Tye Brady, chief technologist for Amazon Robotics, joins us on a new episode of the GeekWire Podcast to talk about the company’s latest warehouse robots, explaining how they represent the emergence of the larger vision that prompted him to join the company more than eight years ago.
Brady makes the case that Amazon is unique in testing and deploying robotics in the field, at a massive scale, and he predicts that the implications will ultimately extend well beyond the company.
“I do believe that what we’re doing in robotics inside of Amazon, mastering these core fundamentals of robotics, actually will help society in general, at large, because these technologies and these techniques, this collaboration mentality, will actually influence other industries and other sectors,” he says.
He continues, “It’s not humans against machines. It’s humans and machines working together to do that task. And we’re pioneering that movement.”
Our conversation at Amazon headquarters in Seattle followed my trip this summer to Austin and San Marcos, Texas, to see several of Amazon’s newest autonomous robots first-hand in the company’s fulfillment centers.
Listen below, or subscribe to GeekWire in any podcast app, and continue reading for excerpts from Brady’s comments, edited for context and clarity.
An inflection point for robotics and automation: Now you can unlock the core capabilities of robotics, something that we’ve been after [as an industry] for 40-50 years, at least. We have the age of the internet, we have the age of computing, we have more sensors available to us, we have machine learning and AI systems. And we can fuse all these together into robotic systems. We’re now at this really amazing moment in time, where it’s all coming together.
Biggest concerns: There are bad actors, for sure. But I’m very optimistic that, for the one bad actor that may be doing something malicious with machine learning, there is a society that will keep that person or that group in check. I do get concerned when people overestimate the capabilities of the technology. But they tend to underestimate what it is capable of in the long run. So my concern really is about the reputation that is being formed early on, right now.
An optimistic outlook for future generations: The mindset that technology will help society is really important. And I want our next generation to embrace that mindset. We need our big-hearted, kindest, most awesome engineers, young women, young men, to get excited about technology, to understand that technology will help us become a better species on planet Earth. I want them to be excited about that. I want them to embrace technology, and not run away from it and say that technology is going to be doom and gloom.
The impact of robots on safety: I want to eliminate the mundane, and the tedious, and the repetitive. I want to make things safer inside our fulfillment centers. I don’t want folks to have to lift heavy boxes and crouch down on their knees or reach over their shoulders. And if we can have robotic systems to do that, that’s a win for everybody.
The impact on jobs and work: I think the evidence is pretty clear. The more robots that we add, the more jobs we’re creating. Over the past 10 years, we’ve created over a million jobs, in total. There are over 700 job categories that go along with that. Jobs do change. When you do robotics right, a collaborative style of robotics, or robotics that extends human capability and augments existing expertise of people, then you become more productive. And when you are more productive, then you actually gain the opportunity to have more customers, because you’re bettering that customer experience. And when you have a better customer experience, that grants you revenue to invest in more new jobs, and also in better robotics, and this flywheel will continue to spin.
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Audio editing by Curt Milton.
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