Everyone Wants to Work at Ups After Teamsters Deal (opens in new tab)

I don’t understand this idea of not paying people a good salary just because they are not doctors.

If people want to get packages delivered to their house, they should pay for it, and they should pay enough so it is sustainable. If you are not able or don’t want to walk to a central package collection station you can pay a premium.

Should only doctors be able to afford rent ?

At some point far, far in the future. If you think this through you’ll see it’s one of the hardest tasks to get a robot to do.

Stairs, judgement, packages of different size and weight, dogs, gates, doorbells, lobbies. Have you ever tried to get a robot to walk? It’s hard. Climb steps? Open a gate? Open a lobby door? Ring a doorbell to get into a lobby? Do all that while holding a package of arbitrary size and weight?

I would sooner try to automate the job of a lawyer, software engineer, customer service rep, marketer, CTO…

So maybe you cheat. Standardize box sizes. Standardize delivery points. Good start! Go cost out 300M steel delivery boxes and 300M unique install jobs. And 200M of those don’t have room on the property for it. Think about people who live in cities for a moment.

Just deliver to mailboxes! Try that one out and report back!

Ooh! Drones! Amazon spent a billion bucks on it before giving up.

I’m not saying you posted your response in bad faith, but might I humbly suggest that in the future you try to think things through a bit more?

Ah! A robot that can drive a vehicle in all weather conditions and deliver a package of any size and shape through a snowy sidewalk up three flights of stairs and open any style of gate with a key or code and read and understand signs like “deliveries out back” and communicate with shipping and receiving departments for the same or lower cost and speed as a human driver.

I bet UPS is kicking themselves for not thinking of this sooner! I’m thinking 8 story points, maybe we can get a pizza ordered and get an MVP out the door this weekend.

> At what point do you just have robots deliver packages though?

At the point where it becomes cheaper and more reliable than hiring humans to do the work. Right now, we don't have the technology do the job well and do it under all required conditions, but once that changes we should absolutely replace the human workers with robots so that humans are freed up to focus their efforts on other things.

> Is paying someone the salary of a doctor to carry packages to a house sustainable?

The majority of unionized workers at UPS are only working part time and under the new contract they'll make $21 an hour to start, eventually making $23 an hour. I suspect that doctors tend to make more than that, and if they don't they should probably get themselves a strong union too.

Total compensation isn’t salary.

Also, at what point? Maybe like 30 years after there is a robot robot that isn’t garbage or a vacuum. The Fifth Element didn’t even imagine a robot taking jobs beyond Worst Airport Bartender Ever and Roomba.

I think you're vastly underestimating the complexity of the task.