehouse employees. The robot, called Sparrow, is Amazon's "first robotic system in our warehouses that can detect, select, and handle individual products in our inventory," a spokesperson said in a statement. Using AI, computer vision, and a suction-cup "hand," the robot is capable of handling around 65% of the products sold on Amazon's website before they are packaged, the company said at a technology expo where Sparrow was unveiled. The robot arm is currently deployed at one warehouse in Texas for testing, the spokesperson added. Amazon envisions a wider rollout as soon as next year.

What do you call a robotic arm that relies on computer vision, artificial intelligence, and suction cups to pick up items? In Amazon's world, it's called a "Sparrow." The tech giant unveiled a robot on Thursday that's capable of identifying individual items that vary in shape, size, and texture. Sparrow can also pick these up via the suction cups attached to its surface and place them into separate plastic crates. Sparrow is the first robot Amazon has revealed of its kind and it has the potential to wipe out significant numbers of the company's warehouse workers.

Adrienne Williams and Milagros Miceli are researchers at the Distributed AI Research (DAIR) Institute. Timnit Gebru is the institute's founder and executive director. She was previously co-lead of the Ethical AI research team at Google. The public's understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) is largely shaped by pop culture -- by blockbuster movies like "The Terminator" and their doomsday scenarios of machines going rogue and destroying humanity. This kind of AI narrative is also what grabs the attention of news outlets: a Google engineer claiming that its chatbot was sentient was among the most discussed AI-related news in recent months, even reaching Stephen Colbert's millions of viewers.

Why do Computer Vision Products need in Warehouses? I have found that the use of computer vision products in warehouses is very helpful as it can save millions of lives of people, that are working in warehouses. Some of the research quotes are mentioned below. "According to the U.S. Department of Labor, tripping, falling, and slipping make up most of what it calls "general industry accidents." Slip and fall accidents make up 15 percent of all accidental deaths, 25 percent of all injury claims, and -- are you ready? "The nearly 40,000 reported injuries accounted for about 49% of all warehouse injuries in the U.S. according to the analysis, though Amazon only employs about 33% of all warehouse workers.

Who wouldn't want a robot to handle all the household drudgery? With recent advances in artificial intelligence and robotics technology, there is growing interest in developing and marketing household robots capable of handling a variety of domestic chores. Tesla is building a humanoid robot, which, according to CEO Elon Musk, could be used for cooking meals and helping elderly people. Amazon recently acquired iRobot, a prominent robotic vacuum manufacturer, and has been investing heavily in the technology through the Amazon Robotics program to expand robotics technology to the consumer market. In May 2022, Dyson, a company renowned for its power vacuum cleaners, announced that it plans to build the U.K.'s largest robotics center devoted to developing household robots that carry out daily domestic tasks in residential spaces.

As of 2019, the global warehouse automation market -- that is, programmable machines that pick, sort, and return goods to their shelves, as well as sensor- and AI-based tools that simplify tasks for warehouse workers -- was worth about $15 billion. That number is expected to double within the next four years, with supply chain leaders in an internal Accenture survey citing warehouse automation as one of their top three priorities for digital investment. Clearly, the industry has huge growth potential. But what does this mean for the millions of workers who currently work in warehouses around the world? In the U.S. alone, some 1.5 million workers are employed in the warehouse and storage sector.

We've heard the fable of "the self-made billionaire" a thousand times: some unrecognized genius toiling away in a suburban garage stumbles upon The Next Big Thing, thereby single-handedly revolutionizing their industry and becoming insanely rich in the process -- all while comfortably ignoring the fact that they'd received $300,000 in seed funding from their already rich, politically-connected parents to do so. In The Warehouse: Workers and Robots at Amazon, Alessandro Delfanti, associate professor at the University of Toronto and author of Biohackers: The Politics of Open Science, deftly examines the dichotomy between Amazon's public personas and its union-busting, worker-surveilling behavior in fulfillment centers around the world -- and how it leverages cutting edge technologies to keep its employees' collective noses to the grindstone, pissing in water bottles. In the excerpt below, Delfanti examines the way in which our current batch of digital robber barons lean on the classic redemption myth to launder their images into that of wonderkids deserving of unabashed praise. This is an excerpt from The Warehouse: Workers and Robots at Amazon by Alessandro Delfanti, available now from Pluto Press. Besides the jobs, trucks and concrete, what Amazon brought to Piacenza and to the dozens of other suburban areas which host its warehouses is a myth: a promise of modernization, economic development, and even individual emancipation that stems from the "disruptive" nature of a company heavily based on the application of new technology to both consumption and work.

The robot revolution is always allegedly just around the corner. In the utopian vision, technology emancipates human labor from repetitive, mundane tasks, freeing us to be more productive and take on more fulfilling work. In the dystopian vision, robots come for everyone's jobs, put millions and millions of people out of work, and throw the economy into chaos. Such a warning was at the crux of Andrew Yang's ill-fated presidential campaign, helping propel his case for universal basic income that he argued would become necessary when automation left so many workers out. It's the argument many corporate executives make whenever there's a suggestion they might have to raise wages: $15 an hour will just mean machines taking your order at McDonald's instead of people, they say. But we often spend so much time talking about the potential for robots to take our jobs that we fail to look at how they are already changing them -- sometimes for the better, but sometimes not.