Amazon, like most massive companies, will do almost anything if it means making more money at the end of the quarter. One of those things, according to a report from The Information, is using humanoid robots to deliver packages.
The online retail giant is working on replacing its delivery humans with robotic replicas, the report claims, citing people familiar with the matter. But don’t go thinking that the future is just around the corner, because it won’t happen quite so fast.
Artificial Amazon
The main component in development is the software needed to control the company’s new robot overlords package delivery staff. Said software would feature an artificial intelligence component, because nothing bad ever happened after giving a humanoid robot autonomy.
That’s not all that is in development, of course. Anyone can write software, but not everyone can afford to build a dedicated facility for testing robots. Called a “humanoid park”, the under-construction location would be used to trial robots built by a range of contractors. Amazon seemingly won’t be taking hardware development and construction in-house, at least initially.
Successfully creating a being that doesn’t need to stop for bathroom breaks will do wonders for 24-hour Prime deliveries overseas. It may also lead to the world’s first human-on-humanoid-robot mugging, an event we predict will take place almost immediately.
Perhaps Amazon intends to provide its robots with defensive capabilities, or perhaps they’ll just turn and run at the first sign of human aggression. It’s far more likely that the issue of artificial delivery devices being robbed is a conversation that will only be addressed once it’s reasonably certain that the metal men can actually do the job.
There’s no timeline given for when the first artificial delivery person will hit the streets. Amazon this week also revealed how its warehouses would benefit from robots able to load and unload vehicles and conduct basic repairs. These would be powered by an agentic AI and are in development at the company’s Lab126 device unit in California. As with delivery humanoids, they’re still in the very early stages of development.
“We’re creating systems that can hear, understand and act on natural language commands, turning warehouse robots into flexible, multi-talented assistants,” Amazon previously said. This suggests that its warehouse assistant robots also exist more as software than as functional machines.
