What I liked about the article on the Kiva Robots at OAK4, is that it emphasized is that the part of the work that's being optimized is the grunt work of moving stuff back and worth - the (relatively) more sophisticated work of identifying the item, verifying the quality, and confirm it's the right element for the order, is done by humans. While it might not be very high on the feeding chain, it's at least a little higher than it was before - and that's a good thing.

I'm all for humans being automated out of the low-order activities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barge_Haulers_on_the_Volga#medi...