Warehouses Surrender to Bots

In a follow up to a post made last year, robots made by Kiva Systems have taken over warehouses run by the Gap, Staples and Zappos (SingularityHub). Wired reports that the robots have been successful at fooling their humans into believing that they're the masters in their system:

... remain our underlings — fetching our underwear, delivering our jeans — not our overlords. At many sites, workers have begun to name their robots, complete with "Hello, My Name Is" name tags. From there, it’s only a short step to playing fetch with your robot.

"One of our customers calls those name tags tattoos, and the robots are adopted by employees," said Mitch Rosenberg, Kiva Systems’ VP of Marketing. "Your robot sends you a card on your birthday — this is a corporate sponsored thing, so I asked the management why they let them do it. They said, ‘We do it because the employees get a lot of joy, a lot of happiness out of anthropomorphizing the robots and turning them into pets.’"

More from a corporate propaganda video: