You raise a great point. And the Amazon picking staff are onshore in wealthy countries. I guess the minimum wage paid by Amazon is around 15 USD per hour.

I wonder: Is the task of automating this work primaryly difficult in vision or dexterity (motion)? Or maybe they are equally difficult for different reasons.

There's a lot more money being thrown at this than in previous years. Seems to be growing beyond corporate R&D labs and university research towards startups trying to productize it.

I've seen multiple articles about robotic claws. This one made the rounds previously https://www.firgelli.com/pages/humanoid-robot-actuators

Maybe this workforce is useful not because of it's direct output, but for it's mere existence : look politian, I'm creating jobs !

As others say, not necessarily. The breakeven point for jobs like Amazon may be quite low (or high? I mean simply "not yet there").

I'd say that we'll know it works when robots with those hands start turning out on the Russo-Ukrainian frontline en masse, because it is there where the lack of manpower has the most pressing and brutal consequences, and cannot be mitigated by usual peacetime incentives (e.g. better benefits).

That frontline has already sucked in all the automatization innovations of the last decade, as long as they proved themselves in combat.

> We'll know this works when it starts replacing Amazon pickers in quantity.

That doesn’t follow. There are plenty of tasks that can be fully and reliably automated but aren’t, for the simple reason that human labor is dirt cheap compared to advanced robotics.