It might be bad for the morale of the human workers at Amazon for the company to openly flaunt its dreams of replacing them with robots, but you can’t worry too much about those temps. 

A few days ago, Jeff Bezos’ everything company played host to an AI challenge. The technology proved to not be quite ready to replace pickers, but time is on silicon’s side. From Mike Murphy at Quartz:

We humans often get injured or sick, and can’t usually work round the clock. We also sometimes have families and enjoy healthcare. Robots, on the other hand, have none of these problems.

Which is why Amazon hosted a competition over the weekend to find out if a robot could take the jobs of any of its many employees—more than 50,000 people work in its US warehouses alone—who fulfil our insatiable desires for books, toasters, cameras, and live ladybugs.

The Amazon Picking Challenge, hosted during a robotics conference in Seattle last week, tested a robot’s ability to autonomously grab items from a shelf and place them in a tub. While we have robots that can be programmed to pick things up and put them other places—Rethink Robotics’ Baxter is great at this—it’s much harder to get them to recognize millions of items of different shapes, colors, and sizes on their own.•