Boston Dynamics' Creepy Ostrich "Handle" Bot Set To Replace Warehouse Workers

Boston Dynamics has a new robot, entitled “Handle,” which aims to be the replacement for warehouse workers loading pallets.

In a new YouTube video showing off the advancements in its robot, Boston Dynamics shows how Handle can easily pick up pallets and boxes in a warehouse environment.

You may remember the name Boston Dynamics from the infamous video showing an employee bullying Atlas by pushing it over. Since then, Atlas has evolved and is now doing parkour as Activist Post reported last year.

Unlike Atlas, Handle isn’t able to do parkour because it lacks legs; it’s equipped with wheels instead.

Handle originates from 2017 and was Dynamics’ first “wheel-legged” robot. Boston Dynamics described the design decision on its website, stating, “Wheels are fast and efficient on flat surfaces while legs can go almost anywhere: by combining wheels and legs, Handle has the best of both worlds.”

The new Handle robot is no longer based on a humanoid design like Atlas. While it still has wheel-legs with backward-bending knees, the robot now resembles a bird or mechanical ostrich. The original two arms have been replaced with a single arm mounted at the top of the bot, giving it the look of a long neck.

In the new video, two Handle bots move around completely untethered, picking up boxes from a shelf, neatly stacking them onto a pallet, and unloading them onto a conveyor belt.

Boston Dynamics isn’t the only company building warehouse robots.

Another company, Mujin, a start-up out of Tokyo University, developed artificially intelligent robots that can fully automate entire warehouses in China and is pushing for the tech in the United States.

Mujin already has supplied manufacturer JD.com with warehouse bots to become the first fulfillment center with full automation and only five human workers to service the machines, as Activist Post reported last year.

This highlights what Activist Post and this writer has detailed consistently for months — that advancement in robotics and A.I. is taking jobs daily more and more, warning that robots would soon take human jobs, such as construction and farming robots, Angus and HRP-5P, being created to replace workers in the aforementioned industries.

Also see the article entitled: “Robots Already Replacing Bank Tellers, Drivers, News Anchors, Restaurant and Warehouse Employees. Will Your Job Be Next?” written by BN Frank.

Activist Post also reported that even finance wasn’t be safe from the robot apocalypse. China Construction Bank (CCB) opened a Shanghai branch run entirely by robots in a testing phase for finance with little to no human involvement.

With robots like Atlas, Angus, HRP-5P and now robots made by Mujin threatening various industries, employment will become scarce for those of us with limited abilities in human flesh suits.

As this writer has written before on Steemit, we are shifting towards a working world with little or no humans, as automation and artificial intelligence begins to take over our jobs. It’s cheaper to hire a few robots which don’t need rest and benefits than to hire a few humans who need healthcare and retirement funds.

Doctors could also be replaced by surgeon bots. Although, robot surgery has already led to 144 deaths in 2015. Remember, robots malfunction. Robots are also coming for the tech industry and factory work as iPhone manufacturer Foxconn is replacing a massive 60,000 workers.

In unrelated horrifying news, recent research published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence suggested allowing two parent robots to code a new “offspring.” Researchers found that the resulting offspring contains a mixture of the parents’ code as well as some modules that seemed to have mutated or been blended on its own.

“It gives you a lot of diversity, and it gives you the power to explore areas of a design space that you wouldn’t normally go into,” David Howard, one of the scientists on the project, told Wired.

All this sets a potentially dangerous precedent. We already have a lack of work – what happens when the great robot apocalypse occurs? Things aren’t going to be pretty. With robots taking our jobs, who will afford these products? One potential solution is to shift away from a monetary economy and more towards a self-sustainable resource economy like the proposed “Venus Project.”

Even fast food chains and restaurants in the past few years like McDonald’s have decided to experiment to see if they can replace workers with robots. While McDonald’s or any business isn’t going to replace workers overnight, the transition will happen quicker than a lot of people think.

All this highlights what Elon Musk has previously warned, that a universal basic income (UBI) — essentially free cash handouts — “will be necessary over time if (AI) artificial intelligence takes over most human jobs.” And that appears to happen faster and faster.

Another famous scientist, Stephen Hawking, has previously warned “artificial intelligence could spell the end for the human race If we are not careful enough because they are too clever.”

If all that’s not enough, scientists at the University of Bergen, Norway proposed the incredibly Orwellian idea of inserting morals into A.I. code at the ACM conference in Hawaii on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Society stating that smart home assistant devices should snitch on their owners, Activist Post reported.

This is only the beginning of the robot apocalypse that will touch on every aspect of society by 2025 according to some estimates. It was recently reported by the Robotic Industries Association (RIA) that robots/artificial intelligence has taken over a record number of jobs in the U.S., proving what Activist Post has been sounding the alarm about for months.

So robots may take over our jobs sooner rather than later.

Aaron Kesel writes for Activist Post. Support us at Patreon. Follow us on Minds, Steemit, SoMee, BitChute, Facebook and Twitter. Ready for solutions? Subscribe to our premium newsletter Counter Markets.