Amazon, warehouse king, paying $775 million to buy Kiva Systems, an obscure and nine-year-old supply-chain robot-maker. Kiva makes a clever self-propelled robot that scoots around warehouses to retrieve and carry entire shelf-units of packages to their proper shipping point. Look at their Web site. Hard to believe that a bunch of machines that look like bloated headless turtles scuttling around a warehouse signals a bright future for our economy.