Amazon Hopes to Replace 600k Us Workers with Robots
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Amazon plans to replace 600,000 US workers with robots, sparking debate about the impact of automation on employment and the economy.
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American companies lie so often about the feasibility of future capabilities that it is becoming just background noise. If the plan is not realistic, if it is not based in well argued projects, then they are just lying to the public and to investors. Currently the bar is so low, that anything counts as "we just though that it was possible" so it is not illegal. That should be solved.
FTA:
Amazon has considered steps to improve its image as a “good corporate citizen” in preparation for the anticipated backlash around job losses, according to The NYT, reporting that the company considered participating in community projects and avoiding terms like “automation” and “AI.” More vague terms like “advanced technology” were explored instead, and using the term “cobot” for robots that work alongside humans.
https://www.reddit.com/r/EDC/comments/dmnuts/53mamazon_fulfi...
the desire to save money/replace workers is real (though I wish that they would start by recycling packaging/materials in the warehouses) and there are certainly a lot of ways in which this could be done --- the issue of course is how society will work through this --- I suspect we'd all feel a bit differently about this if Amazon were a public benefit corporation rather than one focused on profit for shareholders. Their motto is:
>Work Hard, Have Fun, Make History.
and it really should have included something about making the world a better place or doing good.....
For floor work, wheels seem the most logical. There is the issue of loading trucks (which I did at UPS for a couple summers), for that I’m thinking maybe a ceiling-mounted arm that could extend the length of the truck?
It's throwing shit in a box. Who cares how neat it is? As long as things arrive sealed and intact, it's fine.
"When it comes to olive picking, the best a robot can do is get 60% of the olives.
Humans can do about ~80%.
Robots are so much cheaper than humans that it makes sense to use the robot even with the 60/80 performance split."
Including in software.
Given that, as far as I can tell, most handmade artisanal software is given away for free (or nearly so), what are you basing that on?
How would you verify that your belief is correct?
I know this is just a start (and just enough to make the ROI worth it, probably), but it sounds particularly dystopian / late stage capitalism
We’re going to hit a point where we need UBI, and as a society, be OK changing our views on existence and dispel the notion that one has to “earn” their right to exist within society, because the only other alternative is the top few percentage are the only ones that benefit from the automation while everyone else starves to death.
1. the next level opportunity exist
2. proper training (we all know that's pipe dream)
3. fits what these folks are looking for (for some, repetitive jobs == less stress than "creative" jobs).
but what about glut of workers == depress wage?
my point exactly.
hence last stage fiat. capitalism / [insert false dichotomy here] is a distraction.
if only the capitalists own the robots, only the capitalists will benefit.
Someone here wrote they are pro free markets, but anti-capitalism/a capitalist class.
The thought being markets are efficient and liberating mechanisms for coordinating production and exchange but concentrated ownership of capital turns those same mechanisms into systems of control and extraction.
Then it doesn't matter what entitlements you think you should have been getting (or were getting)
Also, based on your phrasing, you seem to think that the current system punishes slackers (and/or perceived slackers) and that's our collective preference? In your opinion is this being done deliberately, or just through regular pricing mechanisms of capitalism?
That's because the US was always in a race to find more enemies to fight. It's an easy way to rally the many under a single banner and then move the banner around as needed by the few.
Lets say the lower 50% of consumers buy something like a $1000 phone every 4 years currently, and they switch to buying a 16e for $600, or a decrease of $100 a year per customer. In revenue terms you could offset this by selling .5 customers a $240 a year Apple one subscription, up-selling a iPhone pro customer to 1TB storage, or convincing someone to buy a pair of Airpods Max over regular Airpods.
Investing in subsidized worker retraining can work very short term, but with widespread automation and a reduced requirement for human workers, that can only go so far as the demand for employees simply won’t be there.
So we either have strong laws and protections that enforce that everyone receives the benefits of automation, or we don’t and only a small percentage of the population receives the benefits while everyone else starves to death.
The only reason America itself fell into dust is because they couldn't figure out how to ship bridges and high speed rail from China. They were hoping that removing all border controls would be the answer, but people who used to have good paying jobs making and building things got upset.
The Democratic Party strategy to ridicule and censor them into silence seems to have failed miserably, but the Republican strategy of making a huge show out of deporting 30 poverty-stricken refugees while ignoring businesses who employ tens of thousands is working.
LLMs and robotics look to be the first mainstream technological development in a long while which not only reduces the number of workers needed, but also doesn't have a commensurate increasing of the size of the economy in terms of increased wages through efficiency and profits being paid as wages --- instead, it is the concentration of profits by those who own the means of production as Karl Marx warned about and the Luddites feared.
If less work is needed to keep society running, why not have a reduction in the work week, and either pay folks overtime (in keeping with the increased efficiencies/profits) or have more workers (to reflect the added efficiency and spread out the workload).
Or, perhaps it's time for universal basic income?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45590900
What is your evidence of this?
Adjusting with inflation and everything else, are people better off today than in the 80s?
Funded by Carters idea where we tax corporations for job elimination. For every head you reduce with automation you pay a tax to help support that head in their time of unemployment. Then we tax the automation products.
Of course with the current government situation this isn't happening. Ever.
But as we look at post-pandemic automation (the counter operator is mostly replaced by an app) or automation (China's robots per capital), or tax policies that encourage capital spending (2018 tax bill, depreciation) it becomes obvious that automation will happen and is in many ways good. But our policy makers, media, and therefore average voter miss the forest for the trees.
It's an inevitability that people unproductive in the real economy will get cut off. You can't run an economy on gigwork that just makes parasitic upper-middle and upper-class lives more comfortable. Elite comfort isn't real production. You cannot feed, clothe, or house people with Uber rides and advertising. Instead, in the US, you feed, clothe, and house people with imports, purchased with borrowed foreign currency.
And the government takes whatever it gets and redistributes it upwards to capital-intensive industries and "US" businesses that are completely supplied by imports. It's almost an optimized destruction.
China is operating on the 'I just bought a new house so my only expense is my mortgage and I have no technical debt because it's all new' position, which doesn't last.
The USA is in the 'all we have is technical debt' phase. Which means smart investment spending can bring real gains IF we don't allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by where we currently are.
The problem is our 'elites' got addicted to that post 2010 hyper short term growth based on digital products. Boeing management moved to DC away from production, because to modern American business the product is removed from the company, something to outsource to someone else. Our MBA/management/leadership types are too precious to be wasted on those sorts of details.
Have no fear, they are gunning for the upper class, now. A quick glance at big tech gutting their ranks is just the beginning for high wage earners.
History shall repeat itself, and many of those jobs will vanish forever.
Additionally, the warehouses are staffed by contractors, who once laid off from the subcontracting company are permabanned from ever working for any other contracting company that Amazon will use. Amazon is literally running out of humans that they can hire. If they are unwilling to address their "one and done" policy, Amazon will have to use robots in order to stay in business.
0 - https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/20/amazon-warehouse-in-illinois...
Is it okay to automate sales and customer service and marketing, but warehouse workers are where you draw the line? Do you have any idea how many jobs this industry has already "killed"?
The robot revolution only benefits the people at the very top of the social stratum.
People fear that we are heading back into that, with no plan other than 'things turned out fine last time this happened' ignoring the, you know, skid row, flop houses, etc and no idea what the magic jobfairy will bring us to be these new, magically appearing 'jobs to come'.
And that happens with a lot of advances. Creates but also takes away.
we realized that we don't want all the money/profit to circulate around the top 10 tech companies in the world where all of us are out of the equation...
The cotton gin is the literal textbook example of a technology that ethically backfires and induces magnitudes greater suffering than what it was intended to obviate. It saved and expanded the institution of chattel slavery in the USA.
Unfortunately something I have seen happening a few times in our capitalism society where only shareholders happiness matters, hitting those quarter goals of exponential growth.
Not everyone thinks of others as disposable resources.
My foremost concern is that robots, particularly American-made ones, aren't ready for primetime yet. Human bodies solve problems that aren't easily automated even with a perfectly capable humanoid robot and AI-powered IK solver. I've worked in the computer vision and factory automation fields, and outside a completely automated redesign I don't think robots will significantly reduce headcount in this field.
Sales underwent consolidation where the same human interactions scaled to bigger deals. Customer service was outsourced. Marketing still remains a mysticism with no clear evidence of a return on investment.
This news topic is also a thinly veiled replacement outsourcing. The engineers involved will replace these roles. When the robots fail, it will most likely have foreign pilots taking control.
The barrier to entry only gets higher, and the people left behind are stuck in a donut hole.
Prices will be lowered. And the appeal of warehouses will go up this way. But for the remaining workers, I don’t think Amazon will come up with a better work environment. I don’t think they have that skill set.
If they can get robots to successfully handle any item packaged in a cardboard box, that is a tremendous boon, even if you still have to hire people to deal with blister packaging, bottles and other irregular shapes.
Hell, Amazon has enough market power with suppliers that if they say they only want to sell things in robot friendly packages, most suppliers will rapidly find a way.
This is incredible. It's far less than I would imagine. It represents how well optimized the warehouses are. If we roughly estimate a median product price to be $20, then the automation represents less than 2% cost saving. Of course, Amazon is at a scale that this is still net positive despite all the R&D cost. But if automation was to reduce the cost of living, there are probably better areas to focus on.
There are so many things we can be doing with our time, and moving objects from a left-bin to a right-bin simply does not need to be one of them. The real question is if we have the collective will to get all these folks education and opportunities to do something else before they feel too much pain in the near term.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Sino/comments/1iwgb19/a_dark_factor... [2] https://www.fortna.com/ [3] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/amazon-vulcan-ro... [4] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/10-years-of-amaz...
In addition to your points, something people forget is that in the previous model of brick and mortar stores, the consumer is the person that did the walking around the store and picking the items off the shelf and carrying them to the checkout.
So a portion of what Amazon is automating used to be performed for free by the consumer. This was one of the big arguments about their business model for shipping books early on, the additional costs in a competitive retail market seemed like it would be unprofitable.
Job culture is nothing but empty competition. Billions of normalized thinkers reduced to nothing but tools of a "trade". Where trade is normalized to time for money.
Not a fan of the racism and gender bias, but am 1000% indifferent to bougie labor exploiting office workers being handed their hat.
"Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!" Yeah but you all suck to work with because that's all you are; HR slang, marketroid speak, programming language gibberish. Yawn.
Am psyched the zeitgeist is turning on "knowledge workers" who ignored worker exploitation and devaluation of others just the same.
Before Amazon, there were the club warehouse retail models like Costco where the frontend experience was cut down and the backend infrastructure scaled up. This all led to cost savings passed onto the customer.
Amazon seems like the next step where the last mile delivery infrastructure was expanded and the retail frontend was replaced by a website. Instead of millions of frontend retail workers, it's software knowledge workers with an accompanying expansion of the backend retail workers.
Now, the software knowledge workers are eating backend retail.
I hear this often, but have not read a single explanation of what the "something else" is that these people are supposed to do (a "something else" that we aren't also actively trying to replace with AI or AI driven processes). Barbers? Nail salons? I think we have enough of those already.
Or else we will have masses of disenfranchised and dissatisfied people with no incentive to keep society working.
> we will have masses of disenfranchised and dissatisfied people
I fear this is coming
> with no incentive to keep society working
as long as the rich get serviced, they won't care much whether society is "working" or not
Theres plenty of things that are worth investing in, and can easily sustain jobs for people...
You really don't think we can just fund people to go into healthcare or teaching? You understand that there is no real reason for those professions have to be chronically underpaid and overworked, right?
I would also suspect that more than 50% of the people working this kind of unskilled labour do have aspirations to do more, it's just that it's hard to switch because they cannot afford to, they're working towards it or they're kind of stuck.
> nurses
nursing is a highly skilled job which the vast majority of people are _not_ cut out for; it's also highly competitive. Your average Amazon warehouse worker or truck driver is _not_ becoming a nurse
> elderly care
this would be something like a CNA; doesn't require the skills of a nurse ,but most people do not want this job (and also wouldn't be very good at it); there's a reason why a lot of undocumented people do elderly care in America
> environmental remediation
sure, this would be a good one. but who is paying for that? it's not a money maker, so unless it's government funded like the CCC, it's not going to happen. and given that work programs like that are "socialism", it's not going to happen in the US any time soon
> teachers
teaching, like nursing, is a job that most people are _not_ well suited for. more importantly, like the last one, who is paying for this? our government is trying to gut public education, not spend more money on it.
So, again, unless there is a _new_ industry that can provide a _large_ number of jobs, which is driven by _profit-seeking companies_ (because otherwise, who is paying?), it is _not_ happening. And so far, there is no indication that such jobs or companies exist.
So my point stands. This is _not_ like the Industrial Revolution or any other "revolution" (computerization, internet, etc.), all of which spawned entire new industries.
I forget the author, or the exact quote, but basically this. Brainless jobs should be automated, nobody should be an automaton.
This doesn't mean we give up on craftsmanship, but mass production and busy work should be eliminated from human roles.
And this is for a prototype plant where you would expect the need for more and top-qualified technicians. (Most likely this does not count the robotics installers and tuners which might be from a different sub-company and classification - but still.) This might change when demand for qualified robotics technicians keeps increasing.
Another noticeable thing was that even with this automation push, Amazon is mostly planning to hire LESS. Not really reduce yet. It seems they are still growing beyond the potential improvements of robotics.
Still another is the insane capital-intensiveness of retail now! Wow.
One would think, but that's not really the reality for the technicians. Amazon assuredly brought in some experienced techs from other facilities to help with launch, but most of the staff are just locals.
> At the Shreveport facility, more than 160 people work as robotics technicians, and they make at least $24.45 an hour. Most of Shreveport’s 2,000 employees are regular hourly workers, whose pay starts at $19.50
The associate pay sounds right, but the average starting pay for robotics technicians is in the low-mid 30s. The $24.45 figure is for apprentices, who are not a large part of any maintenance cohort.
Source: Amazon robotics technician.
The next disruption (possibly by Amazon) will be in getting products more directly from the point of manufacture to the point of use. Warehouses are an oversized cache for physical goods.
None of it will matter anyway, they're shoveling enough money to the right people to have any regulations or oversight squashed, nevermind the sheer number of jobs that will be lost, I might be wrong but it would be a dent in the national unemployment numbers ?
But who cares, they're paying the right people.
I would like to hear, from one of those believers, _what_ type of _new_ jobs these laid off warehouse workers are going to get? (And no, they won't become AI prompt engineers.)
I have not heard a single satisfactory answer to this very simple question. And if no one has any idea of what type of _new_ jobs are opening up, then it's highly unlikely to happen.
In the Industrial Revolution, billions (for that time) were being spent on creating whole new types of jobs (i.e., factories). Which companies today are spending any money on creating new jobs?