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Amazon Uses Robots To Speed Up Human 'Pickers' In Fulfillment Centers
cagraham writes "The WSJ, combing through Amazon's Q3 earnings report, found that the company is currently using 1,400 robots across three of their fulfillment centers. The machines are made by Kiva Systems (a company acquired by Amazon last year), and help to warehouses more efficient by bringing the product shelves to the workers. The workers then select the right item from the shelf, box it, and place it on the conveyor line, while another shelf is brought. The management software that runs the robots can speed or slow down item pacing, reroute valuable orders to more experienced workers, and redistribute workloads to prevent backlogs."
Yes, it's incredible how Amazon is using something exactly as intended after they bought it.
Soon the picker will be automated, and then the self-driving car will deliver (or the autopilot drone)
Pretty soon the customer will be a robot too
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By moving the shelves they are able to create a queue of work for the picker, such that there is little downtime between picks. If the picker was moved, they would basically be idle while moving from shelf to shelf.
The problem is that technology was supposed to free people up to not have to work.... except that the profits from such advances don't trickle down to the people, but instead stay within the company and enter the dark shady environment of financial investments, locking up the productivity and wealth distribution.
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It's interesting that the robots are networked, but the humans aren't allowed to talk to each other - on pain of termination.
The pickers probably should start updating their resumes.
Nah it's probably true and yet completely misleading. Amazon has increased its headcount 400% over 5 years, so it's probably true that they'll keep all the staff they currently have but cut down on seasonal hiring and not need to hire more people as they continue to grow. Ultimately it's neither a problem or their fault. Human advancement is built upon finding ways to decrease work and the reason Amazon is doing this is because we choose to buy from the cheapest company not the one employing the most people etc.
You're using ghettos as your basis for concluding that idleness leads to violence and chaos? Last I checked, ghettos tended to be full of people living in poverty and despair, hence why they live in ghettos. I'm not sure the utopian ideal of people producing art and things for the betterment of society in their idle time is based on the assumption that the people with plenty of time also happen to have no possessions, are living day to day and trying hard not to die of starvation/exposure/disease.
But that puts our priorities upside down. The right thing to do is give those people what they need, not insist that Amazon find a less efficient way to do business so that it's forced to employ them in shitty jobs. Economically these options work out the same, the same stuff gets done either way, so why prefer the option that leaves somebody doing pointless extra work? Because you hate them for being poor?
Right after I'm finished telling it to the families of the post carriage drivers who lost jobs when the telegram took off, the lamp lighters who lost jobs when electric street lights were invented, and the stable hands who got laid off when the auto-mobile replaced the horse for most transportation.
It used to take the vast majority of the time and efforts of society just to find and collect enough food not to starve. It's incredibly naive and short sighted to think that the concept of farming that decreased the work in foraging and hunting vastly was somehow a retrograde step or fundamentally different from automating picking stuff up and putting it in boxes. The problem isn't that we find ways to do things without people it's that we're starting to run out of ideas about what people should do instead.
One of the weirdest arguments against legalising prostitution that I've ever heard was "No child grows up thinking 'I want to be a prostitute'"; as if somewhere out there are thousands of kids who want to be cleaners, warehouse drones, fast food cooks, temporary farm workers etc.
Not really surprising: Workers who talk to each other might start making friends, and eventually realize how much management is screwing them over, and then go on to form a union and force management to improve pay or benefits or working conditions. A basic rule when trying to oppress people is that you do everything in your power to keep the oppressed from organizing, and cutting off communication between them is a standard way of doing that.
And this kind of rule is standard operating procedure in sweatshops around the world for exactly the same reason.
I am officially gone from
There is a (almost certainly apocryphal) story about an American economist who goes to an underdeveloped nation to try to help them improve their economy. The government guide shows him some civil engineering project out in a rural area (building a road or a bridge or a dam or something) with at least a hundred workers digging all over the place with shovels. The economist sees that there is a bulldozer sitting idle nearby, and assumes that it is broken and they don't have the technical skills to get it running. He tells the guide that they need to work with a technical school somewhere to get a steady supply of trained mechanics so that they don't waste resources like that. The guide assures him that the bulldozer works, but there is so much unemployment in the area that they can't afford to put all of these people out of work by using the bulldozer. So the economist recommends (facetiously) hiring hundreds more from the countryside, taking away their shovels, and giving them all spoons to dig with.
Getting things done and providing a safety net are two different (orthogonal, not opposing) things.