A short video is trending right now thanks to an army of 300 little orange robots that may someday take your job away if they haven't yet. The tiny machines aptly called "Little Orange", can be seen moving non-stop carrying packages and then dropping them into holes on the floor.
The orange robots, cute as they may seem, have taken over human laborers in this particular Chinese company giving credence to the fear of many that they may lose their jobs to such smart machines. The said robots sort around 200,000 packages each day in a warehouse based inside the STO Express building located at Linyi, Shandong Province.
Little Orange was made by Hikvision, a Chinese company responsible for other package-sorting machines. Each robot measure just 7.5 inches but can do in three hours what human employees do in five. The Sun reported that the robots started working for the company in November 2016 and are already employed in two warehouses.
As The Verge emphasized, the warehouse is not completely without human participation. Human employees are in charge of grabbing the parcels from the conveyor belt and then placing them on top of the robots. Each Little Orange then uses a code scan to determine where the package needs to go. The robot workers then carry the packages from the assembly line moving seamlessly through the pre-determined routes until they reach the departure gates. They are then quickly dispatched once again. This process eliminates mistakes in sorting and possible damage to the goods. The robots also do not have emotions so they are not susceptible to frustration, fatigue, and stress.
The use of these tiny orange robot employees is a prime example of machines taking over humans which are a predicament seen by some of the best scientific and business minds as inevitable. Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and NBA team owner Mark Cuban are just a few of those who believe robots and artificial intelligence will "cause unemployment".
